Barriers to smartcard use
Andrew Steele, director of corporate strategy at SilverRail, believes the railway should be trusting its customers and having a relationship with them, rather than criminalising them for “not having a bit of orange paper they bought six hours ago, which they can’t now find”.
Says Steele: “Most people on the railways are honest, but they sometimes make mistakes when trying to use a very complicated system. The technology is not the biggest issue. The problem is persuading the railway to allow change to happen. We have to deliver a better passenger experience. Travelling by train can be very stressful. Passengers are making lots of complex decisions about buying the right bit of paper, at the correct price, for the right peak or off-peak train, with a return service that you have to choose before you travel.
“At the moment, this is not really being tackled. But over the next 12 to 24 months I think we will see significant moves - a step change. For some segments of travellers, the journey will become easier. There will be a new way of selling season tickets.”
Steele says the fragmented structure of the railway has made change more difficult, but adds that if rail does not make buying easier, it is going to fall victim to significantly faster-moving competitors like Uber.
“Technology is not holding us back,” agrees Dave Roat from Cubic. “It is the commercial side doing that. When you see autonomously-driven Tesla cars on the road you know that, on the railway, technology is the easy bit.
“Getting a bus company to see the value in having a deal with a train operator and a car rental company and a taxi firm - that’s the block. The tech industry has woken up to the latent demand in transportation. That innovation has to reach rail and make passengers’ lives easier. But rail has not figured out how to do that.”
Roat says that while technology leaders such as Cubic or SilverRail have the means to do it, the Rail Delivery Group has to lead the way. “It needs to show that a seamless journey from Brighton to Glasgow can be made without a little piece of orange paper that is easily lost or damaged,” he says.
However, everyone looks to their commercial contracts, and Meal points out that they need the numbers to stack up on interoperable tickets. “There is a lack of vision to make something happen nationally,” he says. “As a result, we’ve ended up with city-based local transport cards that are only as good and comprehensive as the individual ‘managers’ of schemes have been able to negotiate.”
And here is an example. Great Western Railway (GWR) is to launch a smartcard for the Severn Beach Line. It is part of a pilot that could eventually feature combined rail and bus travel in a single ticket across Bristol. Allowing people to add a weekly or monthly season rail ticket to an electronic card to begin with, the project is being run in partnership with Bristol City Council.
It’s a small-scale scheme on a single route which carries a million journeys a year. It will be branded as ‘touch’ operating from an online account and, once activated, from a ticket vending machine. Fares bought online will only be active two hours after purchasing, when the card is touched against a station validator or gateline. While it will carry the same branding as the local bus smartcard, it will not initially work beyond the railway branch line, even though both buses and trains are operated by First Group.
GWR’s Lee Edworthy says: “It is the first step towards wider integration of ticketing for bus and rail across the Bristol area.”
Much more technically advanced is a trial on Chiltern Railways, run by SilverRail, Cubic Transportation Systems and the RSSB. It will assess how Bluetooth connectivity could speed up moving through the gateline.
“The fastest way through is a contactless bank card,” explains SilverRail’s Steele. “The magnetic stripe card is quick, too. The worst experience at the gate is when someone stands with a magnetic stripe ticket, tapping it on the Oyster reader because they think it is a smartcard. That happens quite a lot. Otherwise the worst gateline time is barcode reading on the phone, because you have to put it in the right position. Contactless takes 500 milliseconds. A barcode is around two seconds. Not for the time it takes the machine to recognise it, but for the time it takes the person to get it right.”
SilverRail is trialling a system in which the phone talks to the gate using a Bluetooth protocol as you walk up. The gate will see all the phones nearby and it has to open for only the right ones.
“Do we use it like a smartcard, where you tap a reader? Should it work in your pocket or bag?” asks Steele.
“Of course, you can get the gate to open when you’re ten metres away, but that’s not terribly useful. “We could well decide that the physical action of doing something, like tapping a reader with the phone, is what passengers like best. Or they may prefer the gate to open in response to the phone’s mere presence.”
Has Britain fallen behind?
“Outside London, we are behind other comparable countries, such as some city states,” says Meal at SYSTRA, who has worked on ticketing systems all over the world, including Singapore, which has a sophisticated fares system that holds together premiums on some modes for speed/quality, yet managed integrated fares.
“Instead, we just have an overly-complex fares system that tends to be a barrier to travel. Nevertheless, we have lots more market-related charging, which is why rail travel here has doubled. We have a clunky way of interfacing with our transport system. But we still have a very well-used system, so something is right about it.”
Andrew Steele, from SilverRail, points out that Deutsche Bahn trialled new ways of ticketing years ago. In France, they have a national system, so the structure is much easier, but the TGV lines basically run to Paris. “If you want cross-country routes you can face long and expensive journeys, and non-rail options have exploited that, especially among younger travellers,” he says. “SNCF has experienced a significant loss of the younger generation to coach companies and BlaBlaCar, the car pooling service.”
“I don’t think Britain is behind the curve,” counters Cubic Transportation Systems’ Dave Roat. “The demand for rail is stronger here and there is ambition to replace the tendering ticket. In Germany the environment to do that is simpler. Here the whole franchise thing is making it harder. If you look at Germany or France, the train operator is able to do things with mobile ticketing because they run the whole system.”
Roat says Germany has a solution where you get on a train in Berlin, use a mobile phone app, get to Frankfurt, and Deutsche Bahn will charge your account based on mobile cell site location.
“It can physically see where your journey starts and ends and charge across the destination pair,” he says. “It can do that because it runs the whole network. There is a lot of ambition to bring change here, there is work going on in the individual franchises, and the Rail Delivery Group is attempting to co-ordinate that.”
What happens next?
The increasing variety of ways to pay for rail travel can appear bewildering.
There are smart cards. There are e-tickets which can be printed at home or read as barcodes on mobile devices. There are contactless bank cards. Ultimately tickets will be ‘in the cloud’ - an account-based system in which you will pay after making a journey instead of beforehand.
“The overriding factor will be whether concessionary bus travel remains free after the General Election,” suggests Jeremy Meal at SYSTRA. “Because for ‘free’ concessionary travel there is no sensible successor to ITSO smartcards, being both smart and the photo ID. Another factor will be whether young people, who are now required to stay in education beyond the age of 16, also get more local, or even universal concessions in future. This would also make an ITSO purse system logical, at least locally, which can work again integrated with the photo ID.
“But if older and disabled people who travel for free now end up having to pay, there will be a stronger move towards contactless bank cards. Many people will still need to have a form of ID control to use concessions, and that’s something bank cards don’t currently offer. So as long as we have free concessions, we will continue needing ITSO - remember some are valid on rail already. But then mobile phones acting as smart media, not just displaying barcodes are also a step nearer now, following refinements in NFC (near field technology).”
Dennis Rocks, managing director of technology services at the RDG, says part of the problem is that there is a plethora of products and a plethora of ticket prices.
“We need to simplify that,” he says. “But I cannot see when that convergence is going to take place. Whether tickets in the cloud happen in five years or ten, I don’t know.”
Rocks says the aspiration is to get a system that works for all, as within five years there will be wider use of contactless cards across the network as well as a significant reduction in the use of magnetic stripes.
“Ideally, we want to put ITSO smartcards on a phone,” he says. “We are working on this, with trials on TransPennine. Scotland is testing a phone emulating the smartcard with near-field communication, tapping through a gate with a phone.”
Meal predicts that five years from now people will have understood that it is possible to have a basic platform that works nationally.
“We need to make phone use easier,” he says. “We can do that with Android phones now and it ought to be possible with Windows phones. However, Apple currently seems to treat theirs as a proprietary system so they force users onto Apple Pay. That precludes them being used as tickets as well as interoperable tickets as a payment system.”
