Plastic surgery:ticketing gets a facelift

摘要

Public transport ticketing has come a long way over the last 30 years, moving from paper tickets, to magnetic stripe and more recently smart cards, and near-field-communication (NFC) enabled mobile phones. However, these are usually in the form of proprietary schemes developed by a single supplier within a closed network, which require considerable capital investment and have substantial operating costs. As technology has developed in other sectors^ most noticeably through mobile communications and the switch to contactless cards in the banking industry, opportunities are opening up for rail operators to make fare collection more convenient for users and cheaper to run. They also offer new ways of collecting revenue, breaking away from traditional ticketing methods and their inherent constraints.