Radical new rail ticket trial to charge for journeys based on GPS movements

Even train tickets using a QR code could soon be out of date, with passengers tracking their journeys on their phones instead.

A new type of ticket is being trialled from today, which uses GPS data to work out which trains were taken and the distance travelled.

The idea is that passengers wouldn’t have to buy a ticket in advance, but check in using an app, and be charged the best value fare automatically at the end of the day.

For ticket inspections and to go through ticket barriers, a unique bar code will pop up in the app to be scanned. 

The nine month ‘pay as you go’ trial will run on four routes run by East Midlands Railway and Northern.

It’s meant to make fares more simple, but a charity boss warned that services should still be easily to access without a smartphone, with research showing that over five million people in the UK struggle due to everything moving online.

Contactless ticketing is already ‘popular’ in London and the South East, and the government plans to roll it out in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands too.

While many love the ease of tapping in and out, not everyone is happy about the move towards needing a phone for everything from parking to paying for shopping.

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Recent research by Age UK found that many older people are unhappy with the pace of change, with a significant number ‘not online at all’.

The study found that 1 in 3 (31%) of those over 60 – equivalent to 5.1 million people – said life is much harder compared to five years ago because the things they want to do are online, while more than half (53%) of respondents felt frustrated by being recommended to access services online, rather than in person or over the phone.

Charity director Caroline Abrahams told Metro: ‘There’s no doubt that there are many benefits for older people who can navigate apps on smartphones or want to go online and are able to do so.

‘But it is really important that whether older people use computers or not, they can still easily access the services they need.’

It’s also not clear what would happen if a passenger’s phone battery ran out during their journey, given GPS services won’t work if this happens (something that can also be a problem for standard e-tickets).

Alex Hornby, Northern rail commercial boss, said: ‘Historically, ticketing across the rail industry has been far too complicated and so anything that makes the customer experience simpler has my vote.

‘We’ve already seen a huge swing away from physical tickets to digital alternatives, which now make up over 80% of journeys on our network.’

Trials are inititially limited to 1,000 passengers on each route, with people able to sign up via the train operators’ website.

The government said that the GPS tech has already been ‘tested widely’ in Switzerland, Denmark and Scotland, but never yet in England.

The plans are backed by nearly a million pounds of government funding, intended as part of wider plans to overhaul the rail system, planning to bring most train operators into public ownership by 2027.

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