Core Architecture & Fare Taxonomy
Foundational fare taxonomy, event topology, smart-card schema mapping, and the security boundaries that keep settlement auditable end-to-end.
Public Transit Fare Collection
& Revenue Reconciliation Automation
A production-focused engineering resource for the people who keep transit revenue accurate. Turn raw taps, scans, and vendor settlement files into auditable financial records with deterministic, type-safe Python pipelines.
Built for transit operations teams, revenue analysts, and mobility-tech developers, the guides here cover the full reconciliation lifecycle: smart-card data parsing, fare-rule validation, agency settlement calculation, fraud-pattern detection, GTFS-RT synchronization, batch reconciliation, and compliance reporting.
Every section pairs architectural guidance with runnable, copy-ready code — so you can move from opaque binary dumps and rate-limited APIs to sub-0.1% variance settlement without manual forensic accounting.
Explore the sections
Three focused sections, organized from architecture down to runnable how-to guides. Follow any topic link to reach a detailed, code-first walkthrough.
Fare Data Ingestion & GTFS-RT Sync
Bring heterogeneous AFC telemetry under control — GTFS-RT sync, CSV batch parsing at scale, vendor API extraction, and schema validation pipelines.
Fare Rule Validation & Calculation Engines
Deterministic fare math — transfer windows, discount eligibility, graceful offline fallback, and peak-pricing threshold tuning.
Start here
Hand-picked, code-first walkthroughs that show the reconciliation pipeline end to end — from raw tap decoding to deterministic fare math.
- Smart-card parsing Decoding Calypso Smart Card Transaction Logs Turn opaque Calypso binary dumps into structured, auditable tap records.
- Smart-card parsing Parsing MIFARE DESFire EV2 Tap Data in Python Decode DESFire EV2 application files into typed Python fare events.
- Data ingestion Optimizing Pandas Chunksize for 10M-Row Fare Files Stream multi-gigabyte settlement exports without exhausting memory.
- Validation Implementing Pydantic Models for AFC Event Streams Enforce type-safe contracts on noisy AFC event feeds at the boundary.
- Fare math Calculating Cross-Operator Transfer Windows with Python Model transfer eligibility across operators with deterministic rules.
- Resilience Building Graceful Degradation for Offline Fare Readers Keep charging correct fares when validators drop offline mid-service.