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Paper and mobile train tickets to be replaced with GPS tracking in new travel trial
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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So by making it reliant upon a foreign satellite navigation system, everyone having a working phone, and a willingness to give us permission to track all of your movements, we've now made it simpler than a piece of paper!
It does seem like a very over-engineered solution, with far too many points of failure.
I'm not saying it's better from a privacy point of view. It's clearly not. And it is more complicated behind the scenes to track 3.000.000 people than to print little pieces of paper. But, they aren't lying when saying it is indeed less complicated to the end user, Instead of figuring out ticketing systems and pricing scales from various companies, regions, with different regulations about exceptions on prices or how many people are a "group", etc to find the ticket / price that is the best deal for you, you just "activate" when getting on a vehicle and "deactivate" when done traveling. I've used it, it's called Fairtiq here and it really is waaaay less complicated to use for average end user than any other ticketing system like counters, machines, websites. They track you, the data is hopefully also used for optimising public transport towards measured demand, and in return for tracking they promise you'll always get the best possible price for whatever route you travelled. It's not the worst way to use tracking technologies.
In D.C. (one of the few places in the US with good public transport) you can get a pass you put money on. Then you just scan it when you enter/exit a station and you get billed for the price of that trip. It's dead simple. (It could be made even simpler if you just connected a credit card to it though, or if it just was, as an option, your credit card or google/apple pay.)
It sounds like to fix this problem the government just needs to regulate these companies and implement a similar system. It's far simpler and more reliable and robust.
The reason that works is the gates. I dunno in Britain, but in Germany the gates at stations are very uncommon, even for underground stations. Pretty much every station is freely accessible to anyone. Think at this point installing gates in so many places is more expensive than for example running a Tracking-Ticket system. It would also always still exclude busses, normal streetcars etc. Netherlands has the gates and you can just use your banking card as you say, but gates are only installed for the real trains, not trams or buses. While the ease of use of the tracking ticket for me is the super smooth integration of all forms of regional and local public transport.
Aye, so to compensate for a complicated, privatised, and fractured rail system, they implement a complicated ticketing system in the name of convenience. It's a shit system to cover for all the other shit systems within English rail.
If they instead nationalise the rail, the end user can have simple fares from one easy provider.
https://www.scotrail.co.uk/tickets/peak-fares-gone-for-good
Publicly owned / run public transport often also has very complicated tariff structures. I'm in Germany. There are many different Verbunds (regions), they all have their own app, their own prices, their own logos, etc. With the fairtiq, using public transport becomes like the Deutschlandticket, but for once in a while users, while Deutschlandticket subscription is for regular users. It effectively takes away the headaches here for having to know/choose which tickets, navigating new apps or machines, because every region has different price structures and regions are divided in various zones etcetera. With fairtiq you can use a bus to a city Bahnhof, a regional train to another city and then a tram to your destination. That covers 3 companies, also when it's not privatised but publicly regionalised. Such a ticket really does make it less complicated for the end user to do such a travel when they don't do that often, and they will often be cheaper off than if they had purchased 3 separate tickets.
Creating a one big catch-all public transport company for an entire country (public or privately run, doesn't matter much in this case) creates a whole lot of different problems everywhere. Try getting a local tiny thingy fixed in Sheffield if the decision to do so first has to go to London for 3 approval stamps and an allocated tiny budget.
The problem you're having, I think, is that they seem to want to replace all existing ticket options by this tracking one. That's a very bad idea indeed, for one you're luckily still not obligated to carry a phone with you at all times. The paper alternative should stay possible, but the fairtiq style ticket does have benefits both for users and for public transport companies.
Hendy is a fucking joke, look at the saga he's conducting in Oxford. This idea is also a joke, I wouldn't believe it's serious if I had seen all the other completely messed up stuff happening in the UK.