Cities made easy

Seamless door-to-door mobility is a hot topic. So how do you make it happen? 

Boosting public transport ridership is the number-one priority for city authorities as they race to combat congestion and cut carbon emissions. The challenge is that door-to-door travel by car remains relatively easy.     

Convenience, certainty and comfort hold the key to seamless and attractive journeys by public transport. Below, we show how focusing on these three factors can help to reduce car dependency – and how Thales’ digital solutions can help you to achieve that.

Convenience

Passengers want easy ways to combine different modes of public transport to create their ideal door-to-door journey – not just using buses and metros, but also first mile/last mile micromobility modes, such as scooters. More importantly, they want an integrated “best fare” that covers the whole journey – and a convenient way of paying for everything, preferably their smartphone.  

Thales’ TRANSCITY™ is our world-leading back office solution for fare collection and it is designed to achieve all of these goals. TRANSCITY™ is purpose-built to enable multi-operator transport networks involving any number of participants – metros, trams, buses, main lines, micromobility and more. There is no limit and the technology can be applied at any scale, from a city to an entire nation. 

TRANSCITY™ makes it easy to implement city-wide fare rules with seamless revenue apportionment between operators. You can integrate any mode of payment and validation: conventional smartcards and EMV debit/credit cards, as well as EMV digitised on smartphones. Meanwhile, TRANSCITY™ makes participation in MaaS (Mobility as a Service) schemes easier than ever, thanks to APIs that make it possible to combine private and public offerings in a single travel experience.   

Hands-free ticketing takes passenger convenience a step further. With hands-free, ticket gates at metro stations open automatically as you approach them. And you can hop on a bus without having to tap the validator. All you need is to have your smartphone in your pocket or bag. Solutions of this sort make life easier for everyone and they have a critical role to play in driving social inclusion.

Certainty

With passenger expectations increasingly shaped by forces beyond the control of transport operators – particularly now that third-party apps allow users to “shop” for journeys based on travel time – it is more important than ever that metro services live up to their promises in terms of journey-time certainty.  

Modern signalling has a huge role to play here. Thales’ SelTrac™ CBTC (Communications-Based Train Control) makes it possible to run more trains on existing lines – and to do so with exceptional punctuality and reliability, thanks to computer-controlled driving that ensures a perfect ride every time. Thales’ SelTrac™ also enables driverless operations, and new features include Green CBTC for significant energy savings and greener mobility. 

Smart supervision also helps to boost reliability. Our data-driven Operation Control Centres (OCCs) are a game changer with new functions driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and video analytics. These technologies enable a whole host of new upcoming capabilities, one of which is Adaptive Train Scheduling. This uses real-time data about passenger flows – captured using video analytics and ticketing systems – to generate predictions and adapt timetables automatically, ensuring that trains are in the right place, at the right time.    

Comfort

Crowded trains and platforms can be a huge deterrent for passengers. Aside from its negative effect on passenger comfort, crowding causes delays – particularly if people have to struggle to get on and off trains. Finding ways to ease congestion is a priority for transport operators – particularly with traffic now back to pre-Covid levels in many cities. 

Thales’ Passenger Density and Guidance solution is designed to tackle the pain points associated with crowding. The solution uses video analytics to monitor congestion and to provide travellers with real-time information that helps them to steer clear of crowded carriages and platforms. 

In addition to improving passenger comfort, the solution helps to reduce dwell times at stations, boosts punctuality and minimises the risk of slips and trips at the platform-train interface (PTI). Passenger Density and Guidance is one of a number of innovative solutions enabled by Thales’ DIVA (Distributed Intelligent Video Analytics). The same technology can also be used to detect left luggage and even intruders on the track – providing further peace of mind for both operators and passengers.

Convenience, certainty and comfort are the three things passengers want the most. At Thales, we are dedicated to helping our customers satisfy those needs – and to building a future we can all trust.