Within the next five years passengers on public transport in England’s major urban areas will be able to travel without a paper ticket, Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis has announced.

England’s nine largest urban areas will receive £20m to bring smart and integrated ticketing to the greatest number of people most quickly through the Smart and Integrated Ticketing Strategy launched today. The strategy also sets out the Government’s goal for every area of England to have access to smart ticketing by 2020 and contains nearly 30 Government commitments to help make this happen.

Smart tickets – a system where a ticket is stored on a microchip, on a smartcard (like Oyster) or even on a phone or bank card – can give improved journey times and faster, hassle-free purchasing and use of tickets, with associated benefits for local government and operators. The Government estimates that the benefits of ‘integrated smart’ ticketing, that allows travel across operators and across modes, could be worth over £1 billion per year.

To incentivise bus operators to install smart ticketing systems, the Government has also announced an 8% increase in the Bus Service Operator Grant (BSOG) if they have ITSO smartcard infrastructure on their buses.

Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis said:

“The benefits of smart ticketing to passengers are clear – quicker, easier and potentially better value journeys on trains, buses and trams, whichever company runs the service. We could even see the death of the paper ticket as direct payment and mobile phone technology picks up pace.

“If passengers had smart tickets they’d almost certainly use public transport more. That’s why I’m incentivising bus operators to make our vision of universal coverage of smart ticketing in England a reality and why we’ll continue to require ITSO smart ticketing in rail franchises.

“Getting this technology on-board will help reduce congestion and pollution, improve the local environment, and help us, operators and local authorities provide the 21st century public transport network that we know people want.”

The £20m smart ticketing fund will be available in the 9 largest urban areas in England outside London – Greater Manchester, West Midlands, Tyne and Wear, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, and West Yorkshire, Nottingham, Leicester and Bristol. The funding will go towards implementing ITSO smart ticketing schemes in each region.

Bus operators will also receive a further 2% increase in their BSOG rate if they have installed their buses with GPS technology – which allows the operator to track the position of their bus. Together these incentives could be worth around an additional £1,000 in grant per bus each year. Encouraging the take up and use of GPS systems will help realize the potential for passengers to receive real-time information about bus services and bus performance.

A recent survey commissioned by the Department indicated that integrated smart tickets have the potential to attract as many as 25% of current non-public transport users onto the system and that a pre-pay smartcard with a daily ‘cap’ could increase some individuals’ trip rates by over 14%.

Source: Department for Transport

Net News Publisher for World News