All-routes ticket here by World Cup

Photo / Paul Estcourt

Aucklanders are promised an electronic ticket for buses, trains and ferries in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, under an $87 million contract signed yesterday.

After years of waiting, passengers can expect a ticket evolved from the successful Octopus system, which handles about 11 million trips every day around Hong Kong - where it was introduced in 1997 as the world's first "contact-less" transport smart card.

Octopus, a consortium of Hong Kong transport operators, has been subcontracted by French electronics giant Thales to supply a central clearing house for an Auckland smart card and ultimately tickets to be developed in other cities by the national Transport Agency.

A deal signed yesterday between Thales and the Auckland Regional Transport Authority after two years of negotiations is for $47 million of capital work and for $4 million of operating costs for each of the first 10 years of the proposed new system.

Authority chairman Rabin Rabindran said Thales had more than 40 years' experience in delivering ticketing programmes to more than 100 cities in at least 50 countries, and the latest system would give passengers "the equivalent of the keys to Auckland's transport system".

Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee said the contract round had not been easy, but integrated ticking was "the fundamental piece of the jigsaw puzzle that will put Auckland's public transport system together".

The transport authority will spend an extra $11 million outside the contract on development activities including civil work needed to lay cabling to about 40 railway stations and 11 ferry terminals, taking overall capital costs to $58 million.

But the Government will pay 74 per cent of the capital costs through the Transport Agency, leaving ratepayers to contribute just over $15 million, a figure which has scraped in within the regional council's 10-year budget. The national agency will also cover 60 per cent of the scheme's operating costs.

Auckland ratepayers earlier faced a $32 million contribution to $80 million of capital spending approved in principle by the agency, before it decided to foot the bill for a central clearing house for development into a national scheme.

Part of the reason for the reduced spending will be a requirement for transport operators to pay for their own ticketing machines, to comply with national standards to plug into the new system.

Despite delays to the tendering round which earlier left the regional transport authority pessimistic about having an integrated ticket available for the Rugby World Cup, chief executive Fergus Gammie said yesterday that a smart card with "base functionality" would be rolled out before kick-off in September 2011.

Although it is likely to take three years for a roll-out through the whole region combined with a simplification of Auckland's multitudinous transport fares, authority project director Greg Innes promised that a "seamless" system across buses, trains and ferries would be available in some form.

Mr Rabindran said there would be no need for passengers to carry cash or wallets or purses full of different tickets for different operators, and there was potential for fare discounts compared with cash purchases.

Boarding times would be faster with a "tag on-tag off" system.

Passengers may come to regard it as a "beep on-beep off" system, according to a sound recognised by millions of Hong Kong residents and their visitors as they start and complete their trips.

Buses will be equipped with "contact-less" sensors, but railway stations and ferry terminals will have consoles for passengers to wave their cards past.

Mr Ellis said that although the sensors would have a 10cm range, passengers would be encouraged to touch their cards to them to make doubly sure of their transactions.

Octopus International Projects representative Brian Chambers said his company would ensure its New Zealand clearing house was on the international technological forefront.

Thales Australia vice-president Pierre Maciejowski said his company intended creating 60 to 70 local jobs in commissioning the project, and also hoped to broaden naval supply work to consolidate its New Zealand presence.

Yesterday's contract signing came less than a week after Infratil subsidiary Snapper Services announced plans to equip the Auckland fleet of its sister company NZ Bus with a smart card used by up to 90,000 Wellington passengers. Mr Gammie said there may be "some room" for compatibility between the Snapper card and the Thales contract.