What to look for in a revenue management solution
By Andrea Hintz
Comprehensive fare collection systems make public transport more attractive for users and more cost-effective for operators. They provide seamless travel, shorter wait times and better environmental performance as well as reliable data collection for revenue protection and resource planning.
Here are a few critical areas to focus on when updating or acquiring a fare collection system with cutting-edge revenue management capabilities.
Passenger convenience
Fare collection systems should encourage people to use public transport rather than being an additional obstacle. Focus on passenger-centric solutions and services to provide convenient access to transport with minimum wait times. These can include in-pocket solutions, acceptance of EMV and non-EMV bank cards at validators and turnstiles, and barcode acceptance for home-printed tickets.
Interoperability
Interoperability can be a complex technical challenge, but passengers expect simplicity. They want to be able to pay with a single account or fare type regardless of the mode of transport they use. Make sure that the fare solution provider helps your agency in defining its interoperability requirements, implementing rules and managing deployment.
Ease of operation
Transport systems that are more convenient for travelers are also easier to operate on a day-to-day basis. Fare collection solutions should be designed to optimize network configuration, monitoring, deployment, maintenance and upgrades to enhance the overall cost-effectiveness of the transport system.
Safety
A flexible, modular design provides the levels of safety, security, reliability and throughput required in mass transit applications today. The traditional multi-beam sensors used in conventional ticket gates can be replaced with a single 3D camera per gate, improving passenger flows whilst reducing equipment requirements and ensuring greater safety and security at optimized cost.
Eco-design
Thales products are developed and manufactured in facilities that comply with the strictest international environmental protection regulations. Thales devices are designed to reduce the overall carbon footprint of fare collection systems, with lower power consumption, more effective idle mode management and innovative solutions such as built-in batteries and detection sensors to activate certain features only when needed.
Aesthetics
Fare collection devices play an important role in the public’s perception of transit agencies and transport operators. Excellent visual integration in stations and on-board vehicles contributes to the modern, high-tech look and feel of the public transport environment.
The open systems approach
Systems architects and suppliers
The open systems approach involves using industry standards as extensively as possible and making system interface documentation readily available to customers for third-party component integration. The open-systems approach ensures that providers obtain the best-performing and most cost-effective solutions.
Turnkey integrator
A comprehensive approach to equipment and systems design reduces agency risk and total cost of ownership by guaranteeing the overall coherence of fare collection solutions in single-mode, single-operator as well as complex multimodal environments. These scalable solutions are designed to support increases in capacity, both organically over time and during surges in usage, to support changing demand and evolving ridership patterns.
Security expertise
The need for security management is the direct corollary of the open-systems approach, because transport operators need solid assurances about revenue protection and integrity. With the emergence of open payment fare collection, security has become even more important, further strengthening Thales’s positioning as the revenue protection partner of choice for transit agencies and transport operators worldwide.
Interested in a demo? Meet Thales at booth #314 at the APTA 2016 Fare Collection & Revenue Management Summit and TransITech Conference Showcase, April 12, San Diego, CA.
Thales Transport & Security, Inc. is part of the Thales group, one of the world’s top suppliers of systems, solutions, equipment and services for mobility on railways, roads and public networks. Visit www.thalesgroup.com.