Smart ticketing on track in Midlands

Go-Ahead is piloting the first ITSO-based UK commercial smartcard scheme

Go-Ahead customers will soon being paying for journeys with The Key smartcard

Train operator Go-Ahead is to start the UK’s first ITSO-based commercial smartcard trial across its London Midland franchise.

Called The Key, the smartcard is based on the ITSO industry standard mandated by the Department for Transport (DfT). The trial will start at the end of February in the Worcester area ahead of a wider rollout over in the next three to four months.

According to Go-Ahead’s group technology director, Dave Lynch, this is the first UK smartcard scheme where passengers will be able to buy rail tickets online using travel passes enabled with the technology.

“The biggest advantage [of the scheme] is the reduction in time spent in queues for passengers, meaning a much easier travel experience,” he told Computing.

The main challenge in the run-up to the pilot was the integration of a mix of back-end applications from different suppliers covering areas such as card validation and web sales, said Lynch. This took 18 month to achieve, he added.

Ticketing systems – which were run by online service TheTrainline on Go-Ahead’s behalf before being brought in-house in January 2009 – have also been integrated into the smartcard platform by IT services firm Atos Origin.

Go-Ahead is now preparing to roll out The Key on its Southern Railways network, and also aims to introduce the smartcard across its entire UK bus operation. Go North East buses will go live with smart ticketing in May followed by the Oxford Bus Com­pany in the summer. The firm is waiting for Oyster interoperability with ITSO to be able to fit its London buses with the technology.

The company is also developing an iPhone application to allow customers to top up tickets through their mobile devices. This follows the completion of an SMS pilot, which indicated that text messaging would not be an appropriate vehicle for ticketing.

“We found that people wanted smart media [for ticketing], but not SMS. Also, we don’t see text as a secure mechanism for that and in addition the cost of the technology was an issue,” said Lynch.

Funding issues and integration problems mean a UK-wide smartcard
platform remains a distant dream

The £20m of funding for smart ticketing recently announced by the Department for Transport (DfT) has been welcomed by the transport industry, but it is unlikely to bring the UK-wide rollout of the technology any nearer, according to specialists.

“There is only a handful of places in the UK where you can use smartcards for concessionary schemes so far. When you really look at what is going on, you realise it is all very flaky,” one industry expert told Computing.

The source, who did not want to be named, said that the funding will mainly go to England’s nine largest urban areas including Manchester and Birmingham, meaning that little will be left for smaller authorities working on smartcard schemes.

Overall, the transport sector faces a bill of more than £1bn for the design, build and operation of ITSO-based systems.

“Even though technology is rapidly evolving and becoming cheaper to deploy, setting up a smartcard scheme requires a huge amount of integration work – it isn’t a case of plug-and-play at all,” the source added.

In December, the DfT also announced an eight per cent increase in the Bus Service Operator Grant (BSOG), to be channelled to bus companies if they have an ITSO smartcard infrastructure on their fleet.

The DfT predicts public transport passengers in England’s main urban areas will be able to travel without a paper ticket within the next five years. This means that the expectation that smartcards would be widely used in the UK ahead of the London 2012 Olympics has been dashed.

Poor integration is a major stumbling block, meaning that some parts of the country will have their own schemes functioning ahead of the Games, but visito rs to the event will need a mix of paper tickets and smartcards to travel across the UK.

A major component of the DfT’s smart ticketing plans is the Prestige project, which will allow London's Oyster system to read ITSO-based tickets. Go-Ahead group technology director Dave Lynch, who also sits on the board of ITSO, said the project is making good progress.

“We will certainly have a much wider ITSO presence by 2012. But London needs to engage with the rest of the country, so it is important that [the interoperability] is there,” said Lynch.