In the first of a series on how well Ireland is making the transition to the ‘Information Society’, Leslie Faughnan tries to find his way around the public transport network without having to ask somebody
Software & Services | 01 Apr 2005 :
Call it the knowledge economy, the information society or the digital age—there is general agreement that the future of the Irish economy is to be based on knowledge management and information goods rather than our traditional industries.
Agriculture is declining in importance to the economy as a whole, and a cursory glance at the newspapers over the past year is enough to learn of the fate of our high-technology manufacturing industry, which has gone to eastern Europe and beyond at a rapid rate of knots.
The government realises this and after the last election a Minister with responsibility for the Information Society was appointed. There has been significant and internationally recognised progress in the provision of e-government services but how far have we progressed in terms of establishing a general culture of information provision and sharing?
Over the next few months ComputerScope will look at the status of information provision in a number of key areas of Irish life. We start with public transport, as these are services that will increase in importance as our cities grow to the extent that private transport for all will simply not be an option. How seriously do Irish transport organisations take the issue of information provision?
There is quite clearly just one outstanding example of the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the Irish transport sector—Ryanair.com. At this stage it’s a fair guess that most Internet users other than children have visited it and many have actually used it. Furthermore, it’s design is so simple that even children would have no problem using it if only they had access to credit cards.
Its plain, no-frills flight search and booking system conceals a very smart high availability back-end system. It operates in eleven languages and is available 24/7, 365 days a year, selling an average of 90,000 seats a day and geared to cope with an anticipated 1bn hits a month come summer.
Smart Ryanair features introduced recently allow one-click checking of previous day/following day alternatives. On-line changes of bookings (€25 per person/flight) are now running at 2,500 changes per day as customers get accustomed to the system. So congratulations to Ryanair and the leadership of IT manager, Brona Kernan. Some plaudits also to Aer Lingus, which smartened up its early Web site enormously as an important element in its turnaround, and now has almost as efficient an online booking system as its rival.
Road and rail
But after that small jet set, the picture gets decidedly murkier, although trusty old Irish Rail is a quietly efficient exception, with a Web site (www.irishrail.ie) that actually allows online purchase of commuter and season tickets as well as the ordering of identity Cards and application forms for student travel discounts. The journey planner facility, maps and fare look-up are excellent and better still, DART users (www.dart.ie) can also get real-time train information—not very relevant for centre city stations, perhaps, but very useful for Bray residents seeing if they can make the next train in time!
A click on the (rather tiny) ‘eye’ symbol brings up all information in large bright type on plain dark background—none of those distracting HTML frills! Each station on the entire network has its vital particulars listed—facilities, phone number, location in relation to town/village and even the name of the Station Master. Again, English only (not even a ritual bit of Gaeilge), so this plain but effective site cannot get top marks but deserves an Honours grade.
Dublin Bus’s Web site (www.dublinbus.ie) has a consistently fast-responding site and easy-to-use searching of timetables by route number or, much more useful for visitors, by districts and main streets combined with clear North/South/Centre maps. However, a weakness is that there is little information regarding connections or how to get from A to B when the end points don’t lie on a single scheduled route. In contrast to public buses and trains on the European mainland, all of which carry charts showing the names of each stop and the various connections available, a certain amount of prior knowledge is desirable before planning your route.
Online purchase of all special offer tickets is enabled through Ticketmaster (with no surcharge) and postal delivery. For the weary traveller at a lonely stop, a smart e-service allows you to text the route number (eg BUS48A) to 53503 to have the times for the next three buses in each direction sent to you by SMS. Similarly, BUS48A 0930 TOMORROW will give you the first three buses from that time in the morning. Admittedly, you have to have some idea of the journey time from start point to where you are, but most regular bus users do.
However, if you travel on the Lucan, Clondalkin or Ballyfermot QBCs (Quality Bus Corridors) you do not need that because you will have the benefit of RTPI at your stop. RTPI is an unlovely acronym meaning Real Time Passenger Information, a technical goal of all of our public transport services and neatly branded Q-time by Dublin Bus. A display at the stop counts down the ‘Time to next bus’.
These pilot schemes began back in June 2001 on the Lucan route with the others added in January 2002. The system works a treat and the idea is to roll it out through the other QBCs and then on lesser frequency routes where the information would probably be of even more use to travellers. When? Ah, here we come up against the wonderful world of Irish state planning habits. Since the whole future structure of Dublin city transport is up for grabs, i.e. part privatisation, the two-year old Q-time system cannot really proceed further until that is all sorted out.
All in all, it has to be acknowledged that the CIE group services are doing reasonably in passenger information and some services. But the Web sites tend to betray their origins with sections of corporate material that is of little interest and less value to the traveller and a certain confusion of structure where corporate and internal values seem to lessen the focus on customer needs.
Integration once again
LUAS is coming down the track. Well, it will be come July or so. What it is dragging in its slipsteam is the Integrated Ticketing System for public transport in Dublin, a long-overdue notion that was mandated to the Railway Procurement Agency (the LUAS project driving body) by the Minister for Transport in 2001.
This was on foot of a report/proposal in October 2000 by the official Integrated Ticketing Committee set up the previous year and chaired by the Department of Public Enterprise. Enough! You get the picture. LUAS passengers will be able to get their season tickets in the form of a contactless smart card—not from day one, however. When the deals have been made between Connex (the LUAS contract operator), the RPA and equipment suppliers etc the smart cards ‘.... should be introduced within weeks of the launch of the LUAS service.’
Payment will be made at any paystation on the line or by direct debit for regular commuters. Just waving the card at the reader as you board will automatically register the journey and deduct the value. In Montpelier, where the same light-rail system has been on the go since the 1996 World Cup (their engineers initially visited the Ahlstom works to see the trams at the same time as our Dublin delegation a few years earlier), it is fascinating to see old ladies simply wave their handbags and students wiggle their rear jeans pockets at the readers as they board.
So far, so very good. This is actually a smart but simple system—for users. We can expect, says Tim Gaston of the RPA project team, to have it as a Greater Dublin Public Transport card by the end of 2006. That will be just nicely over a decade since the first such systems were up and running elsewhere in the world. Are we so technically challenged?
Alas, technology is simple compared to historically diverse (for want of a kinder epithet), administrative and political systems. Places which have had flat fares and integrated ticketing since the days of omnibus conductors and trams have found it much easier, regardless of the number of transport modes. Yet it has to be conceded that London Transport, for example, has taken seven years to get to the launch of its smart-card project earlier this year.
In Dublin, there has been a limited form of integrated ticketing between Dublin Bus and the DART for some years but even within the CIE Group no more than that has been attempted. Since the government policy to part-privatise was announced, any planning has had to allow for the participation of current and potential future private operators.
Dublin Bus, for example, is committed to smarter (and non-cash) ticketing systems and so has ordered new in-vehicle readers that will take contactless smart cards and be compatible with any city-wide system introduced in the future by any new authority, agency or office. These will take time to install throughout the 1,100-plus fleet and will also have to live alongside the current magnetic stripe readers for a phase-over period of up to two years.
Some idea of the back-office complexity of the integrated ticketing systems can be gleaned from the ‘clearing house’ concept explained by Tim Gaston, who actually led the team that e-enabled the Northern Ireland system, which already had integrated ticketing and fares. Since all operators are going to be entitled to their share of the revenue, a central system has to be set up to handle the apportionment and disbursement. Being digital, however, it will be both transparent and accurate and adding new entrants at later stages should present fewer problems.
But the blunt fact would seem to be that we could have enjoyed the benefits of smart-card based integrated ticketing years ago if Government planning and decision making had allowed it. Almost all of the technical issues are resolved and alternative solutions identified and available. But in the absence of a firm and final plan for the governance and operation of the public transport systems in Greater Dublin—and nationally—the decisions either cannot be made or the individual state sector operators cannot commit to the specific expenditure.
We are presuming to plan for the Information Society while harvesting the bitter fruits of failing to plan for a public transport infrastructure. It’s a classic Irish problem that, hopefully, will not lead to a traditional Irish solution.
Dublin Airport—Not much help for arrivals
Aer Rianta’s Web site (www.dublin-airport.com) is an informational mess. It seems to assume that only outgoing passengers would be interested, since there are directions for ‘Getting to the airport’ but minimal information for visitors on how to get from it to the city centre.
Take for example, the ‘Train Service’ link, which informs you: ‘There is currently no train service directly to the airport, however taxi and bus services are available from most train stations throughout the Dublin area to the airport. Dublin Bus runs from Heuston and Connolly rail stations and AerDart from Howth Dart station.’ Not much consolation there for the perplexed, non-English speaking potential arrival.
The fuzzy ‘Dublin Airport Arrivals’ map ends at the exits and only the ‘Dublin Parking Area Map’ actually shows (by colour code) where the buses and taxis are to be found. The fact that there is not even a token attempt to give standard, basic information in at least some other European languages is really astonishing. Equally strange is that the links to tourist information are buried in a sub-menu as Local Area Links (after Lost Property and Retail Opportunities!) and there is no link to help accommodation seekers.
Two ambitious efforts stand out from the surrounding dross: a link to real-time flight information and the opportunity to download the entire airport timetable to your Pocket PC. The flight information is clearly invaluable, but valiant initial efforts failed to get beyond a loop at the point where Aer Rianta forces you to accept a disclaimer that it will not be remotely responsible for anything at all to do with the accuracy or otherwise of the information and any consequences of believing it!
A little stubbornness established that the site is optimised for (only works properly with) Internet Explorer and demands but does not declare that cookies must be accepted by the browser. In fairness, with IE it works well.
As for the entire set of flight timetables, this is certainly a valuable resource. Who would want it on a PDA I can’t imagine, but there must be some. Yet it seems even stranger that the same information should not then be available for general PC download. One link does come up trumps : intending travellers can see what the weather is like over here—courtesy of the Met Office.
This is a transport service Web site for, arguably, the most important single access point to our notionally tourist-friendly, EU Presidential country. It’s not good enough.
Watch the road yourself
The AA, in recent years almost better known for its Roadwatch service, has both smart Web sites (www.aaireland.ie, www.aaroadwatch.ie) and a unique SMS alert system in partnership with Vodafone. Drivers can subscribe (free) for traffic information for a particular route or area (eg Dublin City Centre, North, West, South) and automatically text messages for any exceptional traffic or travel incidents that may affect them. Payment is by message received at 15c incl. VAT each (13c for Ready to Go). Single journey information can be requested in the same way.
05/04/04