Memorandum from the Alco Group Ltd (TPT
02)
1. ALCO is a strategic consultancy in ICT.
One of its founders, Chris Oulds was the TfL (then London Transport)
Project Manager during the development of the Oyster Card. Alan
Leibert was an editor on the design of the ITSO Specification,
the first General Manger of the ITSO organisation and is currently
a consultant to ITSO. In addition, he is currently an editor on
the European standards committee developing the pan-European equivalent
to the ITSO smartcard transport ticketing system.
2. On the issue of integrated ticketing,
rail has long had an integrated ticketing system managed by the
Rail Settlement Plan (RSP) division of the Association of Train
Operating Companies (ATOC). However, the same cannot be said for
buses; indeed the deregulation of buses has meant that competition
positively works against integrated ticketing. The Government's
strategy of using ITSO as a way to promote integrated ticketing
would be fine if the strategy was supported by a fully proven
product and by the management activities of the ITSO organisation;
however since neither is the case the strategy falls down. Why
should rail operators with a perfectly adequate ticketing system
pay out millions of pounds to implement smartcards to achieve
the same result (for them)? Why should bus operators support their
competition by agreeing to integrated, multi-operator ticketing?
3. While ITSO, as defined and implemented,
meets all the requirements of the DfT, the transport industry
and passengers, take-up has been slow as a result of poor management
of the development of ITSO by both its organising body and the
DfT which has resulted in it taking far too long to be completed.
This in turn has led to lack of confidence by operators that "it
will ever happen". In addition, the lack of ITSO in-house
testing before it was made available to the operators and their
implementers has acted as a positive disincentive to early adopters.
4. One knock-on effect of the long gestation
of ITSO is that new technologies are overtaking ITSO; examples
being the growing use of the mobile phone as the prime user interface,
Near Field Communication (NFC) to allow mobile phones to replace
smartcards, and contactless payment cards to be used directly
as pay-as-you-go tokens. A number of operators and local authority
transport planners are now considering whether to leapfrog ITSO
straight to these.
5. Experience in London, where Oyster was
an efficiently developed, implemented and tested project, shows
us that smartcard ticketing is very acceptable to passengers,
works well and speeds up throughput of passengers, including reducing
bus boarding times. However, it must be remembered that the London
environment is essentially a closed system and does not parallel
the competitive multi-operator environment in the rest of the
country; and Oyster was designed specifically to meet this requirement.
6. The current Scottish implementation of
ITSO is of very limited assistance at present as it is solely
for concessionary fares at the moment and is still in its deployment
phase. Essentially it is acting as a test-bed for ITSO.
7. Wales and Scotland have both gone the
route of a national, free concessionary scheme and it is hoped
that England will follow this same path. In order to properly
manage concessionary travel spanning the English and Scottish
border and the English and Welsh border, as well as properly to
support multi-modal travel, the use of an ITSO smartcard scheme
is essential, subject to ITSO getting "its house in order"
as discussed in paragraph 3 above.
February 2007
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