Smart Ticketing - What will it mean for rail users ?

[Haydn1971]

There's been lots of talk over the last decade about smart ticketing, many of us will have used Oyster in London or a similar system, but now we are starting to see smart ticketing being part of franchise agreements, what sort of impact will it have on users, be they season ticket holders, regular or irregular travellers.

Will caps become the norm, helping reduce costs for people that travel 3-4 days a week, will splits cease to be possible, what sort of technology will check for ticket validity... I've no real preconceptions, but given the impact on every rail user, I'm interested to hear the thoughts of other forum members.

 

[14sutton]

There was a big conference on smart tickets today

From DfT website

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-death-of-the-tangerine-ticket

 

[Bevan Price]

The chances are that it will mean more money for "them" - less for "us - the passengers".

Split ticketing will probably be more inconvenient, forcing you to alight at the split point, check in & out at a card reader, and then rejoin the following train. Forget to do this, and you will probably get charged the higher fare for the combined journey. And forget about quick connections, if the station card reader enforces a time delay between checking in/out.

Will the smart cards carry full information about railcard holders. And how/will rover tickets continue, and how will they function.

And how is the ordinary passenger know if correct information is on their smart cards ? Will there be a system, readily available for passengers, to check the card contents ?

Whilst smartcards may function on relatively local networks, I am not convinced that it will benefit passengers, remembering all the complexities of the national rail system and the nightmare fare system .

 

[nottsnurse]

The OV Chipcard seems to work fairly well in the Netherlands.

 

[deltic]

The main benefit of smart cards is that they can offer new ticket types more easily via capping or discounts. Eg off peak season tickets, discounted carnets etc and if monitored can reduce fraud and provide substantial information to operators on travel patterns. Also offer automatic top-ups and renewals (which effectively led to the death of LUL ticket offices) and speed up use of ticket barriers.

As C2C offer can also provide automatic refunds in the case of late/cancelled trains.

More controversially can be used to nudge passengers to avoid heavily used stations via targeted messages as travel patterns and times are known. It is also clear many journeys made on the network are sub-optimal - identifying these and suggesting alternatives can help reduce demand.
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There was a big conference on smart tickets today

From DfT website

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-death-of-the-tangerine-ticket

I see that SEFT has been worked on since 2011 - as there been any actual deliverable from it?

 

[TEW]

At the moment on the National Rail network smartcards are nearly exclusively just being used as a means of storing a conventional ticket electronically . The main benefit is to season ticket holders travelling through stations with ticket barriers, a smart card should be more convenient and durable than a magnetic strip.

 

[D1009]

I see that SEFT has been worked on since 2011 - as there been any actual deliverable from it?

Roger Ford has an article on this in the Informed Sources section of the new Modern Railways. According to the e-preview he reckons SEFT has been binned.

 

[Ianigsy]

I suspect that Rovers and Rangers will exist either as caps rather than an actual ticket, or as a separate ticket you can load onto a smartcard along with your normal travel.

 

[The Ham]

There has been talk of using contactless payment cards to "store" pure purchased tickets. In doing so split ticketing would still be possible as the ticket wouldn't need you to touch in and out.

This could work by buying a ticket with a card and rather than having to pick it up from a machine you would just touch in and it would start your journey.

Something that could be useful would be to be able to pre buy tickets (such as anytime or off peak) with no set date so that people can have a stock of them for journeys that do on a semi regular basis which they can just use as they need to.

 

[eisenach]

Smart tickets will be a very good way of discouraging older members of the public from travelling by train.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Smart tickets will be a very good way of discouraging older members of the public from travelling by train.

If it's done right, i.e. true e-ticketing, which if it'll work with contactless credit/debit cards it will have to be as you can't store anything on them, it will be media-agnostic. So people wishing to buy a traditional paper ticket should still be able to do so. The paper ticket won't have value, it'll be a record in the database, but that'll be transparent to the user, unless they lose it in which case they might find the ability to reprint it quite useful.

 

[cf111]

Smart tickets will be a very good way of discouraging older members of the public from travelling by train.

It could be done like the Glasgow Subway, where if you want to buy a paper ticket you can do, but inside that ticket is an RFID chip which you use to operate the barriers. Regardless, not every "older" person is afraid of or incapable of dealing with change.

 

[Bletchleyite]

It could be done like the Glasgow Subway, where if you want to buy a paper ticket you can do, but inside that ticket is an RFID chip which you use to operate the barriers. Regardless, not every "older" person is afraid of or incapable of dealing with change.

You see plenty of older people flying easyJet...

 

[eisenach]

It's still off-putting for many older people, though. I can't get my wife to use her debit card at the supermarket. If she hasn't got the cash, we don't buy it.
She regularly travels from Leominster to Reading by train, but with smart ticketing, unless someone buys it for her, she'd be lost. It's ok whilst I'm still around ...

 

[Chrisgr31]

The main benefit is to season ticket holders travelling through stations with ticket barriers, a smart card should be more convenient and durable than a magnetic strip.

As a season ticket holder this is why I have the Key. It doesnt stop working. Last years paper ticket didnt even operate the barrier on day 1, let alone day 365!

The other benefit is that there is not the same limit on losing them, as in theory the Key can remotely be stopped, so if you lose it your original one can be disabled and your ticket replaced. Paper tickets cannot be disabled.

They also stop fraud with Delay Repay in theory, as you are timed through the barrier, so i should be known which train you were on so you cannot claim for a train you werent on.

 

[deltic]

Smart tickets will be a very good way of discouraging older members of the public from travelling by train.

While different context - concessionary passes were the first tickets to move over to Oyster in London and the English and Scottish concessionary bus passes have been smart cards for quite a few years now.

 

[Minstral25]

As a season ticket holder this is why I have the Key. It doesnt stop working. Last years paper ticket didnt even operate the barrier on day 1, let alone day 365!

The other benefit is that there is not the same limit on losing them, as in theory the Key can remotely be stopped, so if you lose it your original one can be disabled and your ticket replaced. Paper tickets cannot be disabled.

They also stop fraud with Delay Repay in theory, as you are timed through the barrier, so i should be known which train you were on so you cannot claim for a train you werent on.

The Key is not infallible. Firstly we have serious problems where the key fails to load tickets at our local stations. Reigate being the worse where many have been forced to buy tickets again because of Key failure.

Secondly my Key failed (i.e. stopped working) two days from the end of my annual season ticket in December meaning I had to buy paper tickets to get to work. What is worse I am still awaiting refunds for these journeys.

Many people are IT illiterate for many reasons especially older people or find systems difficult to use. Recently I stayed at a friends in London with my 2 daughters in an area only served by buses, as we live outside London we don't have Oyster cards and the three of us had one Contactless card between us. We couldn't get on buses and ended up walking two miles to find a station where we could buy tickets for this one off trip.

Despite these points I think Smart ticketing is the way forward, but the computer programmers and rail management need to think carefully about how they deal with situations like reliability problems (customers should not have to pay again for tickets already bought) and putting all their eggs in one basket not available to all users.

 

[AM9]

The Key is not infallible. Firstly we have serious problems where the key fails to load tickets at our local stations. Reigate being the worse where many have been forced to buy tickets again because of Key failure.

Secondly my Key failed (i.e. stopped working) two days from the end of my annual season ticket in December meaning I had to buy paper tickets to get to work. What is worse I am still awaiting refunds for these journeys.

Many people are IT illiterate for many reasons especially older people or find systems difficult to use. Recently I stayed at a friends in London with my 2 daughters in an area only served by buses, as we live outside London we don't have Oyster cards and the three of us had one Contactless card between us. We couldn't get on buses and ended up walking two miles to find a station where we could buy tickets for this one off trip.

Despite these points I think Smart ticketing is the way forward, but the computer programmers and rail management need to think carefully about how they deal with situations like reliability problems (customers should not have to pay again for tickets already bought) and putting all their eggs in one basket not available to all users.

I agree that the 'all eggs in one basket' is a real risk for passengers with smart tickets. At least chipped cards are passive. The higher risk is using phones to store tickets on. With the number of complaints here about batteries not lasting a whole day, phones would become a liability if they had to be re-booted just to show a ticket validity.

 

[Scotty]

Smart tickets will be a very good way of discouraging older members of the public from travelling by train.

They manage to use their smart bus passes though!

 

[Llanigraham]

They manage to use their smart bus passes though!

But you don't have to load journeys or money on to them, though, so they are easy to understand and use. Add in the that complication and it WILL put some people off.
Even I have problems trying to work out when I can and can't add money to my rarely used Oyster Card!

 

[Bevan Price]

They manage to use their smart bus passes though!

Yes (mostly) - but it is only for a single journey, and there is no money involved, etc.

 

[Hadders]

I strongly suspect we will see a reduction in flexibility with the introduction of smartcards. For example:

- requirement to touch in and out making split ticketing more difficult
- removal of through ticketing with each TOC operating separate (but not linked) schemes
- the loss of the facility to obtain excesses, start or finish short

We need to be very wary.

 

[miami]

The main benefit of smart cards is that they can offer new ticket types more easily via capping or discounts. Eg off peak season tickets, discounted carnets etc and if monitored can reduce fraud and provide substantial information to operators on travel patterns. Also offer automatic top-ups and renewals (which effectively led to the death of LUL ticket offices) and speed up use of ticket barriers.

These can be offered right now.

Off peak season ticket - simply make it clear what the restrictions are, and have gatelines/barriers/staff check for them at peak times, same as they check for off-peak day tickets.

Carnets are offered now.

You can even get season tickets that are only valid on 3 of the 5 weekdays.

What e-ticketing will mean (it doesn't have to, but what it will mean) is a far worse deal for the passenger. Break of journey and split tickets will go for starts.

The media will come out with something like a walk up fare for Newquay to Fort William is £968.42, the PR will spin it as how if you book 96 days in advance on the 0623 departure you can get from Newquay to Fort William for £4.52, it's a bargain, and everyone misses the point that if you want to travel on the 0623 departure from Newquay to Plymouth and you'll be paying £50 rather than splitting at Par for £35. It's not the headline high figure the media will show, or that the spin doctors will come out with in response. Figures like "98% of passengers don't use anytime tickets so it doesn't matter" will be produced and quoted in an example of citogenesis.

 

[Haydn1971]

Started travelling three days a week on the EMT service, so, rather than buying a set return ticket each day, I thought, I'll buy for three days, or six tickets in one transaction... Much to my amazement, I had three different codes to enter to get my six tickets. Whilst this is fine when you have time and it's dry, it is not halfway into winter, blowing a gale and with a queue behind you at a station with a single ticket machine out in the cold. Whilst we could talk around the smart aspects, one thing is clear to me, the sooner the current outmoded method of ticket delivery is gone, the better for the customer.

 

[CheekyBandit]

They manage to use their smart bus passes though!

Which tend not work on all buses. Arriva Midlands vehicles seem to reject perfectly valid South Yorkshire passes.
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What if someone needs a receipt to claim travel expenses from work. Like when I had to travel from my home (where I usually work) to head office south of London sometimes. A bit hard to do with a smart card.

 

[miami]

Which tend not work on all buses. Arriva Midlands vehicles seem to reject perfectly valid South Yorkshire passes.
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What if someone needs a receipt to claim travel expenses from work. Like when I had to travel from my home (where I usually work) to head office south of London sometimes. A bit hard to do with a smart card.

Depends on your company policy, with Oyster you can get a journey printout, or you could simply use PAYG and claim for the topup (assuming you don't use the card for non-work journeys)

 

[gimmea50anyday]

It would prevent misuse of standard opens as seasons.....

 

[miami]

It would prevent misuse of standard opens as seasons.....

So would checking tickets. So would composting tickets.

 

[Via Bank]

Which tend not work on all buses. Arriva Midlands vehicles seem to reject perfectly valid South Yorkshire passes.
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What if someone needs a receipt to claim travel expenses from work. Like when I had to travel from my home (where I usually work) to head office south of London sometimes. A bit hard to do with a smart card.

I would expect it to be much like what I already do when I buy (paper) train tickets online for work: I forward the confirmation email (which constitutes the receipt) to the finance officer and expense that.

If I could, at the same time, get the ticket emailed as a Passbook pass to my phone, rather than then having to queue (on company time) to exchange it for paper coupons, then even better.

 

[mikeg]

I reckon smart ticketing can be made to work for all but it would require a radical overhaul of the fares system. One solution might be to not base it on the existing fares structure at all but have it run in parallel with paper tickets. Operators could set smart fares, to be priced as singles with some capping for their own services. The price paid would depend on the route taken and service used. There are likely to be fewer anomalies on a given route as operators would be responsible only for setting the fares of their own services, so would pay more attention to any potential anomalies. You would lose some integration but settlement costs would be reduced greatly, allowing the fares to be much cheaper in the first place. The passenger would then have a choice between the two systems. The current approach reduces passenger rights and keeps some settlement costs, whilst not offering cheaper fares. There has to be more of a carrot and stick approach.
I stress that this should run in parallel with the existing fare structure, which would remain paper based. This would be the pay as you go approach anyway.