On the move
The central principles of the TransCity concept are flexibility, convenience and responsiveness. The system will allow passengers to pay their fares in a range of ways and will encourage users to pay with contactless banks cards and smartphones via the use of near-field communication.
- Collect: ticket gates and control devices process transactions with different payment methods such as contactless cards or tickets, bank cards, ID cards, smartphones, bar codes (printed or on mobile phone screens).
- Select: top-ups and multichannel sales options for tickets, including vending machines, post offices, call centres, mobile payments, online.
- View: intelligent, pluggable, scalable monitoring system to oversee the entire ticketing system, from individual components to a national level.
- Open: simple and economical small to medium size back-office ticketing system.
- UP: back-office system that manages interoperability and supports compensation and settlement operations between transport agencies, processes payment transactions and integrates with banking systems. It is modular and scalable, and can be used either in transport agency data centres or hosted on the cloud, offering resources on demand.
Many operators have already used the data gathered through their card systems to gain a better understanding of passenger behaviour. Plans for the future include increasing the capacity for real-time analytics and working on integrating an even wider range of data sources, to better plan services and inform customers.
TransCity builds on these foundations to help operators monitor critical periods to better accommodate travellers’ needs such as regulating train traffic or entrance-exit configuration.
The launch of TransCity comes at an opportune time. The market for ticketing technology and solutions is growing at a rapid rate. According to a recent estimate, the Smart Transportation market reached US$45.05bn in 2014 and is expected to reach $104.19bn by 2019 – a CAGR of 18.3 per cent between 2014 and 2019.
TransCity is currently being rolled out at a number of sector conferences across the world and has already attracted interest from several cities. Bordeaux Urban Community awarded Thales a 10-year contract in December 2014 to install a new multi-media fare collection system by 2017 covering its light rail, bus and ferry network, and this will include the passenger monitoring element of TransCity. Thales has also signed a new contract to modernise the ticketing system for Gautrain in South Africa, as the operator has expressed its desire to move to contactless bank card payment.