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The paper tickets used by almost all passengers would still be recognisable to the Victorians who built the railway. But the introduction of smartcards on the railway hasn’t gone exactly to plan - when it comes to ticketing innovation, the bus industry is years ahead.
The South East Flexible Ticketing programme (SEFT) ran millions of pounds over budget. It was delayed several times and has so far failed to deliver. The National Audit Office, the spending watchdog, found that it had been paused three times since 2012 and reset twice, reducing the scope each time. The cost: £54 million, plus a further £66m to upgrade London gatelines. Total: £120m.
The NAO said the business case relied on 95% of season ticket holders switching. However, by the end of March 2017, only 8% had done so. Eleven train operators running services into London were expected to offer flexible smart tickets. Only five offer smartcards, of which only c2c offers a flexible part-time option. Govia Thameslink Railway and South West Trains preferred to develop their own back-office functions, rather than relying on the Government-led system.
The Department for Transport claimed 400,000 commuters now have “access to paperless season tickets”. But the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) confirmed that only 30,000 passengers actually use one. Most travel on c2c. In April, the DfT handed the assets and operation of the SEFT scheme to RDG, saying the private sector should in future take the lead in smart ticketing.
Three years ago, Transport for London slipped straight to contactless bank cards, and it has been a runaway success. But according to Dennis Rocks, managing director, technology services at the RDG, the national railway will catch up over the next eight or nine years.
“Take-up is happening - 250 customers a day are switching and the rate will increase,” he says. “The number of train operators using our back-office function is up to seven, and 450 stations have been upgraded. We can process five million transactions a day and we can host all 28 operators. It is a very robust infrastructure.”
While currently only 5% of its capacity is being used, Rocks says this will become the basis of a national structure for England and Wales. Scotland has a separate multi-modal back-office to cover rail, bus and Caledonian Macbrayne ferries.
“The Secretary of State has said he wants all train operators to be able to use smartcards by December next year. Northern has come to us and we are in the process of garnering the support other operators need.”
It is the gateline infrastructure that takes the time and money. Gatelines and post validators are expensive bits of kit. A majority of the 2,500 stations need civil engineering works, wiring, network connections, and commissioning.
“Ticket vending machines also have to be enabled with the ITSO system, so you buy a product and tap your card to upload that product. That allows people to purchase from a station machine rather than online, with the delay entailed in registering and receiving a card through the post.”
Then there’s the advertising and marketing, and the cultural change needed to alter passengers’ buying habits. It is a many-faceted operation.
Transport consultancy SYSTRA has specialised in this field. Smart ticketing director Jeremy Meal explains: “We sit between the suppliers who don’t fully understand the transport industry, and the transport industry, local authorities and operators who don’t fully understand all the technical intricacies.
“I think rail started out three years behind the buses. It has slipped further since then. There was not a generic solution for the rail industry; it turned into a project-by-project approach on individual train operators.”
“It’s down to the level of investment,” says Dave Roat, strategy manager for California-based Cubic Transportation Systems, a world leader in ticketing and which designed the London operation.
“To implement a smartcard system is expensive. There was a fund available some years ago for bus operators to implement smartcard solutions to support concessionary travel: free for people over 60, reduced rates for people in education, and so on. Councils saw potential for savings and efficiencies. There was an obvious investment case. That never translated into rail.”
Meal comments that it was hard to change an existing franchise and to get commitments that involved significant cost.
“It certainly added to the delays,” he says. “The first attempt which started on South West Trains never properly defined the scheme and ended up just delivering equipment. It was meant to work with TfL’s system, but with delays to that, followed by the London Olympics, it never quite worked as far as a viable smart ticketing rollout. The next five train operators were given a different regime: to reach a certain percentage volume of smartcards on particular flows. They all found reasons why they couldn’t achieve that.”
The result is that most rail passengers do not have the option of a smartcard, even though it has long been commonplace on buses. RDG says 1.5 million e-tickets are sold, either to be printed at home or read on a mobile device. And nationwide there are half a million ITSO rail smartcards. Compared with 920 million orange paper tickets, it remains a drop in the ocean.
Smartcard rollout
SYSTRA’s smart ticketing director Jeremy Meal says that however you look at smart tickets, there are only four types.
“First, there are the concessions: free or proportional fares. Smartcards work well for these. There are period passes, which are for commuters. These now activate on first use. Carnets are for frequent but not daily travellers. They have not been popular yet, though we put them on the Cambridge busway. And the payment purse: loading a card with money, which can accommodate a daily cap on how much is paid regardless of how much it is used.”
In the bus industry, the operator gets a toolkit which allows it to switch on any ITSO smartcard. A change to the card can be handled in two or three weeks. The number of pieces of equipment you have to change is fairly small.
On rail, there is more kit to install. On Northern, for example, they will need to get every conductor’s hand-held machine upgraded before a smartcard can go live, because every conductor must be able to check every ticket. That is an expensive deployment of hardware, says Meal.
“The initial approach in the South East was to introduce a complete new set of products at the same time, including part-time season tickets. The Department was also pre-occupied with the idea of using smartcards to influence shoulder peak pricing. This took any real focus off delivering volume,” he says.
“The Secretary of State has now refocused on the rollout of smart period passes - season tickets. I think with RDG now in control, this is now happening. It could move forward quite quickly. We need to roll out ITSO across the rail network so that any product for any flow could be switched on. That is the bread-and-butter requirement to replace magnetic stripe paper tickets. Mobile phones and barcodes can be added on to that later as an overlay, especially for short-use singles and returns.”
The problem in the South East is that, historically, Transport for London has not bought into that idea. Instead of embracing the ITSO system wholeheartedly at the outset, it had to jump straight from nationally non-interoperable Oyster to contactless bank cards. A bit like a music fan skipping from vinyl LPs to Spotify without going via CDs. The passenger flows in London are sufficiently large to justify it, and fares do not reach the £30 limit on contactless debit cards. With hundreds of millions of journeys routinely paid this way, it has been outstandingly successful. It is seen as a world leader for other capital cities to emulate.
