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Paper and mobile train tickets to be replaced with GPS tracking in new travel trial
(www.independent.co.uk)
They make faraday cages for phones these days.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Bag of cocks. Simplify the ticketing system by:
a) make all the tickets generally cheaper, so you don't need to make special advance super saver restricted use tickets
b) actually tell us when peak time is, and keep it consistent
c) no more "you can only use it on this train company" tickets
d) no more "you can only use it on this exact train" tickets. If you cancel my train, I'm getting on the next train that goes there and you're accepting my ticket.
e) there are three main tickets - single, day return, period return
f) you can buy discounted tickets for a week, month, year of the same journey
g) you can buy a ticket online, from a website to email, from an app, in a ticket office with a person or from a machine
Basically, just get rid of the stupid shit with all the "special" conditions on it.
Glad I'm from Northern Ireland where our railways are still somewhat nationalised
Rail minister Lord Peter Hendy said: “The railway ticketing system is far too complicated
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.
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.
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.
GPS isn't the most reliable thing when travelling in a metal tube, through tunnels, and arriving in big buildings with Victorian iron roofs.
This is going to end up as one of those hugely expensive IT project failures and pissed off customers.
Edit - probably to be introduced at the same time they get rid of peak fares to “sweeten the deal”
Just no
“How can we get them to accept constant GPS tracking?”
“Easy, start with train tickets, like you’re doing them a favour”
The UK is on a very slippery slope
Please release this tomorrow because I don't have a smartphone and it means I will have another reason to not go into the office
Weird that it needs GPS given that the barriers that need to scan the barcode already know where you are!
I have a KeyGo card and this works great - you scan the card at the barriers and it works out and bills you at the end of the day. Doesn't need an app or a powered up phone.
The overwhelming majority of stations don’t have barriers.
In the Netherlands there's a simple pillar you scan your card on. Employees on the train occasionally just check if you checked in or not.
TfL has this for oyster transfers behind the gateline. However National Rail has failed to come up with a national system.
TfW have also implemented this in every station in the South Wales metro area. Works pretty well and it is so much cheaper than paper ticketing.
Not sure why this won't be able to be used in England too. Sometimes I think that some in government just push for the new shiny tech thing (be it AI, GPS...), without considering how applicable it would be.
Well there are nearly 2600 stations in England, many of which are low-footfall.
If you can't scan an ITSO card, you can't scan the barcode on the app either. In both cases some sort of scanner needs to be installed (doesn't need to be barriers).