Introduction
Seamless multimodal and multi-operator travel across Europe is a major goal of EU transport policy. This goal is based on environmental arguments (less pollution, sustainability, EU climate targets), economic arguments (less energy consumption, less congestion) and social arguments (making it easier for citizens to work, study, and do business across borders).
One of the facilitators of this European transport is the development of a standard to integrate electronic ticketing for all public transport modes in all countries of Europe.
This standard shall elaborate an EU-wide interoperable barcode and is one component in a whole series of initiatives to arrive at seamless travel in Europe.
To be effective, this standard should include all surface transport. This work is in line with the objectives of current and upcoming EU legislation. CEN/CENELEC oversees the barcode standardization process and has created a BT4PT workgroup.
Actual work in the BT4PT workgroup
To support the usage of the interoperable barcode and to secure the standard to be future proof, the BT4PT workgroup is now collecting as much real-life information as possible (both current and planned) to define the “payload” of the barcode.
This payload is the compilation of the contractual data that is needed to do all manual or automated operations on the Tickets/contracts like validation, control and aftersales operations.
The focus is on collecting the information stored in/on tickets, like validity date/time, zone where a ticket is valid, class, … as well as the restrictions (terms) and conditions to the validation and inspection activities in ticketing in Public Transport. Tickets can be of any kind, we do not limit the info collection to actual barcode tickets only.
The method adopted by the BT4PT workgroup to collect this information is to share a questionnaire with as many relevant stakeholders as possible. This information will then be treated to define a dataset that is suitable for all parties.
If you think another (partner) company could be relevant to receive this questionnaire too, just inform us so we can include them in the panel.
BT4PT Questionnaire
This questionnaire has been created to get as much information as possible about the way ticketing is organized in your company.
We are interested in all the elements that are used on your ticketing/ in your ticketing data, and also in the size of the elements (e.g. how are the stops, stations, zones, … encoded on your ticket) and the number of times each element is potentially repeated in one ticket (e.g. the list of zones that can figure on one ticket).
Apart from that, we are looking for “exotic data-elements”, elements that are very specific – they often exist in the rules & conditions part of the data – and need to be represented in the dataset on the ticket.
We would like to receive your answers before 31 August at questionnaire@BT4PT.eu