Bus operator First has expressed doubts over the business case for smartcards for public transport fare payment.
Brian Keith, special projects manager, questioned whether the economics would stack up outside London – where 90% of all fare payments remain coin-based – including in Bradford, where First launched its own smartcard-based payment scheme in 2000.
Operator take up of new ticketing technology remains low because ‘benefits and savings are difficult to assess’, he told last week’s transport card forum. Doubts also remain about whether or not new payment technology has the scope to increase the size of the overall market.
Much would depend on results of the Yorcard scheme, a joint venture between the West and South Yorkshire passenger transport executives being piloted in Sheffield later this year. The first to test the UK’s Integrated Transport Smartcard Organisation national standard commercially, this will involve bus services run by First and Yorkshire Terrier along a busy city corridor, a cross-city network of school routes, and rail links between Sheffield and Doncaster. South Yorkshire PTE is currently evaluating tenders for scheme equipment and back office systems.
But operators were generally keen to take cash out of the bus and eliminate the passenger/driver interface – not least for security reasons, he added.
They also want to reduce the expense of reclaiming from local authorities costs of concessionary fares, which typically account for 30% of the total.
Alternatives to smartcards proposed by operators include radio-frequency ID tags and near field communications using mobile phones. But Jeremy Acklam of international IT services specialist Atos Origin, warned of ‘the massive problem’ of incorporating the interests of mobile phone operators within transport business cases.