Why’s our transport ticket system so far behind london?
The Get Me There card has been introduced to make life easier for Greater Manchester commuters. But why is our public transport ticket system still miles behind London’s? Charlotte Cox reports
IT was with great fanfare that the new and improved ‘Get Me There’ card was unveiled to the travelling public this week.
Finally, a smart card that can be used on Greater Manchester’s trams AND buses.
Passengers will be able to view, buy and upload single and season tickets online, instead of having to carry cash and queue at machines.
All very impressive – if it were 2005.
You only have to look to London to see how far we are lagging behind. We’re already bruised by the knowledge that London gets £2,595 per person in publicly-funded transport investment versus £99 in the north west.
And now it’s emerged we won’t be getting ‘contactless purse’ payment – where you can automatically beep on and off trams with your credit card without buying a ticket or product – until 2019. Trains and buses should follow by 2021.
John Moorhouse of watchdog TravelWatch NorthWest, described Get Me There as the ‘new symbol of the north-south divide.’
Calling for more investment in public transport, he added: “Whether it’s electrification, the quality of our trains, our buses, or this, we are lagging behind because for too long public transport in the north has not been prioritised.”
The issue surrounds the limitations of the new Get Me There scheme.
Users can only buy bus and tram tickets for their card – rather than topping up a balance as you would with an Oyster. Meanwhile, ‘contactless purse’ payment – well-established in London – feels like a pipe dream here. So why are we so far behind?
Transport for London formed an early partnership with ticketing contractor Cubic Transportation – also behind Sydney’s smart scheme.
And as far back as 2003, when the first Oyster card was hot off the press, they were looking ahead and researching how to bring in contactless payment. Meanwhile, we were still using paper tickets.
Nine years later, passengers in London could pass their credit card over a scanner on all buses without having to buy a ticket. By 2014, it was rolled out on tube and rail.
You can now use 100 different international credit cards or your Oyster card to bleep your way across London’s Underground, local rail network, buses, trams and even Thames Clipper ferries.
Manchester’s progress has been both slow and chequered.
Transport bosses blame less funding than London – and the fact that a firm they hired to take the scheme forward didn’t work out.
Atos took on the project in 2012, when transport bosses said it would be ‘different to the Oyster’ because passengers would be able to ‘use bank cards, bus passes and mobile phones to pay for ticketless journeys.’
Coun Andrew Fender, chairman of the TfGM Committee said at the time: “We knew that people would expect our scheme to be like Oyster, but both life and technology have moved on since its introduction.”
But after a series of delays, Atos was ditched and handed £15m back to TfGM. With no track record of delivering a smart travel system, it’s not known why they had been chosen.
But this alone can’t fully explain why transport bosses have been ‘trying and failing’ to get a travel card up and running since the 90s.
MP Graham Stringer says TfGM have had ‘genuine issues’ – but also reckons they could have handled the process better. In particular, he feels they could have worked harder to get bus firms to co-operate towards a genuinely cohesive scheme.
Challenging, because here buses are run by different operators while in London they operate under one body. He also feels money used to pay bus operators under the current system could have been put towards smart ticketing had bosses been handed greater transport powers sooner. He added: “If you look at the money we waste on subsidising bus services, we could have used that for our smart ticketing.
“Andy Burnham the new mayor of Manchester needs to ensure as quickly as possible that our service is as good as London’s if not better.”
Elisabeth Tasker, managing director of Stagecoach Manchester and Wigan, said: “Smart, multi-operator, multi-modal ticketing is already the norm for bus passengers in Manchester, Stagecoach introduced smart ticketing in Manchester in 2011 and, along with other local operators, led on the delivery of multi-operator, multi-modal smart ticketing which has been in place for the past two years.”
She said customers can pay for products on their buses using contactless – although there is no automatic function like in London.
She added: “While London’s bus network is heavily subsidised by taxpayers, bus operators in Manchester receive no public ‘subsidy’ – 93 per cent of the Stagecoach network is run commercially without any public funding. The remainder is operated under contract to local authorities, delivering a service on their behalf, in the same way that local councils contract private companies to carry out work for them across other areas”
She said they were playing their part to deliver improvements for bus passengers but called on transport bosses to engage with operators and for politicians to tackle congestion. TfGM insist they are now back on track. And the Bus Bill, which will give Andy Burnham more power over the buses, could accelerate their progress.
They say the current Get Me There for buses and trams has cost far less than the £15m handed back by Atos.
A contactless system will be in place on the trams by 2019, and across buses and trains by 2021 and hopefully across the north thereafter.
A TfGM spokesman described the project as ‘complex,’ adding: “We’ve been working hard to develop Get Me there since the contract with ATOS was terminated. get me there is being developed incrementally and this launch is a further step in a journey towards delivering a fully integrated smart system across the city region and beyond.”
He said the Oyster doesn’t adhere to ‘current smart ticketing standards,’ which had a £1bn budget and ‘isn’t interchangeable with other schemes.’
Get Me There, he added, is compatible with the M Card in Yorkshire, Walrus in Liverpool, Pop card in the north east and Swift in the Midlands – which can already be used to upload Greater Manchester bus tickets.
He said they were working with Transport for the North and other city regions to explore ways of connecting northern cities to deliver ‘seamless integrated ticketing.’
Summing it up, a TfGM insider told the M.E.N.: “We’re not where we want to be but we are where we are.”
Not quite as catchy as ‘Get Me There’ – but perhaps more fitting.