“Smart ticketing requires reliable, secure communication to handle payments and to validate passengers quickly, with as little impact on the passenger as possible. The aim is to create a seamless experience for the passenger, so it needs to work efficiently at all times to avoid creating delays and congestion. A traditional paper ticket identified the bearer as being free to travel. If you take away the physical ticket, then other forms of identification are needed, whether that be the passenger’s payment card, smartphone, smartwatch or bio-metric data.
All of these solutions need three things:
- sensors to capture identification data
- a central “identity provider” to keep a database of valid journeys
- connectivity between those components.
Contactless payment cards make it possible to use a “tap in, tap out” system to track each journey segment that a passenger takes with a single payment. Smart devices offer a number of ways to connect to sensors, for example: WiFi, Bluetooth or Near Field Communication (NFT), all of which can be combined with secure digital certificates held on the device to identify the device.
To combat fraud, we are increasingly using multi-factor authentication for payments and to connect to systems. It is likely that ticketless travel solutions will follow this pattern so we will see combinations of the above technologies used.”