Transit already rewards loyalty. It just forgets to tell you.

Nobody has ever described their commute as a loyalty program. And yet if you tap the same card enough times in the same month, many transit systems now quietly stop charging you. No enrollment, no points, no confetti. Just a rule, a ledger, and a free ride. It may be the quietest loyalty mechanic in the country, and almost nobody involved calls it that.

This fall gave us three good reasons to pay attention.

Fare capping is a loyalty program with the paperwork removed

On September 1, Toronto started capping fares. After 47 paid trips in a calendar month on the same Presto card, phone, or bank card, every ride for the rest of that month is free. The TTC was explicit that there is no pass to buy and nothing to sign up for. You just ride, and the system notices.

New York's version has been running on OMNY: spend $36 in a week and the rest of the week is free. MTA chair Janno Lieber has argued that capping is more equitable than a prepaid pass precisely because riders never have to pay in advance to get the discount. That's a better loyalty design principle than most retail programs manage. Reward the behavior, remove the up-front commitment, and don't make the customer ask.

The reward is invisible

Here is the catch. In late September, NY1 reported that some OMNY riders don't know whether they've hit the cap. Cap progress isn't shown at the turnstile the way it used to be with the MetroCard; to see it, a rider has to register their payment method on the OMNY site and keep using the same card and device. Advocates are now pushing the operator to show progress at the gate, and the MTA says it's pushing too.

That is a small sentence about turnstiles and a very large lesson about loyalty. A reward nobody can see is only half a reward. Recognition works when the person knows they've been recognized: the badge, the "you're almost there," the free ride that feels earned instead of accidental. Transit built the hard part, the mechanics, and left off the part that makes a person feel noticed.

The ledger is keyed to a card, not a person

Read the fine print on most fare caps and it says some version of the same thing. The TTC's rules say to use the same payment method and the same card or device all month; if you switch between a physical card, your phone, and your watch, the trips are counted separately. OMNY's progress tracking has the same requirement.

So the system doesn't know you. It knows a payment instrument. A commuter who taps with a phone on Monday and a card on Tuesday looks like two half-riders. A household where a parent and a teenager share a commute, or one person who rides in two cities, doesn't register as a relationship at all. The ledger is accurate about plastic and blind to people, which is a familiar problem in loyalty and one of the first things we'd fix.

Transit has already tried nudging, and the numbers were honest

The other loyalty mechanic transit has real data on is demand-shaping. BART's Perks pilot offered riders incentives to travel outside the busiest morning hour. Of roughly 2,600 participants who had been riding during the peak, about 250 a day shifted their trip earlier or later, around 10%, which BART described as freeing up roughly two full train cars at the busiest time. It wasn't enough scale to visibly thin out the crowd, and BART said so plainly. The follow-up pilot, with personalized offers, came in at about $1 per shifted trip against a typical $4 one-way fare.

It's the same logic as asking visitors to arrive before 10 a.m. at a national park. You don't need to discount a trip to change when it happens. You need to know who is flexible, ask at the right moment, and say thank you.

Now someone else is writing to the ledger

On September 22, Waymo announced a transit rewards program. Link a Visa card in the Waymo app, take a Waymo ride and a transit ride on that same card within two hours of each other, and Waymo automatically issues $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which it says matches a San Francisco bus fare. At launch it covers the Bay Area agencies that accept contactless Visa.

Whatever you think of the offer, look at the structure. A company that isn't the transit agency is creating loyalty value out of transit behavior, and it can only do that because the bank card became the shared identity across both systems. The announcement doesn't spell out how the underlying ride data is handled, and that's the question every program like this should answer in plain language before it launches. When more than one party is writing to a rider's history, who is allowed to see what stops being a footnote.

Where Loom Loyalty would fit

We are not pitching a transit agency, and public transit is a public good. We would be wary of any plan that put a points economy between a person and getting to work, or that made access to a bus depend on how much a rider had been "engaged." The goal is the opposite of status.

But if we were sketching the infrastructure from the outside, it would look like this. One append-only ledger of ride events, keyed to a person or household instead of whichever card tapped. Rules an agency can see and change, such as caps, off-peak thanks, and transfer logic. A rider-facing view that shows progress, so the free ride feels earned. And a neutral place where a partner like an employer's commuter benefit or a ride-hail company can post an event under rules the agency controls, with minimal identity and short retention by design. That last part matters more in transit than almost anywhere, because a ride history is a map of someone's life.

Transit already built the mechanics, and it did the hard part well. What's left is the part that makes riders feel known, and the infrastructure that lets that happen without anyone being surveilled for it.

If your customers' loyalty is hiding in the rules instead of the experience, let's talk fit.