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
My colleagues and I have been talking about Bursa quite a bit lately, since
it’s 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. The new smart cards will be
produced by the local card and printer supplier
Hayat Teknoloji
who supported Burulas and NXP throughout the entire migration phase.
The MIFARE DESFire Light IC offers the same amount of memory as the MIFARE
Classic IC with 1K memory but with a higher level of security. It supports up
to five AES 128-bit keys to support secure management for access rights and
secure messaging. NXP’s MIFARE DESFire Light is also upwards scalable
and can integrate with a MIFARE DESFire EV2 product-based system, so it
provides an attractive long-term roadmap for future growth and co-existence of
applications on one single card supporting smart city use cases.
The transit authority Burulas has upgraded their system remarkably quickly.
Within just three months they were able to transition away from legacy MIFARE
products and introduce a new level of passenger experience. For example, it
will be easier to report a lost card. A pilot program for the new BursaKart
begun the first week of May, is expected to transition to the live system by
the end of the month. An incentive program, designed to encourage passengers
to trade their old cards for new ones based on MIFARE DESFire Light, will help
drive the transition and expand access to new smart city services.
Security, Flexibility, Innovation
For the people living and working in Bursa or just visiting, the upgrade to
MIFARE DESFire Light means a new level of protection and privacy, plus a
convenient experience while using public transport. For me, it’s an
exciting reminder that even an ancient city can take the lead when it comes to
adopting the latest smart city trends.
