College Students Can Pay for Cabs with Their Student IDs

Students at Emerson and Suffolk can now pay for cabs outfitted with card readers by swiping their student IDs, and unshockingly, they like this feature. The Herald reports on a new collaboration between the companies that make the card readers and the campus IDs:

Creative Mobile Technologies, which has terminals in 1,200 out of 1,825 Boston taxis, came up with the idea in collaboration with local hackney regulators, officials said.

“One of the concerns was providing safe rides home for students,” said Jason Poliner, CEO of CMT. “They want to prevent students who are low on cash after exiting a bar from making bad decisions on how to get home.”

A Suffolk dean tells the paper that students have apparently already taken to using the service. We aren’t surprised, given the success of other cashless payment systems for transportation. There’s the quick rise of iPhone-based car-hailing services like Uber and Hailo, for example, or the roll-out of smartphone-based tickets for the commuter rail, introduced by the MBTA this month. People like paying to get from A to B without cash.