TICKETING
technology and don’t allow you to use a single back office system. There are multi- ple variants to understand and to read.
“The benefits of smart ticketing are prima- rily for people who have multiple-modal journeys, so if you’re getting on bus and rail, it’s useful to have both a season ticket and a stored-value solution that allows you to get straight on the bus when you get to the station, or the hired cycle as Norman Baker might like.
“It’s going to take some time for people to feel comfortable with it all – it did in London, and took a lot of incentives. One size doesn’t fit all for the rail network.”
London Midland ticket machine
I want to make using public transport more simple, and one of the ways of do- ing is through smart technologies. EMV (the common contactless standard agreed between Europay, MasterCard and Visa) is a good way of doing it, but I’m not sure it’s going to appeal to everybody.
“Personally, I’ve already got three EMV or EMV-compatible cards. I’m not going to take one out of my wallet to tap it down on a gate the way I would a transport card. Some people, particularly tourists, may find it better, but there are complications with that technology.
“You tend not to have multiple Oyster cards, but you do have multiple debit and credit cards. If they’re all EMV enabled and can ‘go off’ at the same time – that’s a pretty significant risk.
“It limits it to £15 a transaction, and £50 a day before you have to put your PIN in. That will discourage people using it.
“People won’t want to take a card out go- ing through a ticket gate where they may drop it or lose it, whereas an Oyster card, if you lose it and if it’s registered, you know where it’s gone.
“But, that said, there’s room for any tech- nology, including cash, that gets people onto buses and onto rail. I don’t ever see contactless bank cards being suitable for long-distance rail journeys, or season tick- ets, or being desirable for a number of the operating companies.
“They want to own the relationship with the customer. Allowing HSBC or Barclays to do that takes away that ability. There’s that cultural clash, and I’d be interested in hearing what Passenger Focus’ view is,
to see what passengers think of that ap- proach.
“ITSO will not dominate the market; but neither will contactless bank cards.”
No dominant technology
So will any individual technology come to dominate? Not according to Leach, who said: “The smart card as an actual piece of plastic doesn’t do enough to cover all of rail.
“It’s not just about cards, but barcodes, mobile phones and print-at-home tickets. ITSO is working to enable 2-D barcodes and NFC mobile phones so that the exist- ing ITSO back office infrastructure can be used for all these types of transactions, thereby reducing the cost of supporting these technologies.”
He said smart cards were “fantastically useful” for season ticket holders and en- able the development of benefits like ‘holi- days’, with the potential that users who do not use the smart card while they are away would have an obvious data record, which could make them eligible for discounts on future tickets.
Leach added: “Smart cards are also really useful for pay-as-you-go type journeys. Contactless bank cards have that £15 lim- it, so they’re only going to be applicable, in the next five years-plus, for shorter jour- neys. For one-off journeys, you have print- at-home tickets and even temporary smart cards, which are pretty cost-effective now compared to five years ago. You use these for your journey or a couple of times then throw it away.
“Magnetic stripe tickets are an ageing
ITSO has come a long way since 1998, and the gradual roll-out of smart ticketing has given it a much more central role than back then.
Its core role will not change, Leach said, but he added: “ITSO was designed so there was an open environment to encourage competition among suppliers and choice among operators, but ultimately inter-op- erability across all of them. ITSO is mov- ing to do far more assurance of inter-op- erability than we’ve done before. Our job over the next 12-24 months is to do what we’ve always done, but far better and more efficiently. That’s the only way we’re going to reach the minister’s vision of 51% of all journeys being by smart tickets by 2015.
“If our members want it, we’ll be looking at creating a standard interface for near field communication mobile phones. That’s using your smart phone as a smart card, meaning when you get to a gate, you’re able to touch your phone down rather than your card.
“There will be those who want to use their phone for that, and others who want in- stead to ‘link’ their phone to their card, so they can use their phone to top up their card, so phones become ‘readers’, as well as ‘writers’. With that technology, you can purchase a ticket over the air, and touch your phone to your card to finish the trans- action.
“Whether they are developed by the sup- plier community, or whether ITSO goes out to do it for eve- rybody; we’ll have to see.”
Michael Leach FOR MORE INFORMATION
T: 0121 634 3700 W:
www.itso.org.uk
rail technology magazine Feb/Mar 11 | 55
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