With the launch of its new pre-paid travel card, Edinburgh edges closer to the innovation of Transport for London and other cities that have ditched cash for public transport. Patrick Brusnahan and Billy Bambrough investigate the developments
Since the South Korean city of Seoul began using what is now the Upass card in 1996, a world-first commercial-used RF card for transportation, numerous cities have moved to the introduction of contactless smart cards to speed up and low costs of everyday small value transactions.
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In the UK Transport for London has been using its closed loop Oyster Card system since July 2003 but has now opened the system up to allow for contactless debit and credit cards, as well as smartphone using host card emulation.
Keen not to get left behind Transport for Edinburgh’s (TfE) is looking to prove it’s as modern as London with its own ‘citysmart’ card. The Scottish capital will have to move quickly though as TfL’s is already looking beyond Oyster with its ‘Future Ticketing Programme’. The Oyster card platform is due to be replaced by a contactless payment card system by June 2015.
The TfE card uses a different model from that of TfL and many other smart card systems. Instead of topping up the card and spending it like cash users of the TfE citysmart card buy credits with each journey costing a single credit.
The new citysmart card for Capital commuters can be used on Lothian Buses and the Edinburgh Trams after topping up the pass with 20 journeys for £30 – equivalent to £1.50 per journey.
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By GlobalDataThe card can then be topped up with five, ten, 15, 20 or 50 additional journeys from participating shops and kiosks.
But critics have argued that a £3.50 day ticket – which permits unlimited journeys on bus and tram for 24 hours – would be a cheaper option than the citysmart card for commuters taking more than two journeys a day.
The cards are not linked to a specific person and can be swapped once they are topped up. With only 50 journeys possible to be loaded onto each card TfE doesn’t want customers to be storing too much of their money on any individual card, hoping to avoid some of the problems other systems have seen when people lose cards that have a large amount of cash stored on them.
This is not though TfE’s first experience of using a smartcard system. TfE has used a season ticket only smartcard offering frequent travellers on its buses and trams an unlimited number of journeys across our network for the time purchased.
According to Stevie Chambers, commercial projects officer at TfE, the Ridacard is very different.
"Citysmart, on the other hand, is a multi-journey smartcard and is an alternative to paying cash for those passengers who don’t travel frequently enough for Ridacard to be a cost effective option, but who value the convenience of pre-purchased travel."
A further electronic method of payment is crucial to limit losses for TfE, due to the costs of dealing with cash.
Bus drivers end up collecting over £130 ($213) every day in foreign and counterfeit coins, totalling a loss of nearly £50,000 every year. Some of this is offset by passengers overpaying on the exact-fare buses, but this still leaves a deficit of £21,000. Additionally, overpaying has dropped by over 85% since 2012.
This new Oyster card-like service is not the only innovative product launched in Edinburgh. In November of last year, TfE released a mobile app, m-ticket, to allow customers to purchase and use bus and tram tickets on their smartphones. This development has been widely used and has sold over one-million tickets in just under a year.
