Nottingham City Transport (NCT), together with Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) and, Almex Information Systems have played a key role in launching a dual contact less card scheme for the County of Nottinghamshire.
From Monday, 10th January 2005, approximately 85,000 passengers were given the opportunity to board Nottingham City Transport buses and use their 'freedomcard' contactless smartcard. The 'freedomcard' gives Nottinghamshire's concessionary fare passengers and scholars the entitlement to travel throughout both the County and City and has been progressively rolled out by Nottinghamshire County Council since Sept 2002. The addition of the NCT fleet extends ' freedomcard' across the majority of the service network and the card is now accepted on approximately 850 vehicles. The 'freedomcard' enables interoperability across the county with no less than three electronic ticketing machine supplier's equipment being utilised.
NCT have been operating a successful commercial smartcard scheme - easyrider since 2001. Available in 4 formats to cater for the majority of travel patterns undertaken by NCT passengers, this now accounts for a third of all NCT journeys with over 50,000 cards in regular use, plus a further 35,000 concessionary cards which are issued by NCT on behalf of Nottingham City Council. Commercial Manager Barrie Burch stated “the smart operation of the county freedom cards across the NCT was launched extremely smoothly with few passenger problems, this is due to the excellent preparation and partnership working between the 3 organisations to ensure a seamless smart transition”.
In joining the operation of these schemes together it makes this the first and largest application of its kind to have two independent card schemes working on the same hardware. |
