A new rail ticket app will follow passengers by GPS, watch which trains they use and calculate the best fare at the end of the day, finally giving Britain’s railway system an adult who knows where everyone has been.
The trial began on 1 September between Leicester, Derby and Nottingham, with up to 4,000 passengers able to take part. Further trials on Northern services are due from the end of September, proving that the future of travel arrives in stages, like a delayed train carrying an apology to the next platform.
Passengers check in and check out through an app, which identifies their journeys and charges the best fare. This removes the need to buy tickets in advance, select from hundreds of fare types and discover that “flexible” means choosing which part of the transaction to regret.
‘The phone simply follows you,’ said Felicity, Director of Reassuring Surveillance. ‘It will not ask where you are going. It will just know, then offer you the cheapest way to have got there.’
The system produces a barcode for inspections and station barriers. Passengers therefore need only keep their phone charged until the end of the journey, which is a bold assumption on a network where the replacement bus sometimes appears to have been planned by candlelight.
The app promises the best value fare on the day. This is welcome news for travellers who have spent years studying advance, anytime, off peak and super off peak tickets, only to discover that the cheapest option requires them to have predicted a meeting cancelled in 2019.
Location technology should make rail travel more flexible. The app can detect when a passenger has left the rail network, although it may struggle to distinguish a deliberate exit from a platform alteration announced quietly beside a vending machine.
The technology has already been tested in Switzerland, Denmark and Scotland. England’s trial will now discover whether a system designed to simplify travel can survive the national custom of changing platforms while everybody is staring at the departure board.
Nearly £1 million of government funding supports the trials, which aim to modernise ticketing and encourage more people to choose rail. The app has solved the problem of finding the best fare. The railway can now devote its full attention to finding the train, the platform and the passenger who was told all three would be in the same place.
Real story: Department for Transport.
