MIFARE

Smart City Bursa is First to Deploy NXP’s MIFARE DESFire Light for Transport Ticketing 1. July 2019

If you happen to visit the city of Bursa – the fourth most populous city in Turkey and now one of its most industrialized metropolitan areas – you’re sure to notice how it mixes the ancient with the very new. Historic buildings, dating back to the Ottoman Empire and before, mingle with shining modern skyscrapers, and narrow streets with covered bazaars give way to major thoroughfares filled with the latest car models – many of them produced by Bursa’s expanding automotive industry.

Bursa is one of Turkey’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas and, as such, has committed itself to being a Smart City. The idea is to use digital technology to create the efficiencies and conveniences associated with modern urban life. One of Bursa’s most visible examples of Smart City planning is the BursaKart, a reusable card for buses, trams, and metros. With a BursaKart in your pocket, you have an easy, economical way to get around town or visit the nearby capital of Istanbul, which lies just across the Sea of Maramara.

The BursaKart system has been in place for several years now and, as the backbone of Bursa’s Smart City initiatives, has become a familiar part of everyday life. In a metropolitan area of nearly 3 million people, there are more than 1.7 million active BursaKart cards in service according to Burulas, the city’s official transit authority. The system issues roughly 500,000 new cards on an annual basis and supports 630,000 journeys a day or 230 million journeys a year.

A World First

Bursa is the first transit system to migrate from using NXP’s MIFARE Classic with 1K memory to our brand-new MIFARE® DESFire® Light IC.

The city’s transit authority Burulas has decided to the make the change so they could take advantage of new opportunities made possible by the tiny microchip within the transit smart card. The General Manager of Burulas, Kursat Capar, cites higher security, with sufficient memory, as the main attraction of MIFARE DESFire Light, and expects the new chip will make it easier to introduce new Smart City services.

Read the full blog.