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HAVE CASH FARES HAD THEIR DAY?
Ticketing provides the theme for the content of this Supplement to Transit. It looks at thedevelopment of ticketing and considers some of the issues involved in the introduction of new technology to fare collection. It also asks: where do we go from here?
A ticket to ride
If you took advantage of the August Bank Holiday week-end to explore our heritage byvisiting one of the major specialist museums, such as London’s Transport Museum or the National Railway Museum in York, you will have been fascinated by the extraordinaryrange of exhibits. You may even have discovered their ticket collections: for example, theLondon museum aims to collect an example of every edition of every ticket value fromevery bus route. Quite an undertaking. But it is not easy to spot exhibits relating to theunderlying technology – the machines, the ticket gates or the background machinery, for example. The same goes for the memorabilia on sale at transport collectors’ fairs.Scouring the trade magazines also reveals little on the history of ticketing technology.You can, though,
 
find lots of ideas on how to maximise revenue streams through the useof chip cards or mobile phones, as well as recipes for improved fraud control. Similarly,no technical conference is complete without at least one presentation on smart cards.Perhaps, however, there are lessons to be learned from the past. If so, few have made theeffort to find out. Indeed, the author of one 1980 article complained about how little eventhen remained of the experimental automatic fare collection (AFC) equipment tested inthe late seventies.Why should this be? Is it because the revenue collected is so much more important thanthe means of collecting it? Are tickets seen merely as inconvenient pieces of card, paper or plastic that eat into operators’ margins (in the 1950s, London Transport’s most popular ticket cost more to print than the 1d fare it produced)? Or is it that this is the one aspect of transport technology to interface directly with that most inconvenient part of the system – the passenger?Certainly, there is little discussion of the reasons for having tickets and the benefits (or otherwise) of automating their issue. For example, is there a conflict between the hard-nosed operator’s business case and the interests of passengers – who do sometimes seemto get left out or, at least, side-lined in discussions!Per Als, of the Greater Copenhagen Authority, claims that his city’s new Travel Card, dueout in 2004, is the result of a complete re-think of fare systems: “New electronic ticketingschemes around the world have almost exclusively focused on turning the well-known paper ticket into electronic tickets.” Instead, Copenhagen’s passengers will see
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‘customer-friendly’ pricing which does not require them to know the fare before boardinga bus or train. Adds Als: “the biannual (
 sic
) UITP event on the issue in Bologna is stilllabelled ‘Automatic Fare Collection’ rather than ‘Customer-Orientated Tickets’”.Unfortunately, fares and ticketing do seem to be the Cinderellas of the transport industry,with few thinking through their logic. So, here are some questions: Why do bus and railoperators issue tickets? Who benefits from their existence? Why automate farecollection? Maybe these are questions worth bearing in mind as you investigate the latestexciting developments at Coach and Bus, PTS or whichever trade show you next visit.
Why ticket?
Virtually since transport tickets were introduced there have been attempts to devisecheaper, more effective mechanisms for producing and issuing them. Many of thesefailed because little thought was paid to the (sometimes conflicting) roles of the partiesinvolved: operator, user (i.e. the passenger), manufacturer and legislator. Insufficientattention to the needs of any of these can result in an expensive failure.What are the functions of a ticket? For a passenger, it gives access to a vehicle, andshows that he has paid for a particular journey and class of travel. While this providesevidence of a contractual relationship it may not guarantee a specific seat or, indeed,space on a particular journey – as many air travellers have discovered to their cost. For anoperator, a ticket is a document that accounts for a payment which can be audited, as wellas giving protection against fraud.The search for efficient fraud control is, of course, a key driver in the search for effectiveticketing systems. The ideal product would be a readily available off-the-shelf pre- payment system with low establishment, development and running costs, allowing for rationalisation through inter-availability and shared systems. Operators would like a low-maintenance, robust, vandal-proof system that reduces, or eliminates altogether, cash-and paper-handling, avoids the need to issue tickets, is fast, cuts queues and does awaywith the ‘fumble factor’. Many card-based systems are administered by third parties, suchas banks or system owners and, as well as introducing extra costs, they can haverequirements which may not suit transport operators.From the passengers’ point of view, the ideal is probably a single card that is safe,anonymous (i.e. cannot be identified with an individual), eliminates the need for coins,tickets or other cards, is quick and easy to use and does not need to be removed from a pocket or handbag and, preferably, gives free travel! That sounds rather like a universalelectronic version of London’s Freedom Pass. Somewhere, however, there needs to be a payment mechanism.There have been frequent attempts by bus companies, in particular, to simplify farecollection. Many of these were introduced in attempts to cut costs through the eliminationof conductors. Hence the popularity of flat-fare, zonal, and coarse fare schemes whichtend to discriminate against the poor – and those on ‘short hops’.At different times, bus and train operators have tried to encourage particular groups of the population to use their services by aiming ‘segmented’ fares at them – for example, early
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or late workers, students, scholars and pensioners. Rail company C2C’s current Flexitimeseason tickets are aimed at those using the railway before and after the morning peak  period.
On the buses
It is hard to visualise the changes that have taken place in public transport ticketing sincethe 1960s. Now, we assume that an electronic ticketing machine will collect a wide rangeof data that can be displayed in many formats. But how did it work in the past?Tickets only became an integral feature of bus travel towards the end of the NineteenthCentury and their introduction had to overcome strong union opposition, as well asstrikes: they were seen as yet another form of managerial control and conductors, rightly,feared a loss of the ‘perk’ that ‘allowed’ them to pocket a proportion of the farescollected. Often, when people ask for a return to crew-operated buses the key argument isthat they save time. It is assumed that all a conductor of yesteryear had to do was check that the maximum passenger number was not exceeded, give the starting bell, collectfares and issue tickets. Not so. For example, when Bell Punch-type tickets were in use the conductor had to dealwith much red tape, a wide-range of fares and ticket values and a very complicatedwaybill system for recording every aspect of the bus’s operations.The punch was much more than a means of cancelling tickets. It contained a miniature‘cash register’ which, at the end of the turn, gave the number of tickets sold. All the pieces of ‘confetti’ clipped from the tickets fell into a chamber inside the punch. Later, if necessary, clerks separated them by colour so that they could all be counted and reckonedup should there be any discrepancy in balancing the conductor’s cash. Ticket issue was,however, only one part of a conductor’s duties. The job required a great deal of speed,combined with geographical and route knowledge as well as both mental and physicalagility.
Self-service ticketing
Removing the bus conductor puts pressure on the driver. So the next stage isto take cash-handling away from the driver. An example of this approach has been thefare box.Fare boxes, which require the passenger to put the exact fare in a driver-supervisedcontainer have been tried in several British municipalities, such as Hull and Preston, andwidely in the USA. Fare boxes do, however, require the driver to scrutinise how mucheach passenger puts in (and to make sure that funfair tokens and foreign coins do not getcounted!) and there are unresolved problems with bank-notes. The boxes require either coin-counting add-ons, which may not be reliable, or expensive staff to count the cash atthe depot. Potential fraud is another problem.A similar system tried by many operators was the Videmat: passengers dropped the exactfare into a box which issued a ticket carrying an imprint of the coins. This suffered fromsimilar disadvantages to the fare box. Furthermore, the machines encouraged children to
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