IRISH PEOPLE could be forgiven if they howled with laughter at the recent news that Siim Kallas, the European Commission vice-president and commissioner responsible for transport, was launching an ambitious plan to create a unified journey planner that would allow people to book tickets on all modes of transport across all countries in the European Union – and then travel with a single ticket.
EU-wide integrated ticketing? Tickets that would allow you take buses, planes, boats, trains and other modes of transport, anywhere in Europe, using one ticket booked on a website? Is he for real?
Apparently he is. “I do not see why there is such a big patchwork of journey planners when there is supposed to be one European market,” Kallas said earlier this month.
“I want to travel through Europe, switching from air to rail or sea, to urban or road transport with a single ticket planned and bought online. This is why I am launching this challenge today.”
The idea of an integrated pan-European ticketing system will seem wildly optimistic to Irish people, who have waited nearly two decades for such a system to be rolled out covering public transport in Dublin only.
Kallas has insisted, however, the system will not be difficult to set up. He has pointed out that the technology already exists to create a one-stop journey planner.
“We just need to get things started so that millions of Europeans are able to plan their journey with just a few simple clicks,” he said.
The challenge “for a truly European journey planner” is open to everyone, from companies and organisations to anyone with an interest in travelling, he added.
Once a shortlist of options has been drawn up, the public will be asked to vote for the one they like the best, and the winner will receive financial help from the European Commission to promote the idea.
The eujourneyplanner.eu site features a selection of existing national journey planners on a clickable map of Europe.
Ireland does not feature on the map because integrated ticketing and advanced journey planners are not something we are good at. We would appear to be hilariously rubbish at them.
The farcical story of our integrated ticket plan is long and wearying, and has taken up the time of five successive transport ministers without anything tangible for consumers to get their hands on.
The job has passed through so many hands that it is almost impossible to know who to blame. Given that Fianna Fáil was in power for the majority of the time it has taken to make integrated ticketing a reality, the finger of blame might as well be pointed at them.
Mary O’Rourke first launched an integrated ticketing project for Dublin in May 1999 and the Railway Procurement Agency took over the project in 2002.
The first smart card was launched by the then Minister for Transport Séamus Brennan in April 2004 and he promised a totally integrated system by the following year.
Next up was a new Minister for Transport Martin Cullen, who clearly hadn’t learned anything about chicken counting from his predecessors, said in March 2005 that the system would be rolled out at the beginning of the following year.
In February 2008, the then Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey, told the Dáil an integrated ticketing system covering Dublin Bus, the Luas and Morton’s private bus network would be launched in September 2009.
He assured his fellow TDs that it would be extended to Iarnród Éireann, Dart and commuter rail services within a further 12 months, after which Bus Éireann would get its chance to introduce the system on a number of its commuter routes.
Happy days? Not even close. The deadline came and went and there was no seamless movement between modes of transport.
More than two years later, in August 2010, this newspaper carried a report saying that integrated ticketing, involving a smart card for the Luas and Dublin Bus, would be fully in place by the middle of 2011 – or, to put it another way, by now.
At the time, readers were assured that the services of Irish Rail, private bus operators and Bus Éireann would be then added within another six months as part of a project that would cost €55 million.
At the time, Tim Gaston of the Integrated Ticketing Project Office said the project was “taking longer to get to the final delivery day than we had all hoped, but good progress has been made”.
Talk about understating the obvious.
Most recently, a briefing document prepared in March for the new Minister for Transport, Leo Varadkar, said the full launch of an integrated ticketing system for Dublin Bus, Dart and Luas services is “expected” in August of this year.
Amazingly, it looks like it will happen before the autumn.
“We are approaching the final phase,” says Sara Morris of National Transport Authority, the body that took over implementation of the scheme from the Department of Transport earlier this year.
“Live testing is starting in a couple of weeks. The timetable is predicated on no massive problems emerging in the testing phase. It will be launched with Dublin Bus and Luas, and the rail network will come on stream shortly after that.”
So, what can people expect from a smart card that has been more than 10 years in the planning. It is, she says, going to be “quite sophisticated and will operate like an e-purse.”
It will cut out the need to carry change for the bus, stop people paying over the odds for buses because they only have a €2 coin for a €1.20 fare, and take away the need to know how much a fare is from one destination to another, because the card will work it out for you.
Dublin Bus has also promised it will become more efficient because boarding times will be faster as there will be fewer people fiddling with small change and quizzing drivers about fares.
It is typical that Irish users of public transport wait years for consumer-friendly initiates and then three come along at once.
In addition to the roll-out of integrated ticketing, electronic information signs which tell the “real time” buses are due have started operating at selected bus stops in Dublin city, a full 10 years after they were first due to be introduced.
In February, 10 bus stops were fitted with display screens and about 500 signs will be operational before the end of the year. It uses a fairly basic GPS system to identify the position of approaching buses and to update the arrival time shown on an electronic display unit.
It completely transforms the experience of waiting for a bus. Before their introduction, timetables were little more than a loose guide to a bus’s arrival time, and more typically a complete fiction.
Now, if consumers know they have only two or three minutes to wait for a bus, they are more likely to do so.
And there is more good news coming down the bus lane. A web- and text-based service to provide bus arrival information at all stops is also to be introduced across the bus network. It will cover stops not fitted with the new bus-arrival screens.
It can’t be long before a smart phone app is developed that will allow people anywhere in the country to work out where their bus is and how long it will take to get to them.
If that happens then, to paraphrase Microdisney singer Cathal Coughlan, it won’t just be losers who take the buses, but everyone.
