An “all-in-one” urban mobility access for your future daily commute
Traffic jams aren’t just a nuisance for drivers. They are also a huge cost for cities: the congestion, accidents, pollution, lost work productivity, and additional operating expenditures for transport infrastructure can push the bill up into the billions.
The challenge for cities is to cut these costs by improving the attractiveness of public transport. One approach: a single card for all types of urban mobility. And that’s where Thales, a world leader in multimodal, multi-operator public transport ticketing systems, comes in.
“Transport users today expect a door-to-door connected journey that is accessible at their fingertips,” says Jean-Guy Ravel, Strategy & Marketing Director at Thales Revenue Collection Systems. “Our job is to provide collaborative fare management systems that can be trusted by all mobility partners – including new players contributing to the first or last mile of the journey – each of them expecting their share of the fare.”
Thales’s card-centric and account-based solutions employ contactless technologies that can be used for metro, buses, and other operators.
The Thales single-mobility access solution that’s already here
An example of this is the “Park and Ride” system Thales developed for Dubai, where users can pay to park their car, then connect to the public transport system using just one ticketing system. Or in Lyon, France, where you can access and enjoy different services such as sporting or cultural events with the same personnal access media you used to park your car. Similarly, Denmark has adopted a Thales solution that allows users to travel nation-wide with one contactless card.
For users, this “integrated mobility” makes journeys simpler, smoother and more enjoyable. For operators, the advantages include cutting the costs of revenue collection, reducing fraud, and diversifying transport services to better meet passengers’ mobility expectations. Through smart algorithms, Thales makes sure the revenues from travel are properly distributed to each player.
And there’s more innovation to come, such as account-based systems that offer “best fare policies” that automatically charge users based on the cheapest fares at the time of use; instead of buying a one-day pass, you can opt to have your various means of transport added up and billed at the end of your journey or on a monthly basis.
Collective transport is the backbone of smart mobility in a smart, environmentally friendly city. And Thales is delivering the keys to commuters to travel to that future.