He says the barcode system for occasional tickets will become universal, but adds they’re not great at gatelines because they are slow to use.
Rocks questions whether gatelines would even be wanted ten or 15 years down the line. “That’s not the industry view - it’s just me asking the question. We want frictionless travel.”
SilverRail’s Andrew Steele predicts that the turn up and go railway will be about account-based travel - the ability to get on and off trains and receive a bill for whatever journey you’ve made.
“If we can give you a best-price promise that you trust, you just turn up and travel - a seamless and more relaxing journey,” he says. “You just have an account in your phone, or any other portable device. You don’t have to stress about which ticket to buy or what time off-peak starts. And because this is an account personal to you, the railway is able to treat you much better. If you are challenged on the train, your own identity is the ticket, the permit to travel. You don’t need anything other than proof that you are the account holder.”
San Diego-based Cubic Transportation Systems compiles journeys in a back-office function that adds whatever business functions are applicable to you: daily fare capping, weekly capping, a carnet. Then it charges the customer’s bank account according to the travel taken. It’s a pay-as-you-go system. The company has been working with RDG on account-based ticketing, and the Bluetooth trial on Chiltern is one example.
“The issue with barcodes is the fumble factor,” says Cubic’s Dave Roat, an American who has lived in the UK for 26 years, but whose accent suggests he landed yesterday.
“Getting your barcode out and orienting it to the reader takes much longer than the reader itself, which is quite fast. With a Bluetooth phone the challenge is to get the gate to unlock the phone as it approaches, waking it up in the right location.”
Steele says this system will come in the near future, but it is not imminent. “You won’t need a physical token that you present to the guard for inspection as the way to access the travel you are buying. For this to happen the Government has to make an open market, so travel is available to mobility retailers. Transport for London is effectively a closed monopoly, whereas mainline operators can sell their tickets in a variety of ways. A third party like Expedia cannot see Oyster so it cannot sell it.”
However, Rocks warns of the danger of disenfranchising parts of society merely because they choose not to embrace technology that works for the majority. “Not everyone has a bank account and not everyone has a mobile phone,” he says. “For season ticket holders, a smartcard or a card on the phone is the way forward in the medium term. But we still need to overcome ‘card clash’. Most people carry more than one bank card or smart card, and these could be stored in the phone. Only one can be acknowledged at the gateline.”
Does that mean the railway will end up with a piecemeal selection of payment methods, rather than a unified and universal replacement for the paper ticket? FirstGroup’s attempt at a Bristol smartcard may be fine for local travel, but would the passenger switch to a barcode system to get a train to Manchester, where a separate smartcard might work on a tram but not in a taxi or to unlock a hire bicycle? Will many different systems be every bit as confusing as today’s many different types, and therefore prove a barrier to travel instead of an incentive?
“That’s a very insightful question,” concedes Roat. “The ambition has been to get rid of the tendering ticket. There have been various initiatives, mainly closed loop local systems by one provider or group, and mostly where you load some money onto an ITSO card and use it up as you travel.”
Various councils use ITSO cards for concessionary travel, such as student rates. Roat says that smartcard on the railway is a technology adjustment, no more, and adds that in many cases franchises are trying to solve the problem just for their own passengers. That means what Southern does and what First will do in Bristol are not the same, so passengers are unable to make a complete journey across multiple franchises or multiple modes.
“With account-based ticketing, the rules reside not in a ticket vending machine but in a back office. To do that you need the trust of passengers. They must know that when they wave their card at a machine, they will be charged the best price for the journey,” says Roat.
“TfL has done that. Londoners believe that when they use their contactless bank card, they are being charged the best fare the system can give them.
“Trust between a train operator and its passengers will need to be built, but I don’t think it is too hard to do that. On an account-based system, when a train is delayed the system will automatically refund the passenger. That is a really quick proof point to the traveller that the train operator is treating them fairly.”
Roat believes the paper ticket will still be around for years to come. Frequent travellers will switch to new media, he says, but those who travel less often will stick to what they know.
“We talk of ‘mobility’ as a service. You want to get on a bus then a tram or the Tube, followed by a train, all on the same card,” he says. “The payment side is one of the easier challenges to resolve. Doing a deal between the train operator and the bus operator is not really about the technology. The data can be linked. Who does the user have the commercial relationship with? Is it the bus operator, the train company or the local council? That has to be sorted out in a way the passenger trusts.
“It’s a new business model. It could follow the Uber style, where the financial relationship is not with the driver but with a back-office function which then pays the driver. Can that work in rail as well?”
Replacing the paper ticket is a big risk, RDG’s Dennis Rocks concludes. “It will start slowly and pick up as the infrastructure rolls out,” he says. “There are big upsides to this. Reduction in fraud is one - it will be harder to claim a ticket is damaged or lost. We will glean information not available from paper ticket sales. We will know from gateline data when people are travelling on different routes, and that will enable operators to look at loadings and put more resources into place at different times, better predicting flows and managing staffing.”
Roat adds that the information from a central back-office can start to drive other decisions and changes that benefit customers.
“We can incentivise passengers to travel on different trains,” he says. “Can we as a country start to manage travelling habits, spreading the peaks a little so not everyone arrives at 0900 and leaves at 1700? This is about a lot more than selling tickets.”
