ITS Smart Travel

In transport, personalisation matters. If you can create smart travel systems where individuals can be given real-time travel information, where physical tickets become history and where passengers can turn up and go, rather than turn up and queue, you’ll make travel more efficient, reduce pollution and congestion and make the experience more enjoyable.

Our strengths in data management, mobile technologies, e-ticketing and smart media are leading to improvements in transport across the UK and beyond.

A few examples illustrate how we’re literally helping people to move forward as part of the teams that introduced:

• Europe’s first GSM-based real-time journey estimation service in 2003
• Software that manages more than three million travel smart cards
• Paris’s real-time bus monitoring and passenger information service
• Real-time traffic information integrated into web map and routing services for private car users
• In Finland, our real-time, multimodal journey planner is the second most-recognised Internet brand after Google

We’ve designed systems that can aggregate information from multiple sources, take status data from every transport network and turn it into information in real-time in whatever medium travellers want, whether that’s a personal alert on a mobile phone or PDA, updates on a website or strategically-placed variable message signs.

With that level of knowledge, travellers can adjust plans, shifting from a congested part of a transport network to a less congested route or mode. Automated smart ticketing can make this mode-switching easy and painless and we’re leading developments in that field, too.

We design, supply, manage and operate smart ticketing systems, using a range of smart media, including field equipment, back office integration, reimbursement and client support.

We’re also marrying personal devices such as mobile phones to global navigation satellites and other location-based services to identify when someone is making a billable journey. It’s a ticketless system that speeds up the process of travel by eliminating queues. We can even tell you when to get off the bus.

Where barriers are still needed for border control or other security checks, biometric technology can automatically grant access, again cutting down on queuing time.

Everyone benefits from smart travel:

• Peak demand is better managed and congestion reduced
• Fare evasion is cut
• New products become possible across transport modes, driven by a better understanding of individual customer behaviour
• One smart ticket for will bring simplicity and convenience to multiple transport ticketing schemes, exploiting the ITSO smart ticketing specification (we’re members of ITSO)