Government

Metro Moscow to upgrade payment equipment, accept bank cards

Image provided by Moscow Metro.

November 2, 2022

Starting in December, all turnstiles of the Moscow Central Circle, the Moscow Metro's surface railway circle line, will accept bank cards after the equipment is upgraded, according to a press release.

New turnstiles will process bank cards more than twice as fast, and via the Face Pay biometric payment, three times as fast. In addition, the turnstile display has brighter color backlighting and a larger font to demonstrate how many rides or days are left.

"We plan to upgrade about 250 turnstiles at the MCC stations," Maksim Liksutov, the deputy mayor of Moscow for Transport, said in the press release. "In December, passengers of the MCC, who make over 550 thousand trips daily, will be able to use a bank card at any turnstile. The Moscow Metro has already upgraded equipment on more than half of the devices and improved the software."

The network will also receive virtually 1 million more Troika transport cards with Russian chips by the end of the year. The initiative is carried out by the MSP, LLC — a joint venture of the Moscow Metro and Mikron Group created in 2018. In total, the MSP plans to produce 19 million Russian-made Troika cards by the end of 2027.

"This year we fully switched to Russian chips in Troika cards (and) the Moscow Metro has already received 2 million new cards," Liksutov said.