Iris Scans and Fingerprints Could Be Your Ticket On British Rail (silicon.co.uk)

Mickeycaskill quotes a report from Silicon.co.uk: Rail passengers could use fingerprints or iris scans to pay for tickets and pass through gates, under plans announced by the UK rail industry. In its current form, the mobile technology is intended to allow passengers to travel without tickets, instead using Bluetooth and geolocation technology to track a passenger's movements and automatically charge their travel account at the end of the day for journeys taken. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which represents train operators and Network Rail, said further development could see passengers identified using biometric technology in a way similar to the facial-recognition schemes used at some UK airports to speed up border checks. The RDG said more than 200 research, design and technology projects have been identified to increase the railways' capacity and improve customer service. Other projects include new seat designs that could improve train capacity by up to 30 percent and folding seats that could boost space during peak times, including tables that could fold into seats.

Comments

They're missing the point.

[newcastlejon]

Actually getting on the train isn't where people waste time. It takes ten times as long to find the ticket you need to buy from the dozen or so alternatives with slightly different names and wildly diverging prices (that are all nevertheless exorbitant) as it does to walk through an automated barrier.

I had to travel from one end of the UK to the other recently and - this still baffles me - it would have cost about a third as much to fly from Newcastle via Paris to Exeter then back again than it would to get an off-peak return ticket for the train. I'd have probably had more leg room to boot. If I still had a passport I'd have been very tempted to accidentally miss my connecting flight. Think about that for a second... an international flight was significantly cheaper and only marginally longer than taking the train. Something about that just seems fundamentally broken.

And yet, after all this, one still has to have the train actually turn up; in the case of Southern Rail this is not a safe bet. If - and that's a big if - this ticketing system reduces the prices then I'll give it a try but the train companies do not have a good track record (sorry!) when it comes to refraining from bleeding their customers dry. Something similar already works quite well on buses and the Tube so who knows? I'll try to contain my amazement when the whole thing falls flat on its face and people go back to having to use price comparison websites to find a ticket without needing a mortgage to pay for the blasted thing.

Re:They're missing the point.

[TheRaven64]

They've stopped doing free delivery for tickets ordered online and they've removed discounts for advanced purchase. The result of the latter is that there's no point booking the ticket in advance, so they no longer have any idea how many people are planning on taking any given train (not they they did much with that information anyway). The outcome of the former is that if you buy your ticket online, you have to collect it from a machine, whereas if you buy it on the day then you can collect it from a human or a machine. If you want a shorter queue, don't buy your ticket in advance - in the worst case, the machine queue is shorter and you're no worse off.

The fees are weird. It's sometimes cheaper to buy a ticket that goes one stop further than you need (often a lot cheaper) and just get off early. You're allowed to break your trip with most ticket classes, so this is only ever a problem for returns (where if you don't start at the correct point, they can complain).

The rolling stock is often completely inappropriate to task. For example, the trains to Stansted Airport have a tiny luggage rack at the end of each carriage. Apparently they think that most people going to the airport won't have any checked luggage. If they'd ever been on one of the trains, they'd know this is entirely wrong.

I guess there's a reason that 70% of the British public are in favour of nationalising the railways.