Ideas - Northern Smart Ticketing Options

[Bantamzen]

Coming from the Northern penalty fares thread (link below), it occurred to me that with the new TVM technology going into most/all Northern stations that there might be new opportunities for new ticketing technology to be introduced.

https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/northern-to-introduce-a-penalty-fare-scheme.156494/

So for a starter, once they have agreed a system for smartcards (with TPE) I would suggest a touch-in system, whereby the passenger touches in with the TVM and the PTP is loaded onto the card for a couple of hours. A small software change to the card readers the guards use could then mean the originating station is populated on their ticket machine, saving them a little bit of time at each cash sale on-board. This would also save on Promise To Pay tickets (and any possible misuse), save time for passengers arriving at stations with no ticket and no other payment card, and hopefully increase revenue protection.

Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on how the new tech can be best utilised?

 

[yorkie]

I'm not sure, but one concern I have is that passengers should not be inconvenienced. So, for example, if a station has more than one entrance (it is quite common for stations to have an entrance for each platform) then it should have machines (or readers, whatever) at each entrance.

Unfortunately Northern currently do appear to expect people to make lengthy walks, re-tracing their steps, and unnecessarily crossing from one side back to the other using multiple steps (e.g. at Garforth), is unacceptable. Another example I was going to look up is Marsden, but I see the NRE page for Marsden is unavailable so I can't check.

Also, the system would need to cope with people purchasing tickets from a different origin, so the Guard still needs to be able to over-ride the origin if it is pre-populated.

I am not sure that smartcards are really the future though. If they are not used for Pay As You Go, then all they are doing is fulfilling the purpose of a paper ticket, except in a card format, with all the inflexibility of a paper ticket. If a PAYG system was being used, you may as well use Contactless bank cards. However such a system isn't suited to longer distance journeys, so you still need to have something else.

Are you proposing tickets are loaded onto these cards? If so, it doesn't make sense to use a TVM just to load the origin station and then purchase from the Guard. Or are you proposing these cards just be used as a permit to travel type system? If so it is never going to catch on; the cost would be unjustifiable for that purpose, and customers are not going to be prepared to put up with that.

 

[Bantamzen]

To be honest I was thinking of a bit of everything, a little bit like Metro's MCard but instead of having different cards for different types of use, a single card that could be used instead of a bank card / smartphone. So it could be used as PAYG (obviously with a caveat that it could be loaded at PayPoints, via the net etc), as a touch-in device to pay on-board, and as a season ticket device. And in time if the government / DfT ever get around to agreeing a standard it could be adopted and used across the network.

I do agree on the point about not inconveniencing passengers, so where TVMs are not on every platform a simpler reader on each platform (do they have similar on the Tyne & Wear Metro, I seem to remember seeing something like them at Benton?) that passengers touch-in with and pay on-board or at their destinations. Yes it means a bit more investment in installing these devices, but would be much quicker to use when people are invariably arriving just in time at platforms. Of course the tech isn't restricted by a smartcard, something like TransDev's trial with NFC capable smartphones where an app monitors the passengers start and end points and charges accordingly. But with most/all of Northern's stations now being network connected for the TVMs, there are good possibilities to trial and implement other solutions.