“This is what Transport for the North should look at: a system that is easy to use by a person who wants to buy a ticket but who does not know exactly what ticket they want. This needs to be done through a mobile phone or tablet.
“Seventy per cent of all journeys in the UK do not involve buying a ticket at the time of planning the journey. The figure is similar in France or Germany. It is pre-planned by buying a season ticket, or an advance fare, or a concession, or the ticket is bought through some other process. And that figure is increasing.
“People want certainty on how much they are going to pay. SilverRail’s expertise is on the planning side - it wants to be an aggregator, seeing a journey across multiple operators and different modes, and calculating it all in one place. What we need is a system that sells the ticket in the same place. We want it to say: ‘Trust me with your credit card number, and I will go off and buy it for you.’
“SilverRail is not alone in that - other big organisations want to do the same. Amadeus does it for the airline industry. For example, a flight with EasyJet or Ryanair, connecting to British Airways long haul to Australia, then a local flight there - done with the same credit card to ticket all the way through.
“The same thing could happen on rail and bus. An electronic wallet that contains multiple tickets, bought in one go. For that you have to trust the tariff system to offer you the best value for money. That is harder in the UK because the pricing structure is so complex. The technology is there, but the fare structure is not.”
ITSO’s Wakeland says the linking of journey planning, real time information and mobile phones is the key goal for the next few years: “This is what people really want - loading your information onto a device which shows the journey options, pays for them and keeps you updated during your journey. We are working on bringing ITSO ticketing to mobiles. That’s the future. But it will involve simplifying fare structures, if it is to work by merely pointing your phone at a barrier.
“It can be done technically if the political will is there. I think it exists in Transport for the North.”
Ditch ITSO?
The move from cardboard tickets to smartcards has been strangled by a lack of leadership, particularly from central Government. It has taken years longer than anybody expected, characterised by obfuscation and indecision.
“You have to find somebody with the commercial, technical and operational capability to pull this off,” says TfL’s Verma. “Central Government has none of those three requirements.
“They should let us into the tent, and let us help them sort it out. That is the right answer. But it was the right answer ten years ago as well. And if they don’t let us in, then frankly five years from now the system is going to look pretty much like it does today.
“The DfT has specifically said we have no remit outside London. They make the rules. If that is the policy we cannot do anything about it, even though we have a system that has already been proved, and which can work everywhere.”
Verma believes ITSO is fundamentally flawed.
“Having watched this for ten years, it is incredible how vast amounts of money are being spent on this, with practically nothing to show for it. Central Government is investing money for absolutely bizarre reasons. A lot of money, and more importantly a lot of emotion, has been invested in ITSO by the Department for Transport. And that makes life very difficult.
“Let me press the money point,” he continues. “Fantastic amounts have been spent on smart ticketing.
“The Oyster card system in 2003 cost £50 million. Since then we have spent another £50m. £33m went into extending Oyster Pay As You Go to the national rail networks in London - that was the total cost of putting Oyster into 400 stations. Against which there has been extensive academic analysis of the benefits of Oyster Pay As You Go. It shows the increase in revenue is of the order of £100m-£120m per year. It is not difficult to see the investment case.
“Likewise the cost of contactless was £68m. £24m of that was bringing an asset refresh. So the real cost was about £44m. And we have seven million users already. These are not seven million people who are being forced to use the system - they have alternatives. They are choosing it.
“Now look at ITSO. The cost is definitely in the hundreds of millions of pounds. We do not know how many hundreds. And the only substantial successful use of it in the whole country is with concessionary passes for the elderly.
“My suggestion to anyone, operating transport systems anywhere in the world, is to stop investing in technology that is already 15 years old and go with the most modern solution… contactless bank cards. Your passengers already have them.”
CBT’s Joseph adds: “When the Public Accounts Committee finds out, it will fry the Department for Transport. TfL has been offering for a long time to extend its ticketing to Gatwick and Luton airports, so that visitors don’t have to buy a rail ticket and then an Oyster card. It has been turned down because there are fears of revenue abstraction.
“There is a large chunk of the London commuter area that does not have this stuff, when it has been offered on a plate. I’m not sure ministers realise the extent to which DfT pride had stopped them delivering tangible benefits for passengers. It is trying to make its own SEFT system work. And it’s not at all clear that it is working in any meaningful way.”
The DfT responded in a statement: “Through our investment, smart season tickets are already available through two operators in the South East. Our investment has offered the foundations for smart ticketing in the Midlands. We are clear that rolling out smart ticketing in the North is a priority, and we are working with local authorities to deliver this as soon as possible.”
“What we have done is world leading,” Verma concludes. “And we are in discussions with practically every major city around the world. They want to emulate what we have done. Every large city you can think of - New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore - they are all talking to us. My recommendation is that the rest of the UK cannot ignore this any more.”
Conclusion
Is Shashi Verma right? Is smartcard travel already yesterday’s technology? There seems no immediate prospect of an equivalent of the Dutch O-V Chipkaart, even though that has been successful since 2008. In the UK, that puts us eight years behind already.
Verma thinks we should skip that stage altogether, and adopt London’s contactless bank card system. If he’s right, it’s as if the Government is urging us all to buy our music on CDs instead of on scratchy vinyl, at a time when everyone else has already tried downloads from iTunes and is now moving on to storing their music in the Cloud.
But most journeys are local. So if we adopt a hotch-potch of options, each of which satisfies a local need, how much does it really matter that a smaller number of long-distance travellers or overseas visitors are significantly disadvantaged?
It’s clear that outside London, we are falling way behind the game. There are two technical paths we could follow, each of them viable now. One is not being pursued at all, and the other is not being pursued with any particular sense of political urgency. One rule for London… another for everywhere else.
