SCANDINAVIA: ELECTRONIC CROSS-BORDER TRAVELLING SOON
Denmark’s national Travel Card is aiming at the wholesale electronic replacement of cash paper tickets on the country’s trains and buses by 2011-2. Scheduled for a two-year roll-out starting in 2008, it will make Denmark the second European country, after The Netherlands, to implement a national multimodal travel scheme and the first to introduce one with cross-border potential.
The initiative reflects considerations that have become pressing for the country’s public transport operators: the growing obsolescence and inflexibility of their existing ticketing systems; passengers’ difficulties in understanding the current mix of differing zone-based charging structures; the inability of these to collect sufficient relevant information on passengers and travel patterns for modern transport management.
Scheduled for a two-year roll-out starting in 2008, it will make Denmark the second European country, after The Netherlands, to implement a national multimodal travel scheme and the first to introduce one with cross-border potential.
The new system will allow public transport users throughout Denmark to carry a single contactless smartcard for train, bus and (in the capital, Copenhagen) metro travel, regardless of the length of their journey, and with automatic calculation of the most advantageous fare. Linked to a payment agreement, it will work like a standard credit or debit card with topping-up capability.
Next step will be exploiting the travel card for commercial use in additional, non-transport related business sectors. Projections for 2011 and 2012 indicate roughly equal numbers of public transport and other commercial transactions.
The issuing and maintenance of the specification for the travel card is the responsibility of a group of major Scandinavian public transport companies, which have joined forces to form the Rejsekortforeningen i Norden (RKF, the Travel Card Association in Scandinavia). Members include Denmark’s DSB, Movia and DanskeRegione (see Sidebar, ‘Project history’), together with Sweden‘s Skånetrafiken, SJ, Storstockholms Lokaltrafik and Västtrafik, and with Norway’s Storoslo Lokaltrafik as an observer member. Stemming from a Swedish initiative to ensure national interoperability, RKF has recently upgraded its specification to cover MiFare 4k as well as 1k smartcards
The Danish initiative therefore forms an integral element in a cross-border movement towards multimodal smartcard deployment which could open the door to seamless, cashless travel throughout Scandinavia. Gothenburg, in Western Sweden, has implemented a system and the Swedish capital of Stockholm plans to follow suit in 2008.
The brief for the Danish travel card concept required provision for maximum levels of integration, based on the RKF specification, with similar initiatives by public transport authorities and operators not only in Southern Sweden – where transport authority Skånetrafiken is now preparing to launch its own travel smartcard scheme – but also, potentially, in Northern Germany.
