SWT accepts that the SEFT programme has been slow and difficult, but believes the Government will specify it for other parts of the country as part of franchise requirements.
“It is what the vast majority of our passengers want and need,” says Shoveller. “London can afford the significant infrastructure required to gateline every station. Not a problem here, because of the vast volumes on a fundamentally profitable railway.
“But I recognise that there are parts of the country which will not support the levels of investment to fit gatelines at every station and then staff them. And you need that if you’re going to replace magnetic stripe cardboard with smartcards.
“We will find that the smartcard itself will soon be on a phone. The time during which it is a physical card will be relatively short. But it is too big a step to go to the phone now. And nor do I think we can wait for that - the cardboard with a magnetic stripe is 1980s technology that is well beyond its sell-by date.”
Shoveller points out that holders of cardboard season tickets are not necessarily given a replacement if they lose one. That piece of card can be worth £5,000 or more, and Shoveller notes: “I can’t just give you another one, because you might pass it to someone else. Sadly we know that happens.” A smartcard, on the other hand, can simply be cancelled and a replacement issued.
“Straightaway that changes the relationship with our passengers,” he says. “At the moment we know very few of them. They can buy their season tickets without leaving us the means to contact them. With smartcards we can know who they are, if they choose. We can know if they are frequently on a particular train. And if there is a problem with that train - a cancellation or a delay - we can let them know.
“If we do overnight engineering work, we have no idea who is going to be on the first or last train that gets replaced by a bus. We can’t contact them to warn them, we just have to put up some signs. In future we can warn them in advance. It changes the whole dynamic. That is worth more to us than just the plastic card itself.”
Smartcards should enable another key demand by passenger groups: the flexible season ticket for people who do not make the same journey to work five days a week.
“The Government has committed to this publicly,” points out CBT’s Joseph. “But the Department does not have the faintest idea how to make it happen.”
South West Trains offered to take part in a flexible season ticket trial, but was not selected. Shoveller admits it has been hugely frustrating, but explains the scale of the problem:
“The challenge is not just how to issue a flexible ticket, but how to do it in a way which also tackles the overcrowding issue. There is no point doing it if it just reduces income for the railway.
“From Monday to Thursday, the level of overcrowding is pretty consistent. On Friday, we carry a lot fewer people. If people could pay for travel on four days a week, we think most people will choose Friday as the day off. That is the day when there is already spare capacity on the trains. That will cost the railway, and ultimately the passengers, because we have to run the same amount of rolling stock on Fridays as on other weekdays.
“So do we really want to give people a discount to travel on a day when there is spare capacity? Or do we want to use this technology to incentivise passengers to travel when space is available, thereby reducing overcrowding in the peaks? I’m all for a sensitive approach, but we do have to achieve more than just making season tickets cheaper for some. Having emptier trains would seem to me to be the wrong thing to do.”
The DfT responded in a statement: “We are actively working with the industry to test a range of options and to identify how flexible tickets can best be achieved.”
The Northern View
“We have a remit to create a smartcard solution across the North,” says David Brown, the newly appointed chief executive of Transport for the North (TfN). “We need an outline implementation plan by March.”
The former Merseytravel boss is based in Manchester, which has had a troubled history with its own smartcard system. As yet, TfN does not even have statutory status. And Brown has just a handful of staff, largely loaned from other local authorities, while he establishes what he hopes will become a northern equivalent of Transport for London.
“We need to build on the schemes already in place,” he says. “The Walrus card in Liverpool is the biggest smartcard system outside London. What we do must go beyond that. It needs to be pan-northern, and it needs to provide real customer improvement.
“The pan-northern card must incentivise people travelling between city regions. It has to add value. It must be there not merely because we can do it, but because it is better.
“I’m not convinced it will be card-based technology. I think it will be more personalised - it will allow existing cards to plug into it. Talking about the technology comes from the wrong direction. It has to be about the person.
“It needs to work for me - working in Liverpool with business to do in Manchester, then going home to Macclesfield. It has to offer a price incentive by card, phone, watch - whatever is suitable for me. But it also has to work for someone who lives in Bootle and who travels into Liverpool every day for work - sometimes by train and sometimes on a bus.”
Brown says he sees little point in a UK-wide smart ticketing system, pointing out that Scotland is currently developing a national card because there is sufficient demand there.
“In all seriousness, the cultural differences between London and the North are massive,” he explains. “And even within parts of the North the differences are large.
“Here in Liverpool, moving people to a card that they have put their trust in, and loaded money on, is a big step. I live near two people who have just for the first time trusted the Walrus card enough to put three quid on it. But my kids, who are quite cosmopolitan, trust implicitly the account they have set up to pay through a phone, because they have downloaded the bit of software that checks what it does. It varies enormously.
“We have a window of opportunity with the new rail franchise owners being put in place in the coming months.”
The Dutch Model
Anyone who has tried train travel in the Netherlands can see how far behind the British system has fallen. The O-V Chipkaart operates on practically every train and every bus in the country. It is simple and seamless.
You tap it against a reader at the start of your journey, and tap it at the end. A train guard checks its validity against his hand-held card reader. A bus driver hears the “beep” as you board the vehicle. As a user, all you have to do is make sure it has sufficient credit. Queues for tickets and crowds at the gateline are consigned to history.
“The Dutch O-V system is an ITSO-like operation but done very successfully,” says Verma. “It is a single card that can be used anywhere. But you still have the problem of getting the card and topping it up. It doesn’t liberate people from the need to buy a ticket.
“I don’t want to belittle what they have done, because they have achieved what ITSO never managed. And it went live in 2008, when contactless bank cards didn’t exist.
“O-V has a heart where all the clearing is happening. It is a centralised system where the company that runs the Chipkaart stands behind everything that is going on. With ITSO in the UK, it was decided very early on that no one organisation would control the technology. So it couldn’t happen here.”
ITSO’s Wakeland says the Dutch model is, in many respects, the same as his system: “It works on pretty much all services - that’s the difference. They’ve just chosen to use a single badge which every passenger recognises can be used everywhere. In the UK the cards look different in different places - Stagecoach Smart, The Key and so on. But the underlying technology here is identical below the branding.”
John Verity is both chief advisor to ITSO and chairman of the Smart Ticketing Alliance, a not-for-profit organisation registered in Brussels that brings together a network of smart ticketing schemes across the world.
“The Dutch card is a standard e-purse,” he explains. “You put at least 50 euros in it. Every time you take a journey, you buy a local ticket with that money. It looks great, but it is in effect like Oyster Pay As You Go. You are not buying a through single ticket, which means you are not necessarily getting the best value. It’s fine where there is only one operator - Amsterdam or Rotterdam. But if you travel for part of your journey on a Veolia service, you can end up paying two maximum fares.”
Wakeland says the technology to use a system such as the O-V Chipkaart already exists in the UK. But no one has tried it.
“We have a standard across ITSO that every card must contain - it has a national e-purse on it. Sadly that purse has never been used. We could have exactly the same implementation that they have in the Netherlands if someone had the political will and the leadership to start using what is already there. You just have to sign up for a back-office facility that assigns the fares to the organisations that are part of it. That’s where you need national leadership.
“Multi-modal smart ticketing like the Dutch have is coming together outside London all over the place. But the biggest challenge has been getting all the operators to sign up to the apportioning of revenue.
“It is not the technology that has been holding the UK back. Those business rules have been the issue, both on rail and on buses. Everyone has to play nicely together.”
Verity offers his international perspective: “We have a very different business model in the UK to anywhere else in Europe. And the business model makes smart technology very difficult to implement. The technology can cope with almost anything you care to throw at it. But the lack of an agreed tariff structure here makes it extremely complicated to use.
“If you’re going from Rotterdam to Amsterdam there are only two fares - one for the high-speed service, and one for everything else. If you travel from London to Manchester, there are hundreds of different fare options.
“In the Netherlands you have a clear tariff structure led by federal government. It is simple and understandable. I used to be operations manager for the Rail Settlement Plan. We were coping with 350 million different fares at RSP. That’s between only 3,000 stations. Then add in the different bus fares - my local one has four different rates from my house to the station, which is a five-minute journey. That does not happen in any other country.
“People are now accepting there is a lesson to be learned here. A simplified structure is the key to smartcards. Transport for the North is starting from scratch. It has an opportunity not just to replace paper tickets with smart ones, but also to look at the structure of ticket pricing. It can use the smartcard to give people a more straightforward and more easily understood pricing system.”
Wakeland concludes: “TfL has a regulated market and a simple fare structure, like the Netherlands. We call it account-based ticketing. What they have done with the contactless bank card has been relatively easy. If you tried to use the same model elsewhere in the UK, where fares are unregulated, it would be very difficult.”
Verma says that the Dutch - already far ahead of most of the UK - are now looking at updating and reforming their system to make it more like TfL.
“The Dutch want to move to contactless as well. We are in discussion with them,” he says.
What Happens Next?
The Smart Ticketing Alliance has been looking at door-to-door journey planning.
“In the UK this is well organised,” explains Verity. “The problem is translating journey planning into ticketing, so that you can do both in one place.
“Two things stand in the way of progress. First, mobile phones don’t yet have a common standard in terms of contactless smartcard operation. We are looking at that with phone manufacturers - they must work across all systems. Second, we are missing the ability to plan a journey and pay for it in one place, then hold the e-ticket there.
“Try explaining to an American or an Australian how our rail fares work. It’s almost impossible. When ATOC sells a UK rail ticket to people outside Europe, it is sold on a zonal system. London to Edinburgh is a three-zone ticket. They buy in the system developed for Swedish rail by a company now based in London - SilverRail.
