TELEPAY - Telepayment System for Multimodal Transport Services using Portable Phones
Overview
Background & policy context:
Easy payment systems are the backbone of seamless intermodal solutions in Transport. User-friendly payment systems are crucial for customer-oriented, cost-effective transport operations. Therefore public transport operators tend to set up Contactless Smart Card based ticketing systems. Due to the relatively high price of the Smart Card itself, such systems are however only cost effective for multi-ride and season tickets to be used by regular customers. Single tickets or in general low value ticket are still combined with magnetic stripe technology. Both systems need an infrastructure with costly maintenance.
The main interest of TELEPAY concept is to reduce those costs by providing a complementary low-cost solution for occasional users. TELEPAY project contributed to the implementation of Mobile Phone based payment in public transport by developing scenarios using different technologies and by trialling some of these solutions.
The TELEPAY concept is based on an intelligent innovative combination of wide spread technologies (GSM/SMS, GSM/WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth) applied to a new application. The omnipresent availability of cellular phone network infrastructure in Europe has been used to innovate payment for transport services and to innovate access to Public Transportation and other transport services. TELEPAY project achieved with success his objectives by providing valuable results such as the technical and commercial assessment of TELEPAY concept, the comparison of the different implementation approaches and the production of a set of recommendations and model contracts.
Thanks to the excellent cooperation between partners, all activities succeeded and especially trials which demonstrated as well the technical performances and high level of user acceptance. These very encouraging findings lead to consider the great potential of TELEPAY concept to improve quality and effectiveness of transport services such as public transport and motorway tolling.
Objectives:
Main objectives of TELEPAY project were as follows:
- Establish the technical, legal and commercial feasibility of a purchase and payment system for virtual 'e-tickets' through mobile phones, using SMS, WAP and short range communication technologies,
- Present a Europe-wide harmonised payment means for tolling applications,
- Promote the adoption of wireless devices as a payment means for transport services,
- Propose different test sites across Europe; Berlin, Rome, Turku and Paris Ile de France,
- Test the access to closed transport systems (e.g. opening barriers and/or turnstiles) using short range communication based terminals.
Methodology:
The work was organised in six work packages (WP) in addition to the project management (WP1) as briefly presented in the table below WP1 Project management.
WP2 Definition of User Needs:
- To identify needs, requirements and limitations for both end user and intermediate user
- To compile a comprehensive user needs overview
- To identify services to be implemented
WP3 System Specification
- To define the system requirements and the common core architecture as a basis for the system specification in the different trial sites
WP4 Legal & Operational Framework
- To investigate the legal framework of the use of mobile phones as means of payment in multimodal applications in the EU
- To determine the kinds of contracts that must be established between the actors of such system
WP5 Trials
- To implement and test different configuration of the TELEPAY system in the four different test sites, Berlin, Rome, Turku and Paris IdF
- To provide the necessary data for the evaluation of these trials (WP6)
WP6 Evaluation
- To design and perform a comprehensive evaluation of the test sites performances
- To produce a synthesis, presenting recommendations for setting up this kind of service
- To produce a conclusive Technology Implementation Plan
WP7 Dissemination and Exploitation
- To produce a Dissemination and Use Plan
- To perform the actual dissemination actions.
Evaluation Methodology:
The evaluation process will cover all the involved players : travellers, PT and motorway operators, telecom operators. Two kind of data will be collected for the evaluation :
- Technical data regarding usage that will be stored by the TELEPAY hardware : number of transaction, percentage of failure will be the minimum data collected by all sites…. These data will be used to derive technical feasibility indicators.
- Data regarding usage that will be collected by surveys among TELEPAY users, PT operators and telecom operators. These data will be used to derive satisfaction indicators, expectations regarding service efficiency and ease of use as well as expectations regarding the future system on the operators side.
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