Was the ITSO system ever meant to be rolled out across the entire network?

[py_megapixel]

Be careful if you ever travel on the Manchester Metrolink tram system as you might find that your contactless debit card has been accepted as payment for your journey and not your weekly ticket, TFGM even say that you must remove your card from your wallet thus separating it from other sources of charging. Shockingly ****e yes but that's the inferior cheap tech that they are deploying. But so long as the coins roll in TFGM aren't going to too much of a damn.

If you've been to London at all over the past few years, you'll have seen the "Watch out for card clash when using Contactless and Oyster" posters. This is nothing new, nor is it unique to ITSO. I don't suspect that a person taking diner's cards for payment in a restaurant would know which to use if handed several at once!
--------------------------
I think one of the biggest flaws of the standard is that the cards contain information about their issuer, allowing tickets to be restricted to certain cards. If I could carry just one ITSO card around, that might convince me to use it for all modes of transport, but the inability to issue some tickets on some cards really puts me off.

 

[nidave]

Be careful if you ever travel on the Manchester Metrolink tram system as you might find that your contactless debit card has been accepted as payment for your journey and not your weekly ticket, TFGM even say that you must remove your card from your wallet thus separating it from other sources of charging. Shockingly ****e yes but that's the inferior cheap tech that they are deploying. But so long as the coins roll in TFGM aren't going to too much of a damn.

TfL broadcast messages all the time when they started to take contactless cards to avoid card clash - this is not a Manchester issue - the devices have rfid tags and its a rfid reader.
You also have to remember to use the same card to touch in and touch out - you cant go from your phone to touch in then touch out on the card as they have 2 different numbers (despite being the same account and you use the card to create the account on the phone) Again, not unique to Manchester.

 

[jagardner1984]

It’s a similar logic to just holding your wallet up to a card reader in a restaurant and then complaining when “they” charge the wrong card.

I’d argue another reason to put your travel product on your debit card (in whatever way). Less RFID confusion.

 

[OxtedSignaller]

There is a lot of work to be done and to be fair why not simply have a standard design across the country so if the time comes you can use the smartcards anywhere in the country people are aware of this. Because if you were not very knowledgeable you would presume you cannot use a Southeastern key on EMR for example. Also I believe every season ticket should be issued on a Smartcard or instead you could discount the cost of a Smartcard ticket to encourage people to use them which is what a lot of bus companies do and it works.

 

[gladiac]

I am astonished how frankly crap some of the smart card products/systems are - here in Scotrail land, the obvious thing of buying your ticket via app on way to the station to beat the queues isn't possible because you have to buy x hours in advance and then go to a ticket machine to load the product onto your card.

There is a way around that advance purchase restriction for their Super Off-Peak tickets, whilst you can only select train times 4+ hours into the future the ticket is still valid on earlier trains (from 1100 on I think) on that date. Combined with the ScotRail app on an Android+NFC phone you can buy and load a ticket onto your Smartcard within 5-10 minutes.

 

[transmanche]

I believe all new ITSO cards will, in addition to the ITSO logo, have a new symbol (red circle with staggered lines) and the plan is to have them work at all locations that accept smartcards. Interoperability is slowly happening and some cards already work in places where it hasn't formally been announced.

Precisely. One example of this is Newcastle University students, who can load a Metrosaver onto their (ITSO-compatible) university ID card - so they don't need to acquire a separate Pop smartcard from Nexus.

Other plans from the ITSO website talk of taking smartcard ticketing to the mobile, using NFC. This could either allow the phone to hold the ticket,

West Midlands Metro passengers can load an ITSO-enabled ticket onto their mobile phones, using NFC rather than a barcode.

or I've also heard that it can be used to transfer a ticket purchased online to your card without the need go to a TVM/gateline/counter.

Northern Rail passengers can already do just this for season tickets bought via their app - transferring the ticket via NFC to their Northern smartcard.

TVMs will perhaps one day dispense cards (as TfL machines can do in London)

Cardboard ITSO cards are available too - they're used on the Glasgow Subway (similar cards are used in the Netherlands). So all single/return and similar tickets could be ITSO enabled - even for people who don't have a smartcard or NFC-equipped phone - and we could replace magnetic stripe tickets completely.

In fact, Scotland seems to be leading the way here. The smarttravel.scot scheme means that you can use any Scottish operator's ITSO card to hold any Scottish operator's tickets. If you want to load Subway tickets on a (Scottish-issued) Stagecoach Smart card? No problem.

 

[si404]

the TfL backoffice systems (e.g. TfL contactless payment systems/ Oyster) might be far better than ITSO for "NSE Land".

Really they should just have adopted Oyster as a nationwide standard.

That being the Oyster that's run out of zones, and whose backend systems need a major overhaul (OK, they've done some to get Contactless-only to Reading, WGC and Luton Airport) with some, if not all, the cards replaced?

The underlying zonal and/or flat fare system is not going to work nationwide. It will struggle (even giving TOCs their own fare scales for outside London and/or special routes, and having no capping beyond Z9 to avoid those issues) to do rail in the Home Counties. Especially when it comes to stuff like the North Downs and Medway Valley lines that orbit London.

 

[hwl]

That being the Oyster that's run out of zones, and whose backend systems need a major overhaul (OK, they've done some to get Contactless-only to Reading, WGC and Luton Airport) with some, if not all, the cards replaced?

The underlying zonal and/or flat fare system is not going to work nationwide. It will struggle (even giving TOCs their own fare scales for outside London and/or special routes, and having no capping beyond Z9 to avoid those issues) to do rail in the Home Counties. Especially when it comes to stuff like the North Downs and Medway Valley lines that orbit London.

The Contactless card system is seperate and has far fewer of the limitations of oyster hence contactless to Reading and not Oyster. Plenty more capacity in the contactless backend system for expansion, it can quite happily deal with more TOC point to point fares if expanded. The contactless sytem is already far cheaper to run that Oyster per transaction.

 

[KingJ]

There is a way around that advance purchase restriction for their Super Off-Peak tickets, whilst you can only select train times 4+ hours into the future the ticket is still valid on earlier trains (from 1100 on I think) on that date. Combined with the ScotRail app on an Android+NFC phone you can buy and load a ticket onto your Smartcard within 5-10 minutes.

This also works for peak tickets - even though an Off-Peak ticket is selected, you are of course able to buy a Peak ticket. Sensibly of course, it's not the top/default option for anyone who really intended to travel on that later service and would be better served by an Off-Peak ticket!

I use this method regularly now with Southeastern's app to buy daily tickets and load them on to my Key card. It does save me a queue at the ticket machine, but I do wish the app would allow me to buy a 'common' journey with just a few taps - i.e. without the need to go through and select arbitrary services to travel on.

Of relevance to this thread, although I use an ITSO card for all my travel where possible I do experience periodic issues when interfacing with other operators, e.g. as I posted here a short while ago.

 

[si404]

The Contactless card system is seperate and has far fewer of the limitations of oyster hence contactless to Reading and not Oyster. Plenty more capacity in the contactless backend system for expansion, it can quite happily deal with more TOC point to point fares if expanded. The contactless sytem is already far cheaper to run that Oyster per transaction.

In other words, your OP would have been better if it didn't mention Oyster.

 

[hwl]

In other words, your OP would have been better if it didn't mention Oyster.

yes though many are still remarkable unaware of what the contactless back office can do and why I listed it first in the OP.

 

[duffield]

In relation to reading the wrong card accidentally, for a few pennies (literally) you can get foil/cardboard inserts for your wallet card slots which prevent the wrong card being read by mistake, e.g. you have your contactless card in an 'insert slot' and your Oyster in a normal slot, and it's totally impossible to read the wrong card (and these inserts do work, I've done tests).

 

[HSTEd]

Can you please explain how I would have used either system for a journey from Caersws, an unmanned station on the Cambrian, to London? As far as I can see there is no way of doing so.

How would you make such a journey now?

 

[Llanigraham]

How would you make such a journey now?

I normally go to the station, touch the screen a couple of times, stick in my credit card and get a few bits of card back, or I get on the train and the nice person asks me a few questions, i give them my card and they print me a short length of paper.

Or I might, if going that way, wander iin and speak to Gareth at newtown Station Travel and get some bits of card from him.

Quick, simple and easy!

 

[matt_world2004]

And where do I buy one from when I suddenly decide to travel from an unmanned station?

You buy a paper ticket as normal?

 

[Llanigraham]

You buy a paper ticket as normal?

Fine, but the proposal being made by many here is for ALL ticketing to be on wasteful bits of plastic, and frankly that is not possible or practicable.

 

[jagardner1984]

With relation to interoperability. It’s possible to put some subway season tickets on an unregistered over the counter smartcard. Others you have to put on a registered (take a photo online) smartcard. Some products you can put on a Scotrail smartcard. Others you need a seperate registered subway smartcard. I check in with my Scotrail smartcard at Cessnock and whilst waiting I think, I’ll buy my ticket now for my train through to Edinburgh to save the queue at Queen Street. Ah, sorry, you need to do that 4 hours before hand to allow the Scotrail website hamster to carry your order over to the smart card machine. I go to the large ticket machine queue and one of Scotrail’s ticket staff is serving tickets to get through the queue. Ah sorry you need to go to that other kind of machine to load onto your card, I can sell you the ticket but you’ll need to carry paper tickets instead.

Integrated isn’t the first word I’d use for any of the above. It isn’t hard to see why in the face of their 60% (by smart ticket) target, they achieved an enormous 8.4%.

 

[yorkie]

I don't think phasing out 'paper' tickets is achievable. The government have long wanted it but it's simply an aspiration not realistic. Irregular rail passengers don't hold smartcards, data information concerns, necessary infrastructure upgrades throughout the whole network to ticket machines, barriers, portable ticket machines onboard etc....

Ignoring Pay As You Go (PAYG) schemes in local areas, smartcards are only useful for regular passengers to obtain Season ticket or similar products (e.g. carnets)

Irregular passengers or passengers who travel regularly but on different routes, have absolutely no need for a smart card, or paper tickets, once everything is available as an e-ticket. Many flows are already e-ticket enabled and this expansion looks set to continue.

 

[HSTEd]

Fine, but the proposal being made by many here is for ALL ticketing to be on wasteful bits of plastic, and frankly that is not possible or practicable.

The machine prints you a card with the details on, containing a chip.

At the end of your journey you can choose to return the piece of plastic to get your deposit back.
The writing is scrubbed off by a machine and the card can be reused.

There are machines that allow monochrome printing for 500 cycles using thermal printing methods.

EDIT:

Then there are things like MIFARE Ultralight Nano, which is an ultra lightweight chip which can be inserted into paper cards for single use tickets.
These paper tickets are available from Alibaba at price of a few pence each.

 

[bubieyehyeh]

Ignoring Pay As You Go (PAYG) schemes in local areas, smartcards are only useful for regular passengers to obtain Season ticket or similar products (e.g. carnets)

Irregular passengers or passengers who travel regularly but on different routes, have absolutely no need for a smart card, or paper tickets, once everything is available as an e-ticket. Many flows are already e-ticket enabled and this expansion looks set to continue.

While I agree there are situations where this doesn't work with smart tickets.

I regularly buy weekly season tickets, and maybe once in that week need to travel outside the limits of the season. With paper I just buy a ticket between border of the season validity and my one-off destination.

I don't think you can buy the additional ticket on a smartcard and have it work, so you need to disimbark the train at the switch point, leave and re-enter the station, extending your journey time. It is possible I believe on the Southern Key if you have their PAYG (keygo) and the season on your key. However keygo doesn't allow you to use a railcard, so its more expensive than paper for me.

Southern did used to allow you to buy daily key tickets (inc railcard discounted ones) online, but removed the feature rather unhelpfully, but to be honest it wasn't that useful, since you still had to get off the train, when split ticketing. It also had some major limitations even though the key can store 5 tickets, you couldn't buy a 2nd ticket until you had collected the previously order one.

Also Keygo has a limitation on the maxiumum duration of a break of journey which is a few hours from memory.

 

[Llanigraham]

The machine prints you a card with the details on, containing a chip.

And what is this card supposed to cover?
For example my route could have at least 5 different routes, with several different operators.

At the end of your journey you can choose to return the piece of plastic to get your deposit back.

Err?? What deposit?
That is something you haven't mentioned before. Where has this "deposit" come from? How and where is it paid?

The writing is scrubbed off by a machine and the card can be reused.

Now you've lost me. What writing?

There are machines that allow monochrome printing for 500 cycles using thermal printing methods.

Don't see the relevance of this, but I'm sure it means something.

EDIT:

Then there are things like MIFARE Ultralight Nano, which is an ultra lightweight chip which can be inserted into paper cards for single use tickets.
These paper tickets are available from Alibaba at price of a few pence each.

Now you've completley lost me!
If you wish to use jargon could you please explain it?

 

[Llanigraham]

Ignoring Pay As You Go (PAYG) schemes in local areas, smartcards are only useful for regular passengers to obtain Season ticket or similar products (e.g. carnets)

Irregular passengers or passengers who travel regularly but on different routes, have absolutely no need for a smart card, or paper tickets, once everything is available as an e-ticket. Many flows are already e-ticket enabled and this expansion looks set to continue.

Exactly, and I really cannot understand why people here cannot see that.

 

[47444]

I believe that Contactless has two key limitations.

• The first has already been mentioned. When used for Pay As You Go, the banks only guarantee payment up to a certain amount (I think it is currently £30). So if someone travelled from, say, Grove Park to, say, East Didsbury with insufficient funds in their account for the, let's say, £180 fare, the railway only gets £30 in revenue. The railway would then have to seek the cooperation of the banks to ascertain the identity of the cardholder to try to retrieve the balance.
• The second is that it is difficult to allow the use of Contactless to identify users who qualify for discounts of one kind or another - in particular children and railcard users. This is because the railway cannot identify who is using the Contactless card/phone. ITSO smartcards can carry user details and have photos embossed on them. Sure, a Contactless account can be identified with a child or railcard holder, but the railway doesn't know who is actually using it. I could borrow my Granny's contactless card and get senior railcard prices. So most contactless systems only offer these for adult users.

 

[jagardner1984]

Surely the first point is covered by ticket barriers / staff in exactly the same way as if I enter through a ticket barrier with a ticket to the next station but stay on the train 200 miles to a station without staff or barriers ?

And whilst the second point is valid, it’s merely a way of storing a number on a card / mobile phone. So for example the entire system of railcards could be linked to it (user links contactless card to their railcard, so photo/expiry details are visible to on train staff when they scan the card. I assume child ticketing would operate in the same way as now, a different card which beeps to alert gate line staff of a child user, and that ticket stored on a prepaid visa of some kind, or on their mobile phone. Smart ticketing won’t solve all problems, but it would solve a lot.

 

[Pakenhamtrain]

Really they should just have adopted Oyster as a nationwide standard.

As for replacing paper tickets, they should just have replaced them with single use MIFARE style cards, with a deposit of ~50p or so to cover the cost.
The tickets could have temporary printing on the outer surface containing the same information as the paper tickets do.

You mean like Opal in Sydney does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opal_card#/media/File:Sydney_Opal_Card_(single_trip),_2016.jpg

 

[Fawkes Cat]

I believe that Contactless has two key limitations.

• The first has already been mentioned. When used for Pay As You Go, the banks only guarantee payment up to a certain amount (I think it is currently £30). So if someone travelled from, say, Grove Park to, say, East Didsbury with insufficient funds in their account for the, let's say, £180 fare, the railway only gets £30 in revenue. The railway would then have to seek the cooperation of the banks to ascertain the identity of the cardholder to try to retrieve the balance.
• The second is that it is difficult to allow the use of Contactless to identify users who qualify for discounts of one kind or another - in particular children and railcard users. This is because the railway cannot identify who is using the Contactless card/phone. ITSO smartcards can carry user details and have photos embossed on them. Sure, a Contactless account can be identified with a child or railcard holder, but the railway doesn't know who is actually using it. I could borrow my Granny's contactless card and get senior railcard prices. So most contactless systems only offer these for adult users.

(1) can be mitigated, even if not solved. If a card is refused - either frequently for small amounts, or once or twice for large amounts - it's blacklisted. This won't stop the passenger from simply getting another card out of their pocket, but it at least inconveniences them.
(2) People using discount tickets that they're not entitled to is a problem with the current system. So the question we need to ask is how much worse (on balance) a contactless system would make things. The downside is that - as spelt out - it would be hard to identify an abused ticket on the fly because the information isn't to hand. But there's some upside in that it would be a lot more difficult to 'accidentally' (or accidentally) travel on an invalid ticket (say an off-peak ticket during the peak period) so that source of leakage would go. Would this be enough to balance out increased use of grandma's Railcard? I don't know.

 

[HSTEd]

You mean like Opal in Sydney does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opal_card#/media/File:Sydney_Opal_Card_(single_trip),_2016.jpg

In the interim we could save significant sums of money by switching to disposable MIFARE style cards made, predominantly of card, like those ones.

It allows all the magnetic strip readers to be decommissioned at the very least.

 

[coppercapped]

Really they should just have adopted Oyster as a nationwide standard.

As for replacing paper tickets, they should just have replaced them with single use MIFARE style cards, with a deposit of ~50p or so to cover the cost.
The tickets could have temporary printing on the outer surface containing the same information as the paper tickets do.

You obviously haven't understood the way that Oyster works.

You need sufficient credit on the card to pay for the most expensive journey you can make and this amount is debited to the card. On 'touching out' the cost for that particular journey (distance - zones and routing - and time of day) is calculated and the difference is refunded to the card.

This works for a limited geographic area where the maximum possible fare is not too great (£20 or £30) for people to add that amount as credit to the card. The model does not work if several hundred pounds has to be added to the card before one starts a journey even if much of it is refunded at the end.

 

[47444]

Surely the first point is covered by ticket barriers / staff in exactly the same way as if I enter through a ticket barrier with a ticket to the next station but stay on the train 200 miles to a station without staff or barriers ?

Barriers don't help, because when a contactless card is tapped on a barrier the barrier simply checks that it is a valid card. It cannot check the balance on the account behind the card as this information is not held on the card. Similarly, at an "on train" ticket check, all the checker can record is the use of the contactless card at that location and point in time.

Payment is collected overnight by working out the correct fare based on the card taps. That is when a shortfall in the account becomes apparent

 

[haggishunter]

There is a way around that advance purchase restriction for their Super Off-Peak tickets, whilst you can only select train times 4+ hours into the future the ticket is still valid on earlier trains (from 1100 on I think) on that date. Combined with the ScotRail app on an Android+NFC phone you can buy and load a ticket onto your Smartcard within 5-10 minutes.

This runs into a problem though with evening super off peak tickets because for some routes / services theres not enough hours left of such services in the current day to buy in advance. This could be changed in the App fairly quickly surely since both the andriod and iOS apps can write / read the smartcards.

With relation to interoperability. It’s possible to put some subway season tickets on an unregistered over the counter smartcard. Others you have to put on a registered (take a photo online) smartcard. Some products you can put on a Scotrail smartcard. Others you need a seperate registered subway smartcard. I check in with my Scotrail smartcard at Cessnock and whilst waiting I think, I’ll buy my ticket now for my train through to Edinburgh to save the queue at Queen Street. Ah, sorry, you need to do that 4 hours before hand to allow the Scotrail website hamster to carry your order over to the smart card machine. I go to the large ticket machine queue and one of Scotrail’s ticket staff is serving tickets to get through the queue. Ah sorry you need to go to that other kind of machine to load onto your card, I can sell you the ticket but you’ll need to carry paper tickets instead.

Integrated isn’t the first word I’d use for any of the above. It isn’t hard to see why in the face of their 60% (by smart ticket) target, they achieved an enormous 8.4%.

I quite often travel from Tyndrum to/from Glasgow - the smartcards can't load tickets that are to / from Tyndrum whether upper or lower. Had a discussion with a couple of ticket offices about why this doesn't work and it has always been this way and it seems the problem is the smart card must be point to point and the actual ticket would be 'Glasgow Terminuses' to 'Tyndrum Stations'.