Oahu’s transit users will have to wait another year or so to learn what fares will be once rail service starts, officials say.

In the meantime TheBus, the future rail line and Handi-Van are all moving closer toward sharing a “smart card” fare pass that Oahu riders would use for all public transportation.

Earlier this week city and rail officials announced that they’ve awarded a $31 million contract to global ticketing firm INIT to set up and run a smart-card pass system for rail and TheBus. The company was selected from five applicants, and the city and HART will evenly split the contract amount, HART spokesman Bill Brennan said.

INIT will provide smart-card readers on TheBus, as well as ticket-vending machines and fare gates at rail stations, the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation said Monday in a news release.

HART employees, along with staff from the city Department of Transportation Services and Oahu Transit Services, which manages TheBus and Handi-Van, have been researching since 2013 how to integrate bus, paratransit and rail so that those services work smoothly together.

Currently, riders of TheBus can either pay cash for individual rides or buy a monthly or annual pass.

Drawing from lessons learned in other cities, the joint working group from those transit agencies has recommended for Oahu a smart-card pass system that would allow bus and rail users to add money to an account with their smartphones, over the Internet, at ticket-vending machines, from a customer service representative or other means. That account balance would then be linked to users’ “registered” smart cards.

Riders could also buy unregistered cards (cards that aren’t tied to remote accounts) at ticket-vending machines, city offices and certain retail outlets, under the system envisioned by the transit working group.

The system outlined to HART board members in November would still let riders pay with cash. However, the details of exactly how riders of TheBus would pay cash in such a system are still being worked out, according to DTS Deputy Director Mark Garrity.

At rail stations, riders paying cash would get a smart card at the ticket-vending machine to pass through the fare gates, Garrity and HART fare collection manager Whitney Birch told the HART board in November.

The smart-card system would allow local transit officials to analyze Oahu’s ridership trends and to adjust service, better protect against fraud and set discount fares for certain groups and different fares at various stations, according to Birch and Garrity.