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

[alistairlees]

100% certain. As soon as you book it, you get given the option to download the e-ticket, and it gets emailed to you too:

You may wish to hide your name there...

 

[yorkie]

EDIT - it has come to my attention that several of the flaws above are with M-tickets, which are supposed to be phased out in favour of E-tickets which are far more flexible.

None of these are really flaws with actual e-tickets. They are all flaws of m-tickets, which is a ludicrous format which should never have been introduced in the first place. My understanding is that m-tickets were a 'stopgap' and are now being replaced with e-tickets. I urge everyone to boycott m-tickets

For the avoidance of doubt anyone can buy an e-ticket for anyone else; they can be shown on almost any device, but if you prefer to print them, you can do. There is no requirement to own a smartphone to purchase or use them.

 

[py_megapixel]

They are all flaws of m-tickets, which is a ludicrous format which should never have been introduced in the first place. My understanding is that m-tickets were a 'stopgap' and are now being replaced with e-tickets.

So you could call them the "Pacers" of electronic ticketing them

 

[AM9]

The main benefit of phone ticketing is purchase - there is never a need to queue to buy a ticket on your phone - or if you're buying an Advance you don't have to worry about ToD messing up, as it alarmingly often does.

I normally buy from one of the four TVMs at St Albans City if it's a normal one item purchase, occasionally I get it from the booking office. If I am booking a non-London bound journey, I normally use Trainsplit and either print a PDF or walk down to St Albans Abbey to collect ToD. I've not had any problems yet with ToD but if i did, I would either call LNR or if on the day of travel, board the Abbey flyer to Watford and pass out of the gates to take the matter up with the booking office there. More to the point, either way, I prefer the extra weight of one sheet of laser printed A4 or tiny pieces of printed orange and cream coloured card in my pocket.
I would really object if rail travel was conditional on me having a working smartphone in my pocket!

 

[Bletchleyite]

I would really object if rail travel was conditional on me having a working smartphone in my pocket!

I don't think it's a likely scenario, to be honest, though I can see there being extra fees to use traditional ticketing, and possibly it being unavailable from unstaffed stations, on a longer horizon (say next 20 years).

 

[AM9]

I don't think it's a likely scenario, to be honest, though I can see there being extra fees to use traditional ticketing, and possibly it being unavailable from unstaffed stations, on a longer horizon (say next 20 years).

If I'm still around in 20 years, I doubt it will be my job to buy rail tickets.

 

[Bletchleyite]

If I'm still around in 20 years, I doubt it will be my job to buy rail tickets.

I also suspect that by then "traditional tickets" will just involve whoever you buy it off issuing you with a printed-out e-ticket, be that on "bog roll" or a laser printed sheet of A4. Indeed, I suspect that will happen a lot sooner than 20 years.

 

[Hadders]

Rail travel is not going to be conditional on having a working smartphone in your pocket!

If you buy through trainsplit the PDF will be emailed to you the email will already come to your phone. Absolutely nothing wrong with printing the PDF off for reassurance but you don't need to do that, you can simply show the PDF on your phone. I used to always print booking confirmations for hotels and travel tickets as well as having it on my phone but stopped printing them around a year ago as I found I never used them and got into the habit of just showing everything on my phone. It does take a but of getting used to and feels like a bit of a leap of faith but seriously I wouldn't look back now.

 

[philjo]

People like my Dad do not have a smart phone and also have never used email. He does not have an email address. He has a basic payg mobile but you can’t install apps on it and I don’t think he has switched it on for several months. He only uses it for calls, never texts. I tend to book Some tickets for him Online when he needs advance tickets but he books everything else himself from the ticket office.

relying on using a mobile to buy or download tickets at a station Also require a mobile signal. I find that I have no signal at some major stations - e.g.most parts of The area around Cambridge station seems to Be a black spot when I try to get any signal!

 

[_toommm_]

You may wish to hide your name there...

Oops - Thank you

 

[adrock1976]

Yoy don’t really need to go via NRE, you can go straight into your app of choice. If you create an account with your TOC of choice, they’ll store your card details, all you need to remember is the three-digit CVV. Once you get used to it it takes less than a minute.

What if any crooks have attempted to use a random number generator for "card not present" transactions and you get contacted by your bank to confirm if it was you or not who made those transactions? If "no" the banks advise you not to store card details or passwords on any computer or mobile phone.

I had this happen to me towards the end of last year when the bank sent me a text message regarding if I had made a transaction or not using my card. Being as I did not recognise the name of the company and no online search could find it, I replied "No" and I had a phone call from the bank saying that the payment would not be processed and that not to store card details or passwords on the computer or mobile phones at all.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Banks do not prohibit the storing of card details in online accounts on vendor websites (it's not stored on the actual phone). If they did, they'd just not allow them to be stored, because it's mostly them providing said merchant services that store said card numbers!

 

[Andy Pacer]

People like my Dad do not have a smart phone and also have never used email. He does not have an email address. He has a basic payg mobile but you can’t install apps on it and I don’t think he has switched it on for several months. He only uses it for calls, never texts. I tend to book Some tickets for him Online when he needs advance tickets but he books everything else himself from the ticket office.

relying on using a mobile to buy or download tickets at a station Also require a mobile signal. I find that I have no signal at some major stations - e.g.most parts of The area around Cambridge station seems to Be a black spot when I try to get any signal!

If it's a PDF I would tend to download it before travel, although your point of no signal at a station if buying there is quite valid

 

[ThisIsSurbiton]

As others have said there is no reason for ticket machines to disappear completely, so there's no need to have a phone, a printer at home, etc... The opportunity for the TOCs (and if they would go along with it, TfL) would be to save millions installing and maintaining expensive ticket machines and barriers by moving to contactless and barcode. The barcode could easily be printed by a simpler/cheaper ticket machine or till and read by a more reliable and cheaper gate that doesn't need a ticket feeding mechanism. Any TOCs that have traditionally been averse to e-tickets (like Southeastern, although arms have been twisted there) can issue disposable or reusable paper contactless tickets.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Yes, I'd expect the TVM of the future to issue e-tickets with barcodes. Never mind bog roll, they could even use till roll to keep it really cheap.

 

[py_megapixel]

Yes, I'd expect the TVM of the future to issue e-tickets with barcodes. Never mind bog roll, they could even use till roll to keep it really cheap.

I'd have concerns about the potential for till roll to become crumpled (don't forget it often takes several attempts to scan a creased barcode) , lost, jumbled up with other things etc. At least the orange colour makes it easy to identify. That said, orange till roll does exist; TK Maxx use it.

On a more positive side, a complete transition to barcodes would hopefully finally see the end of this nonsense of gates eating tickets with no warning; there is no potential for tickets to get stuck in the gates (rare but does happen occasionally I think) and they can't be wiped by a magnet(does happen to the magstripe on the current ticket stock if you leave it next to a phone for too long)

I wonder if smartcards could be given barcodes? That way there would be no need for more than one reader on any gate in the country!

 

[Bletchleyite]

I wonder if smartcards could be given barcodes? That way there would be no need for more than one reader on any gate in the country!

That would require gates and "gripping irons" to have a fast enough Internet connection to move the entire functionality online without slowing progress through barriers while a quick HTTPS call is made. That's coming but we aren't quite there yet. Once it's possible it would have many benefits.

 

[py_megapixel]

That would require gates and "gripping irons" to have a fast enough Internet connection to move the entire functionality online without slowing progress through barriers while a quick HTTPS call is made. That's coming but we aren't quite there yet. Once it's possible it would have many benefits.

Aren't they already doing that? Or is the actual ticket information encoded onto the RFID chip in the card? I thought it was just an ID number.

 

[mikeg]

Regarding the first group apps now correctly sending the email of the eticket, is this definitely fixed in the tpe app? Also have they gotten rid of the wibble about break of journey being prohibited even on tickets that allow break of journey? Those were the two main things that forced me to use the Chiltern app which appears to be a less bad implementation.

 

[_toommm_]

Regarding the first group apps now correctly sending the email of the eticket, is this definitely fixed in the tpe app? Also have they gotten rid of the wibble about break of journey being prohibited even on tickets that allow break of journey? Those were the two main things that forced me to use the Chiltern app which appears to be a less bad implementation.

I can answer the first question, and it's definitely fixed. Without fail (I use the app to travel several times a week) I'll always get an email with the pdf a few seconds after booking my tickets, and of course you can still show them in the app).

 

[AM9]

Rail travel is not going to be conditional on having a working smartphone in your pocket!

If you buy through trainsplit the PDF will be emailed to you the email will already come to your phone. Absolutely nothing wrong with printing the PDF off for reassurance but you don't need to do that, you can simply show the PDF on your phone. I used to always print booking confirmations for hotels and travel tickets as well as having it on my phone but stopped printing them around a year ago as I found I never used them and got into the habit of just showing everything on my phone. It does take a but of getting used to and feels like a bit of a leap of faith but seriously I wouldn't look back now.

I've been using QR code tickets from Trainsplit for a couple of years. There's no problem with them for me at least as I have plenty enough IT resources at home. Here's the last one that I bought, (which together with its return part I wasn't able to use, - see date).


At £4.60 each way a refund wasn't worth the bother.
Interestingly, the actual ticket graphic measures 105mm x 79mm so when folded would be 52.5mm x 79mm, i.e. mariginally smaller than the ISO standard for a credit card. This means that if tickets were printed by TVMs on standard 80mm width thermal paper, with a tear off dotted line seperating the ticket section from the itinerary and receipt, passengers could continue to carry them in a card wallet. If the ticket was kept in a windowed pocket, the ticket could be scanned at the gate without removing it from the wallet.
Using a phone with the same ticket would involve finding the ticket to display, assuming the phone was switched on and not busy on some other application at the time.
So, if the railway was really interested in moving away from the current magstripe card design, it should replce them with something that can be purchased, carried and used by passengers without possessing any IT equipment (including a phone) at all. Then it would be fair to all and get general acceptance. Those who wished to keep their ticketing entirely within the electronic domain would be able to use a smartphone as some here are advocating, and the halfway house that folks like me want with self printed tickets would also fit into such a ticket roll model.

p.s. I assume that those above calling for barcodes on tickets are effectively referring to QR codes which can store more than just a simple number.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Aren't they already doing that? Or is the actual ticket information encoded onto the RFID chip in the card? I thought it was just an ID number.

What context, sorry? Oyster still stores the ticket information on the card, as does ITSO. "New generation Oyster PAYG" will run in the back-end but in a "batch" type manner as per contactless. If you had products on the card, it wouldn't be fast enough yet, unless I suppose you downloaded them to the local barrier set.

 

[py_megapixel]

What context, sorry? Oyster still stores the ticket information on the card, as does ITSO. "New generation Oyster PAYG" will run in the back-end but in a "batch" type manner as per contactless. If you had products on the card, it wouldn't be fast enough yet, unless I suppose you downloaded them to the local barrier set.

I assumed that the ITSO system worked as follows:

• Passenger scans card
• Gate reads ID number from card
• Gate sends this information to a central server
• Central server returns whether that card is allowed through that gate or not

Does it actually work like this:

• Passenger scans card
• Gate reads a list of tickets from the card
• If any one of those tickets would open the gate when put through on paper then gate opens
• Otherwise gate stays closed

or am I completely wrong in both cases?

 

[Bletchleyite]

It's the second one, yes, the ticket is on the card. That's why you have to "collect" any tickets onto the card, e.g. by specifying a station to do this.

 

[py_megapixel]

It's the second one, yes, the ticket is on the card. That's why you have to "collect" any tickets onto the card, e.g. by specifying a station to do this.

Aah yes, I forgot about that as I've only ever bought ITSO tickets on a bus or at a station, where I assumed touching the reader was just a convenient way for the machine to get the card number rather than asking to key it in!

 

[Sad Sprinter]

I've never wanted to use a mobile ticket-what if I lose my phone? You can argue that you can lose a paper ticket, but at least I'd still have my phone if I need to call for help if I'm stranded.

 

[221129]

I've never wanted to use a mobile ticket-what if I lose my phone? You can argue that you can lose a paper ticket, but at least I'd still have my phone if I need to call for help if I'm stranded.

That makes absolutely no sense.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

That makes absolutely no sense.

Seems relatively self-explanatory to me, what part doesn't make sense?

 

[221129]

You can argue that you can lose a paper ticket, but at least I'd still have my phone if I need to call for help if I'm stranded.

If your ticket was on your phone then you would still have your phone AND your ticket.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

If your ticket was on your phone then you would still have your phone AND your ticket.

My point was, if I lost my phone, I would lose not only my phone but my ticket too.