Would a national PAYG phone app work?

[Bletchleyite]

Fair comment. I was just responding to @HSTEd's comment that QR codes on their own could be easily gamed in the absence of any attempt to link them to specific locations, with an example of a use case where this has been thought about and dealt with.

Fair enough. The SBB system doesn't use barcodes, you check in on your phone and it uses its location to work out where you are boarding. There isn't really any need for barcodes in this context.

As a society we have a responsibility to consider the question of digital exclusion. Clearly the impact will shift over time, and what might be a step too far today could be an accepted and commonplace part of at some point in the future.

That would only be an issue if other methods of ticketing were being removed (or priced at penalty-type levels as TfL have with paper tickets). If it was being offered as an additional, optional facility, as SBB are, then there is no such concern.

 

[87 027]

That would only be an issue if other methods of ticketing were being removed (or priced at penalty-type levels as TfL have with paper tickets). If it was being offered as an additional, optional facility, as SBB are, then there is no such concern.

With threads like this I tend to fall back to the question "what is the fundamental business problem that the proposed solution is trying to solve?". I can see the advantage to operators of reducing the costs of physical ticketing including staffed ticket offices, TVMs and TOD. I question the business case if existing channels are to continue in parallel - will the gain in custom outweigh the costs of implementation? With my cynical hat on, I'm not sure that additional convenience to the customer cuts much ice if it fails to translate into a financial benefit for the operator.

 

[Bletchleyite]

With threads like this I tend to fall back to the question "what is the fundamental business problem that the proposed solution is trying to solve?". I can see the advantage to operators of reducing the costs of physical ticketing including staffed ticket offices, TVMs and TOD. I question the business case if existing channels are to continue in parallel - will the gain in custom outweigh the costs of implementation? With my cynical hat on, I'm not sure that additional convenience to the customer cuts much ice if it fails to translate into a financial benefit for the operator.

Clearly the business case of mobile phone based ticketing is not questionable; if it was, TOCs would not all have mobile apps and be strongly promoting e-ticketing.

Is there a business case to have this over a mobile app that just sells traditional tickets in e-ticket form? Possibly not, but then it also isn't that complex to do so the cost of adding it to the app wouldn't be that huge, and improved customer convenience does generally translate to more custom.

 

[87 027]

Clearly the business case is not questionable; if it was, TOCs would not all have mobile apps and be strongly promoting e-ticketing.

Mobile ticketing has been around for many years in various guises for purchase of tickets for defined journeys in advance of travel.

Edit: seems like we were editing our responses at the same time. I note this thread is about some sort of infrastructure for pay-as-you-go that is sufficiently resilient against revenue leakage for longer journeys where customers may, for various reasons, not register completion of their journey

 

[Bletchleyite]

Mobile ticketing has been around for many years in various guises for purchase of tickets for defined journeys in advance of travel. This thread is about some sort of infrastructure for pay-as-you-go that is sufficiently resilient against revenue leakage for longer journeys where customers may, for various reasons, not register completion of their journey

If you track people by GPS/cell locate, then you don't need to register the end of the journey for the fare to be calculated, the phone knows where you've been. That's why SBB have done what they've done, no doubt.

If people start a journey then switch their phone off, they've just "dumbbelled", same as doing it with a paper ticket, but with the bonus that you've got all their details to pursue them for a RoRA prosecution for wilfully fare dodging if they do it persistently. Remember (and this comes up in here a lot) electronic ticketing doesn't need to be 100% secure, it just needs to be no less secure than what went before.

 

[87 027]

Remember (and this comes up in here a lot) electronic ticketing doesn't need to be 100% secure, it just needs to be no less secure than what went before.

We are in agreement here! This is the key point and how it is implemented is really the question

 

[Bevan Price]

If you track people by GPS/cell locate, then you don't need to register the end of the journey for the fare to be calculated, the phone knows where you've been. That's why SBB have done what they've done, no doubt.

If people start a journey then switch their phone off, they've just "dumbbelled", same as doing it with a paper ticket, but with the bonus that you've got all their details to pursue them for a RoRA prosecution for wilfully fare dodging if they do it persistently. Remember (and this comes up in here a lot) electronic ticketing doesn't need to be 100% secure, it just needs to be no less secure than what went before.

What happens if you travel in something like a Voyager, where there is no GPS signal inside the coaches ?
Also, how do you know if the passenger has "switched off" or if the battery has "died" ?
Seem to be too many options for "the railway" to try and penalise passengers for things they cannot fully control.

And I would add, my mobile phone is normally switched off except when I need to use it, because the battery life is rather short -- and that is why I have never downloaded the NHS app. - it would be rather pointless.

 

[Bletchleyite]

What happens if you travel in something like a Voyager, where there is no GPS signal inside the coaches ?

Cell locate provides an adequate level of location detail. You don't need precise location, you just need to know the route taken which doesn't require the level of detail GPS has because there is generally a reasonable gap between railway lines/stations.

Also, how do you know if the passenger has "switched off" or if the battery has "died" ?
Seem to be too many options for "the railway" to try and penalise passengers for things they cannot fully control.

Nobody is forcing you to use it. If you choose to, you accept the terms it offers.

In any case it's no different from having an e-ticket and a dead battery - if you can't show the ticket you legally don't have one.

And I would add, my mobile phone is normally switched off except when I need to use it, because the battery life is rather short -- and that is why I have never downloaded the NHS app. - it would be rather pointless.

Your approach is typical of what I understand to be your age group, but is not now true of the majority of the population. It is clear that you do not make up part of the intended market for such a development - which is fine, if it doesn't suit you don't use it!

 

[HSTEd]

Rather than messing around with trying to force signal location checking which will be susceptible to all sorts of interesting attacks - since we don't control the phone hardware.

It might be easier just to put the QR code(s) at a station on an ePaper or flip display and simply have them change periodically (it could easily be made to change every 30 seconds without issue!).

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 2 Aug 2021 ==

Cell locate provides an adequate level of location detail. You don't need precise location, you just need to know the route taken which doesn't require the level of detail GPS has because there is generally a reasonable gap between railway lines/stations.

I don't think it does - cell locate can be susceptible to all sorts of interesting attacks.

We don't control the phone hardware and thus we can't reliably use cell locate to defeat a malicious attacker - especially one motivated by potentially saving thousands of pounds on phone tickets.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I don't think it does - cell locate can be susceptible to all sorts of interesting attacks.

We don't control the phone hardware and thus we can't reliably use cell locate to defeat a malicious attacker - especially one motivated by potentially saving thousands of pounds on phone tickets.

I would just refer you to several things here:

1. It does not need to be more secure than other options, just not less secure (and if it saves money or increases custom, it could actually viably be a bit less secure and still be worth doing).
2. You have the name, address and card details of the person committing the fraud to pursue them if you are able to detect it.
3. SBB have actually done it and do not seem to find this a problem enough to stop doing it. They have done it for a few years now, though I don't know how heavily used it is.
4. It's a lot of effort to save a relatively small amount of money. If you are going to commit fraud there are more lucrative targets.

So I would conclude this to be a relative non issue, particularly given point 3, i.e. a major European railway has had this in place for several years already.

 

[telstarbox]

With threads like this I tend to fall back to the question "what is the fundamental business problem that the proposed solution is trying to solve?". I can see the advantage to operators of reducing the costs of physical ticketing including staffed ticket offices, TVMs and TOD. I question the business case if existing channels are to continue in parallel - will the gain in custom outweigh the costs of implementation? With my cynical hat on, I'm not sure that additional convenience to the customer cuts much ice if it fails to translate into a financial benefit for the operator.

I think it would allow the closure of lightly used ticket offices, eliminate associated cash handling, and maybe even replace TVMs. Large stations would probably still merit a ticket office but on a reduced scale from now.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I think it would allow the closure of lightly used ticket offices, eliminate associated cash handling, and maybe even replace TVMs. Large stations would probably still merit a ticket office but on a reduced scale from now.

Exactly. The more attractive alternative ticketing options you offer people, the less likely they are to want to use a booking office or TVM, and so you can reduce the numbers of these expensive provisions. Which in practice means closure of booking offices* other than the largest stations and reduction in the numbers of TVMs - e.g. MKC has a bank of I think 8, but if e-ticketing became popular enough this could be reduced to one or two - not zero, but it's still a big cost saving. You could also potentially reduce booking office hours down to a single shift; those for whom dealing with a person is important** can time doing so to be when it's open.

* The mind boggles as to why Merseyrail doesn't embrace e-ticketing, let alone offer it at all, because their booking offices must be some of the most poorly-justified ones on the network, selling as they do little other than day tickets, and Anytime Day Returns to Liverpool. If they offered contactless tap-in-and-out and e-ticketing, they could probably close all of them bar at the main termini, and reduce the hours of those ones considerably. And people would generally consider that as a service improvement.

 

[The exile]

If you track people by GPS/cell locate, then you don't need to register the end of the journey for the fare to be calculated, the phone knows where you've been. That's why SBB have done what they've done, no doubt.

If people start a journey then switch their phone off, they've just "dumbbelled", same as doing it with a paper ticket, but with the bonus that you've got all their details to pursue them for a RoRA prosecution for wilfully fare dodging if they do it persistently. Remember (and this comes up in here a lot) electronic ticketing doesn't need to be 100% secure, it just needs to be no less secure than what went before.

How does that system then differentiate between you travelling 100 miles from A - C by train, or travelling 5 miles from A - B by train, where you are picked up in someone's car and complete the journey along the motorway adjacent to the railway, before being dropped in station C's car park? OK - the exact scenario described is rather too extreme to be likely, but given the number of times my car's GPS is unable to determine which of two adjacent parallel roads (with different speed limits) I'm on...
Also, I can see the phone manufacturers rubbing their hands in glee at this - I'm sure I'd not be the only one who would need to replace at least the battery (if not the phone) if I was going to have to start relying on a phone to be able to be "active" (as opposed to "on" but not actually doing much) all day and still have the power to cope with the unexpected at the end of it (a dead phone is not much use in an emergency situation - which is when you really need it!).
I know it's a personal choice, but I'd far rather keep things separate (phone, debit card, smartcard for ticket [or whatever]) - then losing one / having it compromised is only a problem; not a disaster.

 

[Bletchleyite]

How does that system then differentiate between you travelling 100 miles from A - C by train, or travelling 5 miles from A - B by train, where you are picked up in someone's car and complete the journey along the motorway adjacent to the railway, before being dropped in station C's car park? OK - the exact scenario described is rather too extreme to be likely, but given the number of times my car's GPS is unable to determine which of two adjacent parallel roads (with different speed limits) I'm on...

You press a button on the app to stop it when you've stopped travelling by train on that journey.

If you fail to do so, your loss - it's the same as not tapping out on a PAYG system when you could have done.

 

[Fawkes Cat]

How does that system then differentiate between you travelling 100 miles from A - C by train, or travelling 5 miles from A - B by train, where you are picked up in someone's car and complete the journey along the motorway adjacent to the railway, before being dropped in station C's car park? OK - the exact scenario described is rather too extreme to be likely, but given the number of times my car's GPS is unable to determine which of two adjacent parallel roads (with different speed limits) I'm on...

I posed this problem in post #13 above, and partly answered it by asking how likely this edge case was. It could be that it just won't happen often enough to be a problem.

And I'd go further - how accurate is cell locate for identifying where you are? And how many road vs rail journeys are there that couldn't be distinguished with cell locate's level of accuracy? To use the examples I used earlier, I'm guessing it might be a problem for a Bootle Oriel Road to Bootle New Strand trip, but that for Aberdeen to London the road and rail routes would diverge enough for the computer to work out that the purported passenger isn't in fact on a train.

 

[telstarbox]

I know it's a personal choice, but I'd far rather keep things separate (phone, debit card, smartcard for ticket [or whatever]) - then losing one / having it compromised is only a problem; not a disaster.

This is a fair point (and why I still carry debit cards rather than using my phone to pay in shops!)

 

[Joshua_Harman]

Sadly the railways arent integrated or modern, in terms of ticketing, its all just a jumbled mess.

When I travel to my Native country there is a national smartcard scheme which works on all trains, buses, the light rail, some taxi's and shops. Or you can pay by phone apps, (which are accepted everywhere, with a lot of the issues that we have here just non-existant)

things like this are achievable if companies want them to be.

 

[M-Train]

Sadly the railways arent integrated or modern, in terms of ticketing, its all just a jumbled mess.

When I travel to my Native country there is a national smartcard scheme which works on all trains, buses, the light rail, some taxi's and shops. Or you can pay by phone apps, (which are accepted everywhere, with a lot of the issues that we have here just non-existant)

things like this are achievable if companies want them to be.

Surely Israel’s Rav Kav (and the Dutch OV Chipkaart) would be anomalous by serving a small country? It’s almost like having a big city-state……