Introducing Ticketless On Board
May 11, 2020
UrbanThings is excited to provide an exclusive look at our new product, Ticketless On Board – a lightweight on-board mobility solution for GPS vehicle tracking.
As a team, UrbanThings prides ourselves on listening to our customers and gathering feedback about potential new products and features.
This is how Ticketless On Board was born.
Ticketless On Board is UrbanThings’ newest smart mobility product – an app designed for drivers and other on-board staff to maximise productivity and replace outdated legacy hardware.
Features and benefits of Ticketless On Board
Real-time fleet tracking
Ticketless On Board is designed to give operators a simple, affordable solution for automatic vehicle tracking. Installing and maintaining existing on-board AVL hardware can be prohibitively expensive. Ticketless On Board captures comprehensive data on vehicle location in real-time without the need for dedicated on-board hardware.
Once the app is active on the vehicle, a driver simply logs in and selects their duty to begin tracking the journey. The resulting feed of vehicle positions and estimated arrivals can then be relayed to departure boards, third party developers or directly to the Ticketless™ passenger app to provide accurate real-time travel information for customers. It’s also fully integrated with the Ticketless suite, enabling real-time fleet tracking via the web-based portal
Real-time arrivals predictions engine
Knowing where your vehicles are, solves one piece of the puzzle, but figuring out when they’ll arrive is another thing entirely. Ticketless On Board feeds vehicle positions into our cutting-edge predictions engine, which combines street-level routing with historical journey times. The engine then outputs accurate and continuously updated, live-arrival times.
For passengers, this means being able to access these live arrival times for these services within their transport app, leading to greater customer satisfaction and a streamlined journey.
Portable and rapidly deployed
Ticketless On Board was developed to be lightweight and agile. The app can sit on smartphones or tablets, making it portable enough to integrate with transport networks that frequently change vehicles, operate smaller vehicles such as minibuses or run rapidly-changing routes.
Transport for London is currently using Ticketless On Board for their shuttle services running to and from the Nightingale Hospital in East London. These shuttle services are not part of the main TfL network as they are only used by NHS workers. Transport for London needed a solution that would cope with these new private services, and Ticketless On Board was agile and portable enough to provide real-time vehicle tracking that enables passengers to know when their shuttle is due to arrive.
Affordable non-dedicated hardware
To run Ticketless On Board, UrbanThings can supply rugged, high capacity devices that are shock-proof, dust-proof and waterproof to industrial-grade IP68 standards. The devices come with high-capacity batteries lasting up to 10 hours per duty and 7 days on standby. They are remote-managed to ensure updated software at all times and full compatibility with the Ticketless On Board product. Finally, the devices are securely locked down so that they cannot be used as phones, ensuring legal compliance with regulations regarding phones in vehicle cabs.
Integration with Hex Tags and existing ticketing systems
Ticketless On Board can easily integrate with existing ticketing solutions, and can also be used in conjunction with UrbanThings’ zero-hardware ticketing solution, Hex Tags. This innovative technology is designed to eliminate the need for costly onboard ticketing hardware, whilst still providing transport operators with rich passenger data. When used together with Ticketless On Board, passengers can have access to both RTI and mobile ticketing for adaptable routes and services.
Carl Partridge, CEO at UrbanThings said “It’s exciting to be able to give this first glimpse to the industry of Ticketless On Board following its successful launch with TfL. The solution came about from simply taking the time to listen to our customers about what they needed. We’re hoping that the product will open the door to real-time information for operators and passengers who couldn’t previously access it.”