Lothian Buses has been keeping Edinburgh moving for over 100 years, connecting local communities across Edinburgh and the Lothians. Now the UK’s largest municipal bus company is the driving force behind the city’s journey towards seamless multimodal travel.
Leading Scotland into a new era of fare payments, the operator partnered with ticketing technology specialist Flowbird in 2019 to introduce the country’s first ‘contactless and capped’ open payment system for transport. The next stage of the city’s ticketing evolution will see Lothian and Edinburgh Trams joining forces to launch a multi-operator scheme.
Here, Stevie Chambers, Lothian’s Head of Product Strategy, shares the story of the remarkable success of account-based ticketing (ABT) and open payments on buses, and looks forward to the joined-up future for public transport in Scotland’s capital.
Q. What were the strategic drivers for launching open payments?
SC: In an international destination city, we needed our customer proposition to be simple for residents and visitors. Open payments with automatic fare capping ticks so many boxes. By using a contactless EMV card or device as a travel token, you remove one of the biggest points of customer friction – getting a ticket. And by implementing fare capping, you remove the next barrier…needing to understand the fares structure.
Q. What targets did you hope to achieve with the system?
SC: We launched TapTapCap just days before the 2019 Edinburgh International Festival – when the population doubles! We expected to process somewhere between 10-15% of our paid-for journeys through the scheme in the first five months. We completely smashed our targets, with adoption rates rising to 25% of journeys at the end of the year, and then continuing to grow. Today, over half of commercial journeys are taps.
Q. What tangible benefits has the system delivered?
SC: The most significant benefits are rightly for customers. Making it easier to choose bus rather than drive a car is a big part of what we do. Operationally, it was also extremely important our solution could board passengers as fast as existing products, if not faster. This was a factor in working with Flowbird to implement an aggregated pay-as-you-go system, rather than a ‘known fare’ model. What we saw is that, by making ticketing simpler and faster for customers, growth in ad hoc journeys and overall ridership follows.
Q. Has the system changed payments behaviour?
SC: TapTapCap has accelerated the reduction in cash payments to the lowest ever levels. We’ve also seen migration from other products, such as smartcard and mobile ticketing. The ability to stack multiple types of capping rules so easily in the ABT back office also allows us to consider where we can replace and consolidate legacy products.
Q. Has automatic fare capping benefited ridership?
SC: Undoubtedly – best value capping is such a compelling proposition. Not only does it remove the need to work out which ticket you need, it automatically flexes with you when your plans change, in a way that pre-purchased tickets can’t.
Q. Is data from your ABT system shaping future strategy?
SC: Operators everywhere face significant commercial challenges, and in ticketing these can be barriers to deployment – “What will my decline rate be?” “Will I lose revenue on capping?”. The ABT data has given us the confidence to do more – implementing weekly capping after initially launching daily capping, for example.
Q. Are there more use cases you would like to address with EMV?
SC: We’re working with our technology partners to explore innovative ways to broaden our scheme. This includes looking at how we can offer concessions for customer segments like Edinburgh’s large student population. There’s always more to be done, so watch this space!
Q. What’s next for transport ticketing in Edinburgh?
SC: The next step is collaborating with our sister company, Edinburgh Trams, and Flowbird, to bring multi-modal open payments to the capital. We’ve already integrated paper, smartcard and mobile ticketing across bus and tram, so expanding TapTapCap to encompass both modes is a no-brainer and is highly anticipated by our customers.
Lothian is hosting this year’s ALBUM conference in Edinburgh on April 25-26. Flowbird will be exhibiting and speaking. To book tickets, visit albumconference2023.com
Tel: 01202 339 339
Email: UK-Transport@flowbird.group
