Cheshire – Smart since 2002

Since bus services started, paying for bus travel in the UK has largely relied on cash and paper tickets. This is now starting to change with the introduction of smartcards – plastic cards which contain a microchip to store data and radio aerial to communicate with ticket machines.

One of the pioneers has been Cheshire, a County in North West England, sandwiched between Manchester, Liverpool and North Wales. Cheshire introduced smartcard ticketing way back in 2002 with the launch of the Chester Travelcard. This was not a trial or pilot scheme, but a full rollout of smart ticketing with four bus operators in Chester and part of Wales. Perhaps this was the first multi-operator, multi-national smartcard scheme?

You might be surprised to learn that Cheshire is not really interested in smartcards or technology. Read on to find out why they led the smart revolution. So why did Cheshire go smart? Cheshire’s objective was to increase patronage on bus services. This required overcoming three barriers:

• The need to buy separate tickets for each bus operator used.
• Having to find cash to pay for each journey.
• Making bus services faster and more reliable.

The first barrier arises because the bus industry in the UK (except for London) is de-regulated. This means bus companies compete with each other for passengers and are not allowed to talk to each other to agree on routes, timetables, fares and tickets. Instead, operators tempt people onto their buses by offering attractively priced tickets valid only on their buses. While this is fine for some passengers, it is a real barrier to travel for many; you buy a return ticket in the morning, and then find the bus back belongs to a different company and they will not accept your ticket. Fortunately, Local Authorities do have powers to co-ordinate bus services to help the public. So, Cheshire County Council (as it was then called) decided that smartcards could provide a way of offering passengers one ‘ticket’ which could be used on all buses. Equally, the smartcard data could be used to ensure the fares paid by passengers could be correctly allocated to each bus company.

The second barrier was having to find cash to pay the driver for every bus trip. By using smartcards, the need to carry money could be overcome, making travel by bus easier.

Third, it was clear that more people would go by bus if journeys were quicker and more reliable. When buses stop to pick up passengers, paying with cash and giving change takes time. While some people have the right change ready, others hold the bus up while they search their bags for their money; this variability in boarding times makes buses unreliable. So by introducing smartcards, cash payments could be reduced, leading to faster and more consistent boarding times. Hence faster and more reliable services.

Chester Travelcard

The Chester Travelcard was developed to overcome the aforementioned barriers. Setting up the smartcard scheme was a real challenge, especially as there was no previous experience in the UK to help. While the technical challenges are obvious, it was also necessary to overcome the legal requirement for bus companies to compete for passengers and to obtain permission to use electronic money.

Hard work, determination and persever – ance by Council staff, bus operators and suppliers resulted in the launch of Chester Travelcard in July 2002. A contactless smartcard available as stored value (pay-as-you-go) and period passes.

The pioneering Chester Travelcard worked as planned. Passengers liked it, operators liked it and the convenience attracted more bus users thereby achieving the Councils objectives. But that was only the start!

ITSO

Other areas followed Cheshire’s lead and started considering smartcard ticketing schemes. This led to the obvious question, ‘can a Chester Travelcard be used in Southampton or Nottingham and vice versa?’ While desirable, this was not possible as they all used slightly different systems and technology.

An initiative led by the Department for Transport resulted in the formation of ITSO; an organisation with the task of developing a national standard for public transport smartcards. Setting this standard was going to be a difficult task. The first ITSO specification was published in 2004 and it has been refined several times since.

Migrating the Chester Travelcard

This introduction of ITSO two years after the launch of the Chester Travelcard created real problems for Cheshire. The successful Chester Travelcard had to be converted to the new ITSO standard. This has proved to be a major challenge.

The first idea was to convert everything over one weekend. This was not practical; several depots would have to have all their buses and back office systems converted overnight; not logistically possible, plus a huge risk of everything going wrong. There was also the unsolved problem of what to do about all the customers with smartcards containing their money, which would have to be changed over too.

The second idea was to fit all the buses accepting the Chester Travelcard with dual format smartcard readers which would accept both the existing and ITSO standard smartcards. Such machines did not exist, and developing them would have been very expensive. Plus, once all the buses and cards had been changed over, the dual format readers would be obsolete. So this option was unaffordable and impractical.

The solution which has been adopted was to introduce an ITSO ‘Cheshire Travelcard’ and gradually switch over the bus operators and passengers to the new standard. At present, just two operators are left to convert, while several have gone smart with ITSO standard equipment. It has to be concluded that converting a scheme is actually more difficult than starting a new one!

A major step forward was the introduction of Cheshire Travelcard in 2010. This is an ITSO standard multi-operator pay-as-you-go smartcard. The first such card in the UK. They are made in-house and can be used on 141 routes provided by six operators from 11 depots. All the customer does is load money on the smartcard every now and then. When travelling, they place their Travelcard on the smartcard reader, state their destination and the fare is deducted from the card. So Cheshire residents now have an ITSO smartcard which can be used on lots of services, with no need to find change to pay for every trip and boarding times are quicker and more consistent, thereby continuing to achieve the original objectives.

Other Cheshire Smart initiatives

While smartcards are usually plastic cards which are recharged and reused many times, Cheshire is unique in the UK in that it also uses disposable ITSO smartcards. These are 10 trip tickets and one trip is electronically cancelled when the smartcard is used. Once all 10 trips have been used, the paper smartcard is thrown away. They were introduced in 2007 and are still used today.

Cheshire, like other Local Authorities, provides bus passes for scholars to travel between home and school. Experience indicates that traditional paper passes are easily misused and provide no data to show when they are actually used. Another Cheshire innovation was to trial smartcards for home to school transport. The resulting data helped match bus capacity with demand and also prevented misuse. However, the cheap equipment used proved to be unreliable.

National initiatives

A national scheme to provide older and disabled people with free off-peak travel on local buses throughout England was introduced by the Government in 2008. This required everyone who wanted to take advantage of the free travel to obtain a new bus pass. These passes are ITSO smartcards to a national design. The scheme (ENCTS) has been a great success at encouraging people to go by bus. It has also pushed the delivery of smartcard ticketing throughout the UK.

The current Government is very determined to have smart integrated ticketing throughout the country as it will result in more people switching from car to public transport. To encourage bus operators to go ITSO smart, a financial incentive is available in the form of an extra 8% Bus Service Operator grant. This helps the large bus companies where the high set-up costs of going smart can be shared between large numbers of buses; but small operators are disadvantaged as the cost per bus is prohibitive. To overcome this, Local Authorities such as Cheshire are providing ‘back office’ services to smaller operators.

Current position in Cheshire

Cheshire now has over 200,000 ITSO standard smartcards of various types in use. These are produced in-house as this has proved to be cheaper, quicker and gives better customer service than outsourcing. The systems used have been provided by ESP Systex and ACT, both companies being experts in their field.

Of course, smartcards are of little use if the buses do not accept them, so close working with operators means there are now 500 buses in Cheshire with ITSO standard readers.

Cheshire have found there are real benefits in being smart, including achieving the original objective of increasing bus patronage by having one card that can be used on many services (currently 60%), reducing the need to carry cash and faster and more consistent boarding times. A further benefit is that smartcards have reduced misuse/fraud of concessionary passes, resulting in cost savings of 3%. While Cheshire is more advanced than other Local Authorities in England, it has exciting plans for the future too. Watch this space!