Starting April 19, Gyeonggi Province will introduce a “contactless fare payment service” that will automatically pay fares upon boarding for about 950 city buses on 134 city bus routes in Yongin City and Uijeongbu City.

The contactless (“tagless”) bus fare payment service uses Bluetooth wireless communication between beacons installed on vehicles and passenger smartphones to determine whether they are getting on or off the bus. This system has been operating on buses in the Korean capital region since 2021.

To use the service, passengers install a tagless pay app on their smartphones and register pre-paid and post-paid transit cards, which are automatically processed and debited without the need to “tag” a transit card terminal when boarding or exiting the bus.

Before a passenger exits the bus, they can tap the app’s “Mobile Stop Bell” button to alert the driver that a passenger wants to exit the bus, eliminating the need to manually ring a stop bell or get up from their seat.

A tagless sticker on the exterior of the vehicle informs passengers if the bus is tagless-enabled before boarding, and an icon is displayed in the geolocation service of the Gyeonggi Bus Information App also indicates whether the bus is tagless-enabled.

When traveling on or transferring between buses or trains that do not offer this service, you can still tap (“tag”) your card on the terminal to pay fares and receive transfer discounts.

“We plan to implement the service in Yongin and Uijeongbu and expand it to other regions from the second half of this year,” said Yoon Tae-wan, Director of the Bus Policy Division of Gyeonggi Province. “We also plan to introduce a safe ride home service that sends tagless payment information to parents.”

The company supporting this service, EZL Co., Ltd., is running a promotional event for the tagless system, offering a KRW 300 discount per ride with no limit on the number of rides, as well as a 100% discount for the first tagless payment, and prize draws proportional to the number of payments.

Detailed information can be found through the ‘Tagless Pay-App.’ Other inquiries can be directed to the EZL Call Center (1644-0006).