How have other countries managed contactless bus payments while Ireland has not?

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The National Transport Authority recently said it would take 'years' for the service to be rolled out.

LAST YEAR, THE former CEO of Dublin Bus Ray Coyne estimated that contactless and smartphone payments on buses could be in place in late 2023.

“We do need next-generation ticketing and new equipment to be able to deal with bank cards,” she said. “We would obviously want to do it quicker than that, but it is a significant deployment of new infrastructure and new IT systems.” Andrew Anderson, head of customer payments at Transport for London , told The Journal that it was quite a long project to undertake.

“Barclays was trialling it and it was only available in very few places, but from the dialogue that we were having with Barclays and the payment industry generally, we could see that this was likely to become a big thing,” he said. “It’s not just ‘get the technology done, get it out there’. You have to go through a series of tests and accreditation with the payments industry to demonstrate that the reader is compliant with the security standards around payment card transactions, and that is quite a robust process and takes several steps.”

“There are nuances in how the payments industry works and the scheme rules, so the card issuers and the merchant acquirers have to be brought on that journey with the payment schemes to make it work. I would suspect there’s probably a voyage of discovery going on. In Finland, the city of Turku, located around 160km west of Helsinki, became the first in the country to roll out contactless payments on its buses in 2021 through its public transport network Föli.

Pihlava explained that the old ticket validators on the buses were able to read the contactless card, but it didn’t meet the the requirements from the payment service providers. This meant that they had to be replaced, which delayed the project. In a statement to The Journal, a spokesperson for the NTA said: “The NTA is in a public procurement process for Next Generation Ticketing which will ultimately be deployed on all PSO operators on all modes of transport across the country.

“We’re not massively behind other countries. I think it’s pretty standard that most cities and countries have a smart card like a Leap Card. The main benefit behind these things are we no longer use cash and we no longer have to ask for the fare, and it gets people on and off of buses and trams and trains faster.”

 

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