What are the benefits of integrated ticketing?

Time Magazine

Hi,

I'm thinking of doing a cost-benefit analysis of integrated ticketing for college.* At €50m we all know the cost, but there's less substantive information on the benefits of the scheme.

I personally can only see two. Convenience, which us economics nerds call a lowering of transaction costs, is one. The other is lowering of barriers to entry to the market as people are already in possession of a valid ticket for all firms.

Is there more to it than this?

Thanks in advance,
Ibid

*For those of you who are real transport nerds it's for Sean Barrett, who is unconvinced about the idea of integrated ticketing. Your posts might help sway the views of a fairly outspoken commentator so get to it!

markf909

Well one big plus is that it will allow journeys that are independant of the mode (and crucially for our Sean) also independant of the operator used.

If we do finally get full competition in the bus market then integrated ticketing will be essential for the public transport users to take full advantage of all the services on offer.

After all if folks are stuck on a private operators weekly ticket how is that any better than the current set up with regards to consumer choice?

Turbulent Bill

Could you look at what happened in London with the Oyster card? I know it's a different situation, but there must be a lot of 'before and after' studies done on this.

Off the top of my head, I'd say increased attractiveness of public transport options leading to migration of car drivers might be one (albeit dodgy), and the possibly lower fare costs due to competition with private firms.

ManAboutCouch

There is also the issue of Data. People tagging on and off as they switch modes en-route to their destinations will provide a lot of data for the operator of the ticketing system, which will ultimately be the DTA I presume. This data would be valuable for route planning, timetabling and a range of other uses (not least of which will be deciding payments to transport providers)

If the operator combines this data with other datasets they may have to hand, such as school locations, census data relating to number of cars per household, AADT counts and maybe even GPS signals from individual buses,
trams and trains, they would end up with quite a powerful tool.

Of course you would expect the data to be anonymised, but you can expect that the Gardai would like to have a back door onto the system for tracking the movements of personae non-grata, but that is the kind of can-o-worms that derails projects like this.

I imagine current smartcards and mag-stripe tickets allow the transport providers to do some of this research themselves in-house, but I have no idea if the data is shared with outside agencies, such as the DTO.

OTK

It's probably true to say that integrated ticketing has few benefits and many costs.

If integrated ticketing is defined as "a system that can issue a ticket to be used by multiple transport modes' then the main benefit is that passengers save time and effort buying a ticket once for multiple journeys and thus may be attracted to public transport.

The drawbacks are well known:

• determining the revenue split between operators
• creating a costly & complex system to issue tickets for journeys between different modes
• making the system work with all the various special deal tickets offered by various operators
• there's not much demand for multi-modal public transport if the individual journeys are not punctual as the risk of delay is multiplied

Smart card payment systems, on the other hand offer a raft of benefits. Where the customer does a tag-on tag-off on each journey, credit can be allocated to operators without a complex agreement over revenue split. In other words, a smart card could be used for multimodal transport without it being an 'integrated ticketing system'.

Limited integrated ticketing already exists in Dublin such as "adult 7 day short hop (bus & rail)" €30

ThatBloke

Has this issue ever been seriously discussed by the various dublin transport companies?

antoinolachtnai

The benefit of the integrated ticket are also the following:

- reduced boarding times on buses. This makes a major difference to the economics of a bus service. A bus often spends at least 10 percent of its peak time availability collecting fares.

It is an interesting exercise to model up the increase in bus capacity you will get from speeding up boarding.

- reduced 'psychological barrier' to getting on the bus. having correct cash is actually a barrier for people.

- The key benefit from the original paper on ITS was to be 'capped fares', i.e, if you had already been on a bus, your second trip on a bus a few minutes later to reach your final destination would be reduced.

The difficulties mentioned by otk are true, but these are costs, not benefits for your economic analysis.

Any economic analysis about transport should take into account increases in land value as a result of improved transport links.

From an SB point of view, a fully developed smarlcard allows many small operators to be integrated to a reasonably seamless degree. However, this will cost more than eur 50m to implement.

And remember it's not just about setup costs, it's running costs as well.

An interesting alternative to a travel smartcard would be a general purpose cashless wallet. Rather than evaluating ITS in isolation, it might be interesting to compare it to the project of doing the full-scale general purpose system.

In practice, an ITS is actually the first step towards a general purpose cashless wallet. You may need to take this into account too. The costs of physical cash in the economy generally are enormous.

Time Magazine

Thanks a lot for all the responses.

Fratton Fred

I think this would be great and is possiby the future ofthese things.
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/6592.aspx

Basically you have a smart card in your mobile's SIM, when you want to top up, you do so via WAP and it debits your monthly bill.

You can potentially use this for anything, vending machines, toll bridges etc

tcs

It's probably true to say that integrated ticketing has few benefits and many costs.

But IMHO the benefit it has far outweighs the cost!

...
there's not much demand for multi-modal public transport if the individual journeys are not punctual as the risk of delay is multiplied

I think the demand is very much there! Quite a few people have to get from one suburb to another for work and given the "into city centre" nature of most transport routes in Dublin, any help these people can get is much appreciated!

For a number of years now I've had to take one mode of transport into the city centre (from Fairview a few years back & from Drimnagh now) and another out to where I work (first Ballsbridge, now Rathmines).

Despite the fact that the DART runs to Lansdowne and the Luas runs to Drimnagh, the combined price of a bus & DART ticket / Luas & DART / Luas & bus has been prohibitive to combining modes of transport. It's gas how a combined Dart & Luas ticket is available at a Dart station but not at a Luas stop!

I've thus been driving about 60% of the time & only taking public transport about 40% of the time - depends on what I'm doing after work. When using public transport, I use Travel 90 tickets on Dublin Bus as it's the only affordable way of doing it but it does mean that some mornings I've had to spend more time waiting on buses than I actually spend on them (sometimes a combined time of 30+ minutes just standing waiting on buses).

If I could combine the 2 modes of transport at an affordable price I'd do it in a shot anytime it makes sense for my destination - Luas is far more reliable in terms of frequency so the time spent waiting on one part of the journey would be predictable & the unpredictable would be reduced to only the other (bus) part of the journey!

I've lived in Paris before and once you're travelling within a set number of zones, it's a flat fare irrespective of whether you use bus, metro, RER etc. It's not passengers fault that transport routes often take them twice the distance of the most direct route to their destination so it's enough to penalise them with the added (wasted!) time & not to be penalising the pocket aswell!

I won't hold my breath for a comprehensive cross-town transport network that saves passengers having to unnecessarily enter the city centre chaos! So give me ITS asap!

trellheim

The drawbacks are well known:

* determining the revenue split between operators
* creating a costly & complex system to issue tickets for journeys between different modes
* making the system work with all the various special deal tickets offered by various operators


All of those drawbacks are implementation problems not drawbacks to the customer.

All of them can be solved with IT and people prepared to work out the solutions.

Anyone familiar with the details behind the recent introduction of a Single Electricity Market will know that these kind of details can be worked out, same for stocks and shares.