• Our booking engine at tickets.railforums.co.uk (powered by TrainSplit) helps support the running of the forum with every ticket purchase! Find out more and ask any questions/give us feedback in this thread!

DfT scraps funding for North's Oyster card

Status
Not open for further replies.

johntea

Established Member
Joined
29 Dec 2010
Messages
2,585
Interesting article here, Harrogate news source hence the specific mention of Harrogate but more widely Transport for the North seem to have scrapped any further investments in contactless payment technology implementations on bus and rail...


Plans to introduce contactless pay-as-you-go payments on train and bus services in the Harrogate district are set to be scrapped.

Transport for the North (TfN), the regional transport body for the north of England, had planned to roll out the contactless payment systems on rail, light rail and buses in Yorkshire and across the north.

TfN bosses said contactless payments were key to restoring confidence in public transport after the pandemic.

However, the organisation has now proposed scrapping the roll-out of the scheme, which is already implemented on some transport services, due to a lack of government funding.

Last month, the Department for Transport cut funding for the organisation and withdrew funding for smart travel schemes.

I wonder if one of the funded schemes was the recent introduction of the 'flexi season tickets' and readers that were popping up along the Northern network and intiially trialled on the Harrogate line, if so a lot of newly installed smartcard reader devices have become a bit of a white elephant!
 
Sponsor Post - registered members do not see these adverts; click here to register, or click here to log in
R

RailUK Forums

skyhigh

Established Member
Joined
14 Sep 2014
Messages
5,218
Flexi seasons are a different scheme to contactless payments, and will continue and expand to cover more stations. The readers are needed for those to work.
 

Taunton

Established Member
Joined
1 Aug 2013
Messages
10,018
One of the issues with new technology, whether it's Contactless, automated road tolls, or whatever, is that each such scheme always seems to have had a hard sell by a different technology provider from any that have gone before, who are going to completely invent the wheel from scratch again, to the substantial financial benefit of the technology provider but a real nuisance to the end users who have to go through countless re-registrations, and remember them all when their credit cards change.

If only the various authorities would just go out and buy the service off the shelf from an established existing provider, much cheaper. But it's just like the way that railway rolling stock has gone, everyone gets sold a separate, bespoke design, completely non-compatible version. Whatever were TfN going to spend £33m, just for 2021, on?
 

IanXC

Emeritus Moderator
Joined
18 Dec 2009
Messages
6,331
The DfT have specifically withdrawn the funding for PAYG travel options that were being planned by Rail North.
 

Sleepy

Established Member
Joined
15 Feb 2009
Messages
1,537
Location
East Anglia
So will DfT & RDG stop pushing to get rid of traditional orange cardboard tickets now passenger numbers have gone through the floor ?
 

Ianno87

Veteran Member
Joined
3 May 2015
Messages
15,215
So will DfT & RDG stop pushing to get rid of traditional orange cardboard tickets now passenger numbers have gone through the floor ?

I'm intrigued to see, once passengers return, what proportion do so using e-tickets and Apps. I think it will be quite high.
 

HSTEd

Veteran Member
Joined
14 Jul 2011
Messages
16,632
Transport for the North have gutted their projected improvements anyway.

This makes little difference.
 

JonathanH

Veteran Member
Joined
29 May 2011
Messages
18,531
So will DfT & RDG stop pushing to get rid of traditional orange cardboard tickets now passenger numbers have gone through the floor ?
No, RDG are still pushing for a change to the ticket structure to be the outcome of the current review of the railway and 'building back better'.

And, if we are to genuinely serve our customers, we need root and branch fares and retail reform. We need the Rail White Paper to set out a clear direction of travel in each of these areas.

Taken from https://www.raildeliverygroup.com/a...re-anything-we-can-learn-from-nhs-reform.html written today.
 

JonathanH

Veteran Member
Joined
29 May 2011
Messages
18,531
Do you still need a RDG with the end of Franchising? Seems like it could be a big cost saving.
A central organisation to promote the railway and operating groups does seem necessary. Also, I think RDG administer the allocation of revenue. Is that the work of civil servants?
 

plugwash

Established Member
Joined
29 May 2015
Messages
1,549
This isn't contactless payment it's Account Based Ticketing (ABT).
The problem is that "contactless" can refer to at least three different things depending on who is saying it and in what context.

1. The actual technology for talking to a smart card without electrical contacts.
2. A system for acceping smart payment cards without electrical contacts
3. A scheme where users touch their contactless bank cards on readers while travelling and then a backend system automatically works out what to charge them and bills it to their card.

Afaict "account based ticketing" is industry internal jargon, not a term used in a public facing manner.

It still seems clear as mud to me what these cutbacks will or will not affect.
 

Andrew1395

Member
Joined
30 Sep 2014
Messages
587
Location
Bushey
Do you still need a RDG with the end of Franchising? Seems like it could be a big cost saving.
Well as they run all the back office systems yes. You would need an organisation to that, even if you called it something like Railways of Great Britain Business Systems.
 

WatcherZero

Established Member
Joined
25 Feb 2010
Messages
10,272
There seems to have been a couple of trial rollouts of the system in Merseyside and Harrogate but when it was time to pony up and transfer the funds they had pledged for a full region wide rollout the Dft reneged on their commitments with a 'Westminster central procurement could do this cheaper, lets go back to the drawing board and get fresh tenders and equipment trials' approach.
 

XAM2175

Established Member
Joined
8 Jun 2016
Messages
3,469
Location
Glasgow
So will DfT & RDG stop pushing to get rid of traditional orange cardboard tickets now passenger numbers have gone through the floor ?
The cost of maintaining magnetic-stripe equipment makes it likely that the phase-out of cardstock tickets will continue, even if they're only replaced with basic thermal paper in the near term.
 

IanXC

Emeritus Moderator
Joined
18 Dec 2009
Messages
6,331
There seems to have been a couple of trial rollouts of the system in Merseyside and Harrogate but when it was time to pony up and transfer the funds they had pledged for a full region wide rollout the Dft reneged on their commitments with a 'Westminster central procurement could do this cheaper, lets go back to the drawing board and get fresh tenders and equipment trials' approach.

Those trials are actually just carnet style tickets on smart cards. Its never got as far as a PAYG situation.
 

WatcherZero

Established Member
Joined
25 Feb 2010
Messages
10,272
PaYG was launched on Metrolink. The TfTN scheme also paid for the Tocs to rollout card readers across the Merseyrail, Northern and TPE network and the carnet schemes you mentioned which were collecting usage data that would have fed into pricing/product design, Leeds-Harrogate 10 days unlimited travel that can be used anytime over six months and Merseyrail 3 return journeys that can be used anytime within a week.

They had invited tenders for the full pan-northern rollout last October under the project name Smart North Ecosystem which was supposed to start this year which would support multi-operator and multi-modal fare capping and allow credit to be preloaded.
 
Last edited:

Starmill

Veteran Member
Fares Advisor
Joined
18 May 2012
Messages
23,224
Location
Bolton
Well as they run all the back office systems yes. You would need an organisation to that, even if you called it something like Railways of Great Britain Business Systems.
Would it need to lease such very large, expensive real estate, and employ many hundreds of highly paid staff, though? BR carried out these functions with rather more frugality.
 

P Binnersley

Member
Joined
30 Dec 2018
Messages
426
SwiftGo is the new PAYG card for the West Midlands. It can currently be used on Buses and the Metro. According to a Combined Authority Paper West Midlands Trains have purchased validators for stations and are waiting for DfT approval to install them. They are working with RSP to add SwiftGo fares (similar to Oyster PAYG fares) with a target date of March 2022.
 

mattdickinson

Member
Joined
14 Nov 2010
Messages
548
Location
Uxbridge
Would it need to lease such very large, expensive real estate, and employ many hundreds of highly paid staff, though? BR carried out these functions with rather more frugality.
Would it need to lease such very large, expensive real estate, and employ many hundreds of highly paid staff, though? BR carried out these functions with rather more frugality.
It would be a lot cheaper, but politically impossible, to subcontract it all to TfL.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Top