One of the themes of this year’s Transport Ticketing Global conference was mobile ticketing. Are traditional tickets – and ticket machines – soon to be a thing of the past? Peter Jackson reports from day one of the event
Transport Ticketing Global proudly calls itself the world’s largest public transport ticketing conference. It’s a difficult title to dispute, especially as it has now outgrown its current venue, London’s Old Billingsgate Market. Jessica Williams, Event Manager at organiser Clarion Events, began the conference by announcing that West Kensington-based Olympia would host next year’s event, adding that the change in venue was a ‘true testament’ to the show’s growth over the years. [wlm_nonmember][…]
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This 11th running of Transport Ticketing once again attracted an array of well-known suppliers, with representatives from the likes of Ticketer, Flowbird and Siemens on-hand to discuss their respective company’s latest innovations. As ever though, the main attraction was the packed schedule of presentations from industry figures, with three platforms to choose from through much of the day.
Unpredictable
Delivering this year’s keynote presentation was Aaron Ross, Managing Director EMEA at Vix Technology. He highlighted the pace of change in the industry, asking: “How far into the horizon will there be electric, autonomous pods roaming our cities? If I’d placed my bet two years ago, I would have lost already.”
Instead of worrying about personal mobility start-up companies, Aaron argued that established operators should focus on what Netflix is doing when they look to the future of transport. “To stay relevant to existing subscribers, and to attract new ones,” he explained, “Netflix acquires and produces content. Determining what content to use is the key to their success.
“While their content budget is immense, they only make around 20 cents per viewing hour. Operating at these margins means getting it wrong can be a very costly mistake. But their not-so-secret weapon is data.”
Aaron said that, by collecting the right data, Netflix knows what its users want to watch before they do. In the context of transport, Aaron related Netflix’s success to Mobility as a Service (MaaS): “Like Netflix, to build a truly multi-modal MaaS platform, extensive data is required. A Netflix-like subscription model, covering rail, the last mile, bus and so on is no longer a pipe dream.”
Streamlining the process
Andrew Anderson, Head of Transformation Portfolio, Payments at Transport for London (TfL) moderated a panel discussing contactless EMV ticketing. Also on stage to offer their insights were David Bibby, Head of Chip Product Management at Discover Financial Services, James Bain, Global Business Division Director Transport at Worldline, Lewis Clark, Executive Director of Information and Ticketing Services at Transport for NSW, Matt Blanks, Head of Global Transit Strategy at Mastercard and Nick Mackie, Head of Contactless and Transit at Visa.
Matt discussed some of the initial concerns operators had over contactless ticketing: “Operators said they wanted to maintain their engagement with the customer. But we don’t take that away; we aim to just simplify the transaction and break down one more barrier which may be preventing some people from travelling on public transport.
“There’s no reason why a huge ticket machine should be put in front of you to interact with,” he continued. “Nowadays we can use our smartphones to plan journeys and book them, and simply use contactless technology to pay. It has to be simple, easy and quick.”
“Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks, ‘today I’m going to make a contactless payment’,” said David. “They think ‘today I’m going to work.’ It’s our job to take away the friction of using public transport, and effectively make the payment process ‘disappear.’ That then leaves operators to have more meaningful interactions with their travellers.”
Looking back once again to the early days of contactless, Matt recalled: “Today, contactless is marketed as being ‘easy and simple’ – but originally it wasn’t ‘easy and simple’ to work with us to set it up. We didn’t fully understand how operators worked, and they didn’t fully understand how we worked; we would give 1,000-page documents to operators and expect them to work out how to do it themselves. Since then, we’ve really simplified how we work with cities and operators.”
When it comes to increasing the adoption of contactless, Nick suggested that one major barrier for operators was the cost of investing in new hardware. “What if we could add EMV capabilities to existing machines with software alone? This has been at the front of our minds at Visa for the last three years or so, and hopefully this year we’ll have a bit more to say on that.”
Big data, big benefits
Following the mid-morning coffee break, Dave Lynch, Group Chief Information Officer at FirstGroup delivered a presentation on how the company uses ‘big data’ to help avoid congestion and improve the experience for its customers.
“For me, it is all about the data,” he said. “It starts with the quality of the data, and it ends with analytics. Without quality data, quite frankly you can forget analytics – and we spent a good amount of time trying to fathom out where our data was wrong.”
He went on to explain that, having started out analysing First’s bus services three years ago, he discovered a number of bus stops were in the ‘wrong place’: “To find, after 25-30 years in the public transport industry, that some bus stops were in the wrong place, I was aghast. From a congestion point of view – and from a data analytics point of view – if you haven’t got your route infrastructure correct, it’s a pointless exercise. That was our first learning curve.”
One major benefit to the operator’s new methods of gathering data is that it’s now a more automated process, thanks to connected vehicles and the cloud. This frees up drivers to focus a little more on, well, driving. Dave continued: “We were far too reliant on the driver to push buttons to make sure we knew who’d got on the bus where and so on. That’s gone away in recent times.”
Interestingly, Dave revealed: “We’re sharing our data, and talking to local authorities to work out what we can do together to help improve the service we offer. We’re even sharing it with competitors, to make sure we’ve got a ‘full’ city of data rather than just our routes only.”
He also highlighted how the range of data the company now has access to in certain areas means it can trial things and monitor the impact they have over a period of a few months, taking the guesswork out of planning routes and timetables.
Ups and downs
General Manager at the New Zealand arm of Thales, Neil George, shared his views on the potential of MaaS – and what the issues might be in implementing it. As far as the possibilities it offers, Neil said: “In this 20-minute session, I could talk about just one possibility – but there are a multitude. It starts with consumer choice; with MaaS, one has the ability to pick how to travel, from the mode to the way you interact with each service (via your phone or the internet), to ridesharing and real-time traffic management. The transit authority also has a vast amount of choice in what they can offer, and how they can run their system.
“MaaS frees things up – you start to have more choice. The great thing about it is that you’re not necessarily confined to a single paradigm or service, and you can structure MaaS any way you want.
“If we do MaaS well, why have a car? In Auckland, every family has roughly 2.5 cars, even though there may only be two adults. We’re conditioned to think that we need cars, but do we?”
As for the pitfalls of MaaS, Neil admitted: “When I put this together, I realised I was using pretty much all of the same slides again. Some of the great benefits to MaaS are also some of the pitfalls. There is of course pressure on existing infrastructure; God forbid we use MaaS to create even more pressure.
“In some Australian cities, congestion has actually got worse with the advent of ride-sharing providers. I’m not knocking them – they’re part of the solution – but average vehicle occupancy has decreased as a result, because people are choosing to opt out of public transport.”
A complex equation
Following Neil was a panel discussion on the same topic, this time focusing on what is preventing MaaS from being implemented widely. Moderated by Søren Sørensen, Owner of SFMCON, the panel comprised of Jacob Bangsgaard, CEO of ERTICO – ITS Europe and President of the MaaS Alliance, John Elliott, Head of Transit Practice at Consult Hyperion, Stephen McSpadden, Group Solutions Architect at Rambus and Tony Tom, Chief Business Development Officer at Moovel.
“Generation Z appreciate convenience above ownership,” said Stephen, “want access to mobility but don’t necessarily want to own a car. However, our transport infrastructure was designed 20 years ago – and that’s what we have to interact with.
“Sometimes, I think MaaS is a first-world problem. There are lots of other places in the world that would just be happy to have regular buses – and without those regular services in place already, MaaS isn’t going to fly.”
In the audience was Matthew Hudson, Head of Business Development at TfL. He gave his view on why MaaS is yet to take off: “I will be fired if I fail to deliver the Mayor’s transport strategy – which is to move 80% of journeys to sustainable means – and private mobility companies are there to make a return on equity. I’ve not yet managed to build a commercial agreement between those two parties that will work.
“I’m not sure if we’re ever going to do that, or why we’re trying to,” he continued. “Why not allow people to flip between both private sector apps and public transport?”
Søren replied: “The private operators like Uber and Lyft want to own the customer and so do you – so the customer ends up stuck in the middle, and they have to make their choice on their own. That is what MaaS is all about: helping the customer make the right choice. It’s not giving Uber or TfL sole access to customers, but allowing them to decide which mode to use.”
John concluded: “MaaS is clearly struggling, but I’m a great fan of its goals. I think it’s a long game, and a lot needs to change before it can gain traction.”
Customer confusion
After lunch, it was the turn of Louise Coward, Insight Manager at Transport Focus, to take to the stage. She delivered a thought-provoking presentation on the difficulties infrequent users of public transport face when purchasing tickets and finding their way around a city.
“One thing that’s emerged in some of the work we’ve done is that many people fear getting it wrong when they use public transport. They worry about making a mistake and looking silly, which really can cause stress and anxiety as well as a sense of panic.
“If they do something wrong, they worry that they may be embarrassed in front of their friends or strangers. So, often, they’ll get in a taxi as they weren’t sure what to do on the bus. It’s often not clear; people don’t always realise what they have to do to be able to use public transport correctly. Things like not knowing that it isn’t OK to buy a ticket on a train, or not knowing that you have to have the right cash for the bus driver. How are they supposed to know unless it’s made clear?”
Louise highlighted the importance of consistency when it comes to fares: “It is partly about being able to access tickets easily, but it is important for people to understand each ticket costs what it does.”
The next steps
CEO of transport tech start-up UrbanThings, Carl Partridge, suggested that standalone ticketing machines are living on borrowed time. “For me,” he said, “the king of payment flows right now – the gold standard – is Uber. I know that is a potentially controversial comment to make in front of this audience, but I love Uber for its simplicity. If only we could apply that simplicity to public transport – that is our mission at UrbanThings.
“Our solution for operators is to use the technology passengers already own: their smartphones. Nearly 70% of your passengers are carrying one, and they are up to 100 times faster than those enormous ticket machines we currently use. They pay to upgrade it too, not you!”
Carl then introduced Luke Taylor-Sales, Head of Customer Experience at Brighton & Hove Buses, to give his perspective. “70% of our sales now are made off-bus; only 20-30% of tickets are bought by giving cash to the driver or using a contactless card. That’s a fairly big endorsement from our customers. They’re telling us ‘we don’t need one of these plastic cards anymore – we have a piece of technology in our hand that we’d rather use.’”
The next step, said Luke, would be to remove the ‘catalogue’ style approach Brighton & Hove currently has on its mobile app, which simply shows the range of tickets on offer. The customer still has to know which is best for them, he explained; in an ideal world, the app would be able to select the best value option for the customer.
Finally, Carl returned to announce that UrbanThings’ UK Bus Checker – a mobile app which delivers real-time information on bus arrival times – would begin selling tickets directly to customers for the first time this year. “It was something of an epiphany for us,” he said.
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