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Out with credit-card sized stock and in with mobile ticketing - is it too early?

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alistairlees

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The basic problems with mag stripe are:
- cost of specialised, unique printed stock
- cost of specialised, unique printers
- cost of specialised, unique barriers
- they are not recyclable
- they provide absolutely bugger all information on travel patterns and usage

ETickets, on the other hand, don’t have any of those problems. And barcode tickets generally (Whether bought online or at a station or even a tvm) can be printed on standard stock using standard printers; read by standard optical scanning devices; and recovered if they are lost.

The actual barcodes are Aztec barcodes, not QR barcodes. The former contain more info.
 
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AM9

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To add to my last post:
Here is the image of a mythical ticket that I made up this afternoon
sample_qr_code_ticket.png

For info, the QR* code was created online using https://www.qr-code-generator.com/ (anybody with a free QR code reader on their smartphone can read its content as displayed here - it takes about one quarter of a second). The rest of the human readable info was added in Power Point. When printed, the ticket is 80mm wide and 105mm long. If folded on the dotted line, it will fit in any regular card wallet, so passing through a gateline could be done without removing it from a transparent sleeve. For inspection, it can be removed and the reverse side shown. That would actually make it quicker than a smartphone image to scan/show!
* whether it is a QR code, or an Aztec code, - or any other type, it is both easy to print and to read.
 

alistairlees

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The eTicket design uses Apple’s ‘boarding pass’ format, so that it can be stored in iPhone users’ Apple Wallet feature. This has both a front (with the barcode and summary), and a rear (with some details). It’s also designed to be printable via a pdf, whilst appearing in more or less the same format.

Of course, the big breakthrough with eTickets was allowing multiple copies of the same ticket for the first time ever; the security is in the barcode.
 

AM9

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You should stop reperating that customers "need" to have a smartphone in order to buy, or use, an eTicket. It is simply untrue.

Customers can print them out, or have someone else print them out and hand them over, for instance. No-one is losing any travel rights or opportunities because of the introduction of eTickets - but a huge number of people are far better off because of the flexibility that eTickets provide, and far more comfortable and familiar with having a ticket on their phone. This has been a gain to the rail industry, with no real loss - tickets can still be bought from stations, and from TVMs (and there are way more TVMs than there were 5 or 10 years ago; and probably the same number of booking offices as there were then), though they might be a different shape or design from the "magstripe" CCST ticket - but that really doesn't matter.

Smartcards have introduced a whole other way of getting tickets too (as well as travel rights such as "pay as you go"), which, for many people, is very convenient. NFC-capable phones allow smartcards to be loaded with tickets, and there have been (and will continue to be, no doubt) trials to make smartcards work virtually on phones (not requiring a separate piece of plastic).

If anything will suffer as a result of all of this it will be Ticket on Departure (ToD), which is a much less good proposition now (when compared with eTickets).

No-one is going to be excluded by the changes that are happening. But many people are going to be likely to think (or already do think) that it's far easier to get and use a train ticket because of these changes - and that can only be a good thing.
If a person cannot got to a station, pay for a ticket and carry that ticket with them without having a smartphone/smart card/internet connection+computer+printer/or a friend or relative that has any of the required facilities, then there will be quite a few people excluded from travel. Given that much valuable leisure travel is undertaken by senior passengers, they often travel together so these groups might give up travelling altogether. Why should they suffer making their simple journeys so that "a huge number of people are far better off because of the flexibility that eTickets provide, and far more comfortable and familiar with having a ticket on their phone". There is no reason why those who want those facilities can't have them but not at the expense of others who can't.
 

Energy

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If a person cannot got to a station, pay for a ticket and carry that ticket with them without having a smartphone/smart card/internet connection+computer+printer/or a friend or relative that has any of the required facilities, then there will be quite a few people excluded from travel. Given that much valuable leisure travel is undertaken by senior passengers, they often travel together so these groups might give up travelling altogether. Why should they suffer making their simple journeys so that "a huge number of people are far better off because of the flexibility that eTickets provide, and far more comfortable and familiar with having a ticket on their phone". There is no reason why those who want those facilities can't have them but not at the expense of others who can't.
People are proposing having the machines and offices at stations be able to print the tickets like you would at home so the lack of technology is not a problem.

This idea works fine and allows people to use paper tickets or tickets on their phone, my only suggestion is that ticket machines and offices at stations print on card so it lasts a bit better than paper but is still recyclable.
 

BayPaul

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If a person cannot got to a station, pay for a ticket and carry that ticket with them without having a smartphone/smart card/internet connection+computer+printer/or a friend or relative that has any of the required facilities, then there will be quite a few people excluded from travel. Given that much valuable leisure travel is undertaken by senior passengers, they often travel together so these groups might give up travelling altogether. Why should they suffer making their simple journeys so that "a huge number of people are far better off because of the flexibility that eTickets provide, and far more comfortable and familiar with having a ticket on their phone". There is no reason why those who want those facilities can't have them but not at the expense of others who can't.
Could a reusable bar code be added to the national bus pass card. Then an eticket could be allocated to the bar code (rather than vice versa). Once the ticket has been used, the bar code is no longer valid for travel until the next time a ticket is bought.
 

alistairlees

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If a person cannot got to a station, pay for a ticket and carry that ticket with them without having a smartphone/smart card/internet connection+computer+printer/or a friend or relative that has any of the required facilities, then there will be quite a few people excluded from travel. Given that much valuable leisure travel is undertaken by senior passengers, they often travel together so these groups might give up travelling altogether. Why should they suffer making their simple journeys so that "a huge number of people are far better off because of the flexibility that eTickets provide, and far more comfortable and familiar with having a ticket on their phone". There is no reason why those who want those facilities can't have them but not at the expense of others who can't.
Did you read my post? I explicitly said that people can still buy tickets from stations and TVMs; they don't need a smartphone or smartcard to do this. No-one is losing out, and nothing is being done at the expense of anyone, but many people are gaining, through the advent of eTickets. That's a thing to be celebrated.

To be clear, I am completely a supporter of access to ticket purchasing facilities and rail travel for those who are unable to use the internet or a smartphone. And I am also in favour of new technologies making ticket purchasing and rail travel far better for the many people who have these new technologies and want to use them. The two are not mutually exclusive, and I don't understand why you keep saying they are.
 

Belperpete

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The basic problems with mag stripe are:
- cost of specialised, unique printed stock
- cost of specialised, unique printers
- cost of specialised, unique barriers
- they are not recyclable
- they provide absolutely bugger all information on travel patterns and usage
ETickets, on the other hand, don’t have any of those problems.
But e-tickets have their own problems. I would love to use them, but they are either not available or not enabled for almost all of the journeys that I make.

And don't get me started on the problems with m-tickets, which I refuse to touch with a barge-pole.

At some stage, it might be appropriate to start charging for card tickets, like they do in the Netherlands, or even cease using card tickets altogether. But before we get to that point, all fares and journeys (including cross-London and Plusbus) need to be available in e-ticket format.
 

Starmill

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Part of the problem is the presentation of the barcode, the same as happens at self-service checkouts at supermarkets where many people are very noticeably slower that the professionals.
Good at Aldi have much larger barcodes on them than typically found at other supermarkets, so I'm quicker by some margin using the self-checkout machines at Aldi than at Morrisons.
 

Starmill

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Both the GWR and TPE website still tell you that their tickets have to be displayed in the app, but both apps give you the option to store them in the app or use the pdfs sent as an email.
To be fair this is entirely their own fault. They chose to implement etickets in a ridiculous non-standard fashion. They seem to have been forced to row back on that now but haven't put out correct information.
 

Bletchleyite

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But just how much do these gadget evangelists really thing will be saved by by the railway by forcing every passenger to carry a fully operational smartphone whenever they travel by train. That's assuming that the proportion of potential passengers who don't currently do so don't just abandon train travel completely. This overzealous presumption that everything we do should be centred around a smartphone because they want it to be so is just the chorus of phone enthusiasts in an echo chamber. Admittedly, some of them rely on the spread of their uses for a living but that's not a particularly large proportion ofthe adult population.

I would expect that the majority of people in the UK have a smartphone of some kind - I'm not saying everyone has the latest grand and a half iPhone, but the TOC apps will work just fine on the basic budget Android phones, and some of the cheaper phones (e.g. the Motorolas) are actually pretty good.

I think it's more the "refuseniks" who are an echo chamber.
 

Bletchleyite

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ETickets, on the other hand, don’t have any of those problems. And barcode tickets generally (Whether bought online or at a station or even a tvm) can be printed on standard stock using standard printers; read by standard optical scanning devices; and recovered if they are lost.

Indeed.

FWIW, last time I got a ticket from a DB booking office (changing one from a cancelled compulsory reservation train which was cancelled) it was printed using a bog-standard laser printer on a sheet of A4, which to be fair was pre-printed with a CIV model "blue and pink triangles" background, but that was relatively moot. No particular reason booking offices couldn't start doing the same, and kitting booking offices out with a hundred quid laser printer would be hugely cheaper than specialist thermal ticket printers. And TVMs could churn barcodes out on bog roll or even till roll.

Good at Aldi have much larger barcodes on them than typically found at other supermarkets, so I'm quicker by some margin using the self-checkout machines at Aldi than at Morrisons.

Aldi are actually quite clever - the barcode usually goes all the way round the product and forms part of the label design so often doesn't even look like one!
 

Starmill

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Indeed.

FWIW, last time I got a ticket from a DB booking office (changing one from a cancelled compulsory reservation train which was cancelled) it was printed using a bog-standard laser printer on a sheet of A4, which to be fair was pre-printed with a CIV model "blue and pink triangles" background, but that was relatively moot. No particular reason booking offices couldn't start doing the same, and kitting booking offices out with a hundred quid laser printer would be hugely cheaper than specialist thermal ticket printers. And TVMs could churn barcodes out on bog roll or even till roll.
At least Avanti West Coast are finally adding email delivery for etickets retailed at stations.

I've never bought one because it's very clunky to load one into Google Pay, and as a result of that many staff dislike doing it. If you're successful your eticket is still trapped in the Google Pay or Apple Passbook (or other) account.

Quite why they've only just got to email, after a couple of years, I don't know.

Tbey do seem to be able to retail etickets for flows that are enabled for PRT but not eticket, amusingly. Someone I know managed to buy one to Stadium of Light for example.
 

Bletchleyite

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At least Avanti West Coast are finally adding email delivery for etickets retailed at stations.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of this is - if I wanted an e-ticket I'd buy it on my phone, trying to get someone in a booking office to type my e-mail address in correctly is heading somewhat beyond cack-handed. Just print it on a sheet of A4. There could be a feature added to the TOC app, I suppose, to scan one and so import it into the app.
 

Starmill

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I'm not entirely sure what the point of this is - if I wanted an e-ticket I'd buy it on my phone, trying to get someone in a booking office to type my e-mail address in correctly is heading somewhat beyond cack-handed. Just print it on a sheet of A4. There could be a feature added to the TOC app, I suppose, to scan one and so import it into the app.
I once bought a Super Off Peak Return from Shrewsbury to Ridgmont, and it was significantly easier to get it from the ticket office than try to buy it online would have been. But presumably in that situation the ordinary customer would just be paying 2 times over the odds and be none the wiser.
 

Bletchleyite

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I once bought a Super Off Peak Return from Shrewsbury to Ridgmont, and it was significantly easier to get it from the ticket office than try to buy it online would have been. But presumably in that situation the ordinary customer would just be paying 2 times over the odds and be none the wiser.

I'm assuming this is one of those tickets which was priced by LM (and continued by LNR) where the restriction code has "A connecting service may be used to complete a journey begun at a valid time", which cannot be implemented in the planners and so it can be quite hard to get a planner to issue one unless you work out the exact timeslot when the planner thinks it's valid? That quirk really needs to be fixed, ideally by fixing the planners to allow it as in many cases it does actually make a lot of sense to have a restriction like that, it's essentially done to implement the "Network Rule"[1] across Birmingham. It's been an issue (resulting in mass overcharging) for well over 10 years now.

To be fair the other cause of it is LM being too lazy to be granular enough with their restriction codes, and to try to make one code work for all their Super Off Peaks, which it, er, doesn't, or not properly, anyway.

[1] An unwritten rule that if you have a ticket via London involving an NSE connection to an IC journey, or vice versa, that any restrictions only apply to the IC component of the journey.
 

Starmill

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I'm assuming this is one of those tickets which is affected by LM (and continued by LNR) where the restriction code has "A connecting service may be used to complete a journey begun at a valid time", which cannot be implemented in the planners and so it can be quite hard to get a planner to issue one unless you work out the exact timeslot when the planner thinks it's valid? That quirk really needs to be fixed, ideally by fixing the planners to allow it as in many cases it does actually make a lot of sense to have a restriction like that, it's essentially done to implement the "Network Rule"[1] across Birmingham.

[1] An unwritten rule that if you have a ticket via London involving an NSE connection to an IC journey, or vice versa, that any restrictions only apply to the IC component of the journey.
Precisely - Bad Data is an ongoing issue which can only easily be circumvented by manual intervention yes. TfW children's tickets, ScotRail Group tickets, EMR Group Save vs Groupsave, the list of things quite a lot of people in a defined area will want is quite large, where this is still the only way.
 

Bletchleyite

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Precisely - Bad Data is an ongoing issue which can only easily be circumvented by manual intervention yes. TfW children's tickets, ScotRail Group tickets, EMR Group Save vs Groupsave, the list of things quite a lot of people in a defined area will want is quite large, where this is still the only way.

True, but the real answer to this is to stop hitting the manual override and instead fix the bad data. There is literally no reason why all of these things could not be implemented correctly other than sheer laziness.

I reported that fare issue years ago to David Whitley (the Marketing Manager who used to run the LM Twitter and had connections into all areas of the business, and did get lots of things fixed including a personal stop order for a friend once!), and from my experience he would have logged it properly, and indeed the guards all know about it so it's no secret. They have had over ten years to fix it.
 

AM9

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I would expect that the majority of people in the UK have a smartphone of some kind - I'm not saying everyone has the latest grand and a half iPhone, but the TOC apps will work just fine on the basic budget Android phones, and some of the cheaper phones (e.g. the Motorolas) are actually pretty good.

I think it's more the "refuseniks" who are an echo chamber.
You seem to be missing my point. I have no problem with e-tickets in whatever form they come myself, I am on my third Motorola smartphone, I had the original Moto G, then a Moto G3 and Now a Moto G8 plus. I have used print at home tickets, (see the image of a ticket attached to my post #111 in this thread), and bought online to collect at the station. They both work well generally for me as I was in engineering employment for over 40 years and no stranger to IT far more complex and unpredicatable than mobiles.
My whole argument is about the retention of walk-up tickets at the station, not necessarily for me but for those who can't buy any other way. Calling them 'refuseniks' is just a blatant insult, - maybe you haven't dealt with any of those 'inconvenient' people.
They shouldn't have to rely on friends or relatives to print tickets for them, - indeed, thay may not know anybody to do that and why should that be a condition of being able to travel on a public service railway that is subsidised by public funds. They also might like to be independant persons and not have to ask for favours just to travel.
If the TOCs want to offer any sorts of personal technology based tickets, that's up to them, but the basic ticketing needs of many with limited technology knowledge and experience should not be sacrificed at the altar of convenience and privileges to TOCs and some passengers on a public railway.
 

Hadders

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I don't think anyone is suggesting that tickets shouldn't be available at stations. As we keep saying on here an e-ticket can be made available on any format. For tickets purchased at a station it could be printed on paper. Maybe e-tickets could even be printed on traditional orange credit card sized ticket stock to keep enthusiasts happy.

E-tickets can of course be displayed on smartphones. The advantage of this is that purchase and display of them becomes very straightforward for passengers as well as being cheaper for TOCs due to less equipment being required at ticket offices. E-tickets don't have to be displayed on smartphones, nor do they have to be purchased online. It's a bit like Advance tickets - most of them are purchased online as many people find it easier and more straightforward but they are still available from the station at the same price.

Shapps complicated things the other day by saying that he wanted paper tickets abolished, what he probably meant to say was he wanted everything to move to e-tickets. To be fair that probably down to lack of knowledge of his speech writers.
 

AlbertBeale

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I'm sure I can't be the only person who finds much of this discussion academic, for the simple reason that I never use a mobile phone and don't intend to.
 

Re 4/4

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If you buy a ticket from a TVM at your local station, and get it printed on paper and don't need an email address or "account", why on earth would you call it an e-ticket? It's a paper ticket that might just happen to have a barcode instead of a mag stripe and be on roll rather than card paper.
 

ForTheLoveOf

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If you buy a ticket from a TVM at your local station, and get it printed on paper and don't need an email address or "account", why on earth would you call it an e-ticket? It's a paper ticket that might just happen to have a barcode instead of a mag stripe and be on roll rather than card paper.
E-ticket merely means that the fundamental security of the system (i.e. preventing multiple use of a ticket) isn't through physical means (stopping people from having more than one physical copy of a ticket, like with traditional paper tickets), but instead through electronic means (through the barcode and database system).
 

Bletchleyite

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If you buy a ticket from a TVM at your local station, and get it printed on paper and don't need an email address or "account", why on earth would you call it an e-ticket? It's a paper ticket that might just happen to have a barcode instead of a mag stripe and be on roll rather than card paper.

While railway e-tickets aren't quite there yet, the difference between an e-ticket and a paper ticket is that the e-ticket exists in a database with any printed or phone version just being a reference to it, whereas with a paper ticket the actual piece of paper has value in and of itself.

I understand that railway e-tickets don't quite work like that in that there isn't a single database of validity to refer back to (which is one reason why the barcode has to contain quite a lot of data as validity is established using the barcode rather than by getting a reference number and checking the database), though I understand there is a single database of scans.
 

BayPaul

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If you buy a ticket from a TVM at your local station, and get it printed on paper and don't need an email address or "account", why on earth would you call it an e-ticket? It's a paper ticket that might just happen to have a barcode instead of a mag stripe and be on roll rather than card paper.
Interestingly, for people like me who have lost paper tickets several times, but have never had a problem with my phone, a decent photo of a paper ticket saved on a phone would be a useful back up, as the bar code would be usable and valid presented in that way!
 

Wallsendmag

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E-ticket merely means that the fundamental security of the system (i.e. preventing multiple use of a ticket) isn't through physical means (stopping people from having more than one physical copy of a ticket, like with traditional paper tickets), but instead through electronic means (through the barcode and database system).
Not in Railway terms it doesn't. There is a specific RDG standard for eTickets. Three are also Self Print, mTickets and PRT that are barcode based tickets.
 

Wallsendmag

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Interestingly, for people like me who have lost paper tickets several times, but have never had a problem with my phone, a decent photo of a paper ticket saved on a phone would be a useful back up, as the bar code would be usable and valid presented in that way!
Really? I doubt that would be acceptable.
 

tarq

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I have bought tickets from ticket offices before that were printed in CCST style that included an Aztec code but the code wouldn’t work on the barriers, I had to insert the ticket, why is that?

If we could get bar code scanners added to all barriers and Aztec codes added to all tickets whether they are retailers online or offline, it would be a lot more standardised.
 
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