Event
APTAtech 2026
APTA's technology conference, covering fare payment, data governance, cybersecurity, and emerging transit technology.
APTAtech is APTA’s technology conference. It runs August 9-12, 2026 at the St. Louis Union Station Hotel, co-located with the association’s Sustainability/Operations Planning and Scheduling Workshop, so the schedule-and-service-planning crowd is in the same building as the technology track.
Why it matters for the data layer
This is where the buying side of transit technology gathers. The program stays close to the questions that decide whether an agency’s data is actually usable in the field: fare collection and revenue management, cybersecurity, and data governance. Account-based ticketing and open-loop payments are still being rolled out across mid-size agencies, and that is where most of the standards questions surface. The governance sessions tend to be practical rather than aspirational, more about who owns the feed, how it gets validated, and what the agency is on the hook for when a rider-facing app reads it.
The exhibit hall is smaller than the fall EXPO, which makes it a better room for actually talking to the people who ship the software. For anyone who publishes or specifies transit data, it is the APTA event closest to the work.