The provision of season tickets across the wider Lothian Buses network has, for at least the last decade, made exclusive use of the smartcard platform – season tickets are only available in smartcard format. This is because smartcards offer an inherently more secure means of delivering a higher value travel product to the customer than the paper methods they succeeded and over the past few years we have removed such paper products from our ticketing portfolio entirely. Having first introduced smartcard ticketing in Edinburgh 18 years ago however, the technical platform which underpins our current Ridacard scheme is nearing the end of its working life and has reached the limit of products which it can support, and how these can be delivered (this is why it currently isn’t possible to purchase Ridacard top-ups online, for example). The work to provide a technical solution for a successor to the current smartcard has already begun and, once completed, will create a brand new smart ticketing platform which would comfortably accommodate the creation of new smartcard products in West Lothian. We can’t share any further details at this stage, but would expect that work to accelerate in the latter portion of this year.
In the meantime however, we have introduced a comprehensive range of mobile ticketing products which include the ability to purchase advance bundles of our already heavily discounted Day Ticket products, but at a further discount. In bringing these products to market, we also sought to introduce something that wasn’t directly comparable with standard season tickets by offering the same level of value-for-money but with much more flexibility in when they can be used, in line with ever changing travel patterns and consumer demands. Our feedback from the growing number of customers using these products is that they achieve just that.
As with any new operation, we implement the routes, timetables, prices and products which we feel are most likely to deliver against our objectives and each element of these are, and will be, reviewed.
