TICKETING & FARE COLLECTION
ticketing. Much detailed and collaborative work is already being done by ITSO and its members, who have set up a number of working groups that are also liaising with the Smart Cities Programme Board. The aim is to pool resources and knowledge to achieve effective smart ticketing on public transport throughout the country.
Robertson said: “People have recognised it’s not just the technology, but that the ‘business rules’ need to be agreed. Template ticketing products and back office interfaces need to be set up in a way that allows everything to work together and process data effectively, while always ensuring that passengers can ‘beep’ their way through gates or ticket machines and validators quickly and get on with their journey.
“Operators and transport authorities don’t need to keep re-inventing the wheel every time they set up a smart ticketing scheme.”
You then have to add in to that mix a willingness to cooperate on exploiting the real time information services and ticketing structures so that they work together to provide the passenger with the accurate information they need to help them plan and pay for journeys, or change them quickly if required.
“People can already buy many other things in their lives in a simple way using their mobile phones or laptops. The fact that it is much more complex to enable this in the transport ticketing world is not their problem: it’s ours.”
Funding and control
But who is responsible for making sure it all comes together? “Some might argue that an overarching national system funded by both government and operators to deliver real time information and interoperable transport ticketing would be the most effective solution,” he said.
And government is already doing a lot. The last few months alone have seen a raft of initiatives surrounding smart ticketing, particularly on rail.
• In August, the government announced a £2.85m paperless ticketing trial to be run this year by c2c, which operates between London and the Essex coast. This is part of the £45m SEFT (South East Flexible Ticketing) initiative.
• In September, then transport minister Norman Baker announced a competition to be run this year for a flexible ticketing pilot scheme to be run with a London commuter operator.
• Also in September, Baker announced a plan
for a pilot scheme to run in 2015 that could see all long-distance rail tickets sold on a single leg basis to allow passengers to buy the most appropriate ticket for each leg of their journey and avoid the nonsense where currently single tickets can cost nearly as much as returns.
• In October Baker’s successor Baroness Kramer announced that, as part of SEFT, £3.25m is to be made available to South West Trains to upgrade its current ITSO ticketing system.
• Meanwhile RSP (Rail Settlement Plan) is busy procuring systems for the SEFT initiative and agreeing business rules with the 12 operators currently involved in running trains in the region.
• The DfT is funding a pilot scheme in Norfolk to provide knowledge and support to other areas wanting to get smaller bus operators on board with their smart ticketing schemes.
Rail franchise involvement
From an operator perspective, five rail franchises in England are already running ITSO smart ticketing pilots or part schemes – East Midlands Trains, London Midland, Merseyrail, South West Trains and Southern Railway. In Scotland, on First ScotRail, ITSO smart ticketing was launched with 12,000 staff and season ticket holders in March 2011. And smart ticketing requirements continue to be hard-wired into upcoming franchises in England and Scotland.
Meanwhile, other operators are offering m-ticketing, 2D barcodes, contactless bank cards, or print at home tickets to help meet their customers’ needs.
On bus, the big five operators already have smart ticketing equipment on board and others are joining up to local managed service schemes. That means concessionary passes can now be used smartly for around 600 million public transport journeys a year in the UK outside London.
Go-Ahead says its operating companies, including rail, now have a total of around 500,000 cards in circulation and around 130,000
daily journeys are being made
using ‘the key’ card (nearly 47.5 million journeys a year).
Transport authorities going smart
Elsewhere, multi-operator and multi-modal commercial smart ticketing schemes are in place or are being rolled out throughout the UK.
• Latest figures from Nexus are that 60,000 smartcard journeys are being made a day on its Metro system using its Pop card.
• Strathclyde Partnership for Transport went smart on the Subway in November and now 20,000 customers a day are tapping in.
• Transport for Greater Manchester is currently testing validators to introduce smart ticketing initially for concessionary travel on its Metrolink tram system, but planning a much wider multi-operator and multi-modal scheme called mygetmethere.
• The Oxford SmartZone alone is seeing around 22,000 daily smart transactions on either Stagecoach or Go-Ahead owned buses.
• The Swift card has been launched in the West Midlands and there are major plans for collaboration with London Midland.
• There is the Cheshire Travelcard, the NoWcard in the North West, Leicestershire has the OneCard, Merseytravel the Walrus, and Transport for South Hampshire and the Isle of Wight wants the Solent card. In the South West SWSAL (South West Smartcard Applications Ltd) is a joint venture between 15 highway authorities and 17 transport operators.
• Scotland is aiming for a national Saltire card and Wales the national GoCymru card.
But before we all get carried away with IT for IT’s sake, we need to remember that the aim is to make things better for the paying customer and, as both Baroness Kramer and transport select committee chair Louise Ellman MP would remind us, not all of them have access to a bank account, or have the confidence or ability to engage in smart ticketing – so their version of really smart ticketing will probably always involve the opportunity to buy a ticket with cash.
*FutureRailway is one of the delivery activities working on behalf Technical
of the Strategy Leadership
It has been set up by the rail industry to accelerate the uptake of innovation. The team is hosted by RSSB (the
Rail Safety and
Standards Board), and is supported by the Rail Delivery Group, as well as the Department for Transport.
Lindsay Robertson
www.itso.org.uk FOR MORE INFORMATION
rail technology magazine Feb/Mar 14 | 79
cross-industry Group (TSLG).
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