As you count out coins for city-bus fare or scrounge in your wallet or purse for that ever-elusive Go-To card, you might wonder about using your phone as a bus pass. Is there an app for that?

The answer is no … but soon there will be.

Metro Transit, which runs buses and trains throughout the Twin Cities, has teamed up with a Portland, Ore., software company to transform smartphones into transit-ticketing machines.

This means you will be able to buy bus passes on your Apple or Android phone — or on your desktop computer, with the purchases zapped to your phone app over the Internet.

Then, when boarding a city bus, you will hold up the ticket so the driver can see it. Or, when using light rail, you will produce the “flash pass” if a transit inspector asks for your proof of payment.

T hose on-screen passes will look to be pretty nice, too, with full-color designs and and cool-looking animations — which have the added benefit of making tickets difficult to falsify.

Metro Transit’s tech partner has been GlobeSherpa, which works with other urban transit authorities around the United States to deploy app-based ticketing services. The company on Thursday announced a name change to Moovel in a merger with an Austin, Texas,-based transit-app developer called RideScout.

Features in the popular RideScout app, which helps its users with trip planning and is used in the Twin Cities, will eventually filter over to Metro Transit’s Moovel-made app.

Millennials are the least likely to be carrying cash, which is one of only two ways to pay for a metro-bus ride, said Adam Mehl, a Metro Transit market development specialist.

Go-To cards are the other method, but for those who use Metro Transit irregularly, these are not a practical option, Mehl added.

Metro Transit’s train riders also have the option to buy passes with their credit cards at station kiosks, but doing this on a phone is easier because it can be accomplished anywhere.

“We want to reduce the barriers to transit,” he said.

Metro Transit follows other local transit entities that have deployed smartphone options in recent years.

Motorists in the city of St. Paul, for instance, can pay for time on parking meters via their handsets courtesy of the PassportParking app. That app, used in dozens of other cities, is the handiwork of Charlotte, N.C.-based Passport.

About 5 percent of St. Paul parking-meter payments are being generated in this way, with this option available only downtown so far and accounting for about 1,600 parking spaces, according to city spokesman Joe Ellickson. The State Capitol area should get it by May, with the rest of the city slated to follow this summer, he said.

Likewise, Minneapolis has deployed a meter-plugging app made by Atlanta-based Parkmobile.

Meanwhile, those using a few of St. Paul’s parking ramps can reserve spaces on their phones thanks to companies such as QuickPay and Parking Panda.

It’s the right time for transit agencies to embrace phone-based systems and move away from cash and paper or plastic access cards, though these traditional options certainly are not going away, said Mac Brown, a vice president of business development at Moovel.

Bus and train cabins were once an ocean of opened newspapers; now, riders typically have noses buried in their phones, he said.

Malfunctioning pass-payment kiosks with cigarette butts crammed in card slots is another perennial problem for transit agencies around the country, Brown added.

Besides, “cash is extremely expensive to manage,” he went on. “Some agencies have money-counting rooms. No joke.”

Portland’s TriMet bus, light-rail and commuter-rail authority was the first to embrace the GlobeSherpa technology about three years ago, he said. Now, 14 agencies in 11 states are on board. Other Moovel customers include the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (or “Muni”) that began offering the phone-based ticketing late last year.

Metro Transit’s Moovel setup will consist of four pieces, he noted. These are the consumers’ app, the public desktop-Web portal, a separate app to be used by transit inspectors and technology at a central office to manage everything.

The Metro Transit system looks to be in place by August, Mehl said.

The transit agency is paying Moovel $385,000 for the two years following the launch of the app, spokesman Howie Padilla said. A federal grant will account for $300,000 of that, he noted.

Moovel’s transit-ticketing systems typically require three to six months to be fully deployed and the Metro Transit variant still is in the early stages of development, Brown said.

The on-screen ticket designs are a particularly clever part of the Moovel system, Mehl said.

Along with the animations to reduce fraud, they will be designed to flash or blink for a few minutes immediately following their purchase. This is intended to foil those who would board a light-rail train without paying but scramble to buy tickets on their phones as they see transit inspectors approaching.

Imagery and typography on the phone-based passes has to be designed with care in order to be intelligible at a glance by harried bus drivers, as well, Mehl added.

Metro Transit customers with regular commuting routes or other regularly used routines will be somewhat less likely to use the new app, he believes. For them, that fast, familiar swipe of a Go-To card might make more sense, he said.

Metro Transit also is looking to integrate PayPal’s online-payment system for the growing number of people who would use this service via Internet purchases. Some of these people do not have traditional bank accounts, Mehl said.

RideScout’s app, which is in the early stages of integration with the Moovel system, eventually will have a significant impact on Metro Transit customers.

In its current standalone form, the trip-planning app allows users to type in a point of origin and a destination to be apprised of all transport options — including public transit, car-sharing services such as Car2go, taxi-hailing services like Curb, and even walking and biking.

Moovel is owned by Germany-based Daimler AG, which is also the owner of the Car2go car-sharing service. For Daimler, the merger of RideScout and GlobeSherpa is an opportunity to expand its European transit-app operations into the Americas.

And, while the RideScout app will stick around for the foreseeable future because it’s being used in about 80 U.S. cities, its capabilities will gradually be built into the Moovel-created Metro Transit apps.

For instance, Brown anticipates that commuters who miss buses will be able to pull up other options — including, perhaps, Uber and Lyft ride sharing — and pick the service that works best for them. Eventually, those commuters might even be able to pay for all such services within the Metro Transit app.

RideScout “is pretty darn great,” Mehl said.