The cost to upgrade public transport ticketing system to contactless - how much?

Studies show that free transport doesn't take cars off the road, you get less people walking/cycling instead

Free transport just encourages walkers to take the bus/tram/train; it does not shift commuters out of private cars. In the case of Luxembourg, because it is so small, a lot of its car traffic originates from outside the country, and quite a bit is crossing the small state, from one exurb in France to another in Germany, for instance, so public-transport initiatives that were limited to LU itself didn't help.

To remove private cars, you need secure, car-friendly stations/stops on the periphery of cities, and extensive, cheap Park+Ride provision. Car drivers know that they pay a lot for fuel and parking. All that public transport has to to tempt them out of the car is cost a little less than that, for a more reliable, less stressful journey. We’re a long way from there.

Time-based ticketing is great - it makes journeys involving a change of bus financially viable, but it also allows very cheap “there and back” journeys on one ticket, if you only have something short to do, like collecting an item from a shop.

I wonder, once payment-cards are accepted, if re-phrasing the logic of fare-capping might encourage ridership. Instead of “you are charged for each trip, but that's capped at [one-day ticket price]”, saying “This will purchase a one-day ticket, but if paying for individual trips would have been cheaper for you, you will be refunded the difference”. These are functionally identical, but the second wording may encourage people to use more services because they have “already paid for” a day’s travel.

The TaxSaver scheme is definitely broken: putting it through the employers was a bad move, as most employers are too stretched to deal with the admin - it should be done the way medical expenses are: you keep your receipts, and declare your travel costs to Revenue for a refund. Tying that in with making pre-paid day or week tickets simple to buy would encourage people to buy such tickets, knowing that the taxman will give them part of the amount back, and if your "Leap account" gave you a Revenue-acceptable transcript of purchases, then getting your refund becomes trivial: log in to MyAccount, tick a checkbox and attach the transcript.

Group tickets are another area that needs exploring for tourists. Munich has a fantastic group-ticket offering where up to 5 adults (children count as half an adult) travel together for €40 for 24 hours, with discounts for longer periods (e.g. €96 for five days). That sum is actually cheaper than a taxi from and to the airport (Munich’s airport is in the middle of nowhere, so a cab is over €60). The Dublin Leap Visitor card is great as far as it goes, and is equivalently priced to this offer, but it’s crippled by the very restricted availability; Munich group tickets, by contrast, are a regular product that you can get from any kiosk or ticket machine, so if you don’t discover that it exists until you arrive at your hotel, you still have a chance to take up the offer.

I'd say there's plenty of 5-day commuters who aren't even paying PAYE in the first place - part time service industry staff - that could hugely benefit from some form of reduced travel; but don't have options.

There is the argument that the higher rate tax payers are more likely to have cars, and that there's an incentivisation element to get them to switch to PT, but I'm not going to support that position.

A claim made by the Social Democrats that a new ticketing system for public transport across Ireland would cost billions of euro has been strongly disputed by the National Transport Authority, but the political party has kept the misleading tweet online and doubled down by distributing a leaflet with the claim.

The project includes replacing ticket machines, platform/bus validators, train station fare gates, and the computer hardware and software in the background to make it all work.

A spokesperson for the National Transport Authority said: “The suggestion that spending of €2.7bn on Next Generation Ticketing has been approved is misleading.”

“That figure originated in tender documents published by us in 2020 and represents nothing more than a notional potential maximum spend on Next Generation Ticketing over the course of 20 years or so,” the spokesperson said.

The tender documents included an “estimated value excluding VAT” of €243m and “a maximum value of the framework agreement” of €2.762bn.

The “notional” value could, for example, include technology not yet imagined or for projects much wider in scope, but the framework is also not a totally binding contract. IrishCycle.com understands that the NTA has dropped out of a number of framework processes that were far short of reaching their total estimated value, never mind the total notional value.

The NTA said that no such sum of €2.7 billion has been approved by the NTA board, the Department of Transport, or the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. What has been approved under the Framework Agreement, which was tender for, is a fraction of the multi-billion euro figure.

An NTA spokesperson said: “The first call off contract under this Framework Agreement is to roll out and support for 10 years, Next Generation Ticketing on a phased basis, primarily in the GDA, and the contract value is €73m in Capital Expenditure and €76m in Fixed Operating Costs. Additional variable costs will ensue based on a cost per transaction once live.”

The NTA told this website that “€149m is the only money that has been approved to date for Next Generation Ticketing”. This is likely to rise. Spanish company Indra, which secured the winning bid for a framework agreement for the new ticketing system, said that the framework was “a significant contract worth hundreds of millions of euros over the potential term of the contract”.

https://irishcycle.com/2024/10/30/social-democrats-spread-fake-news-story-of-public-transport-ticketing-system-costing-billions/

A good article by Irishcycle.com that should clear up any confusion