Integrated ticketing and charging (ITS)

Integrated ticketing and charging is perceived as an important step towards achieving integrated and seamless mobility. Major advances have been achieved in the last decades in delivering integrated public transport tickets whereby a traveller can purchase just one ticket for a journey involving more than one public transport segment/operator, rather than purchasing one ticket for each leg of the journey.

Many of the large cities in Europe have moved beyond this to contactless Smartcards (e.g. Oyster in London, Navigo in Paris, Pastel in Toulouse) which removes the need to queue up to purchase a ticket and speeds up the passage through the ticket gate (now down to milliseconds).

There is an interest among many cities to expand the services covered by the Smartcard to other mobility services such as car clubs, public bike schemes and car parks (e.g. Milan). A new generation of transport payment systems are also starting to be developed based on contactless credit card and mobile phone (e.g. London).