London’s contactless system is admired for delivering effortless travel, automatic best fares and fare caps. But are these benefits really tied to the bank card?
In his latest report, Thomas Ableman, former Director of Strategy and Innovation at Transport for London (TfL), argues that seven of the eight benefits passengers value come from London’s account-based, post-pay model - not Contactless itself. The remaining benefit is travelling with something people already carry. When London’s system was conceived, that was a bank card. Today, it is a smartphone.
Thomas therefore makes the case for Digital Pay-As-You-Go (DPAYG): the same effortless experience, with complete journey detection, real-time passenger communication and less physical infrastructure. Drawing on national-scale examples from Switzerland and Denmark, the report offers public transport authorities and operators in Europe and beyond practical guidance for modernising ticketing efficiently, sustainably and at scale.
Thomas Ableman is the founder of Freewheeling, where he supports the leadership teams of city-region transport authorities and operators with integrated transport and organisational strategy. He was previously Director of Strategy & Innovation at Transport for London, the world’s largest integrated transport authority. At Chiltern Railways, he led the creation of the UK’s first barcode ticketing app, and subsequently led the nationwide rollout of barcode ticketing at the UK Rail Delivery Group. As this report explains, he also attempted to bring Contactless ticketing to Chiltern Railways a decade before it finally happened.
This report was commissioned by FAIRTIQ. It was written under Thomas Ableman's full editorial control, and the arguments, judgements and any errors are his alone. FAIRTIQ saw the report before publication (as did other organisations quoted, such as Rejsekort) and were able to correct matters of fact about their own products and deployments; they did not direct the conclusions. In preparing the report Thomas Ableman interviewed, among others: Alex Hornby (Northern), Adrian McMullan (Transport for London), Paul Bowden (Rail Delivery Group), Lucy Dean (Great British Railways Transition Team), John Henshall (TravelMaster), Tina Hørbye Christensen (Rejsekort & Rejseplan), Chris Williams (Transport for Wales), Andreas Sigloch (Baden-Württemberg), Dorthe Noehr (Movia) and Suzanne Hutchinson (SYMCA). In some cases, these interviews were to get feedback on their experience of using Digital PAYG; in other cases, it was to invite perceived challenges and obstacles so he could research solutions. Some interviews were conducted on the basis that comments would not be attributed.
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