Joburg to call for e-ticket tenders

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 28 Nov 2007

The City of Johannesburg will likely next year call for expressions of interest, as well as tenders, for a ticketing solution for the R2 billion Rea Vaya bus rapid transit system that has to be in place for the FIFA Confederation Cup, in June 2009.

French defence and transport group Thales recently won a R100 million contract from the builders of the Gautrain to develop and install a "contactless e-ticketing solution" for the rapid rail system.

Thales Transportation Systems MD Jean-Louis Oli'e says its solution will be innovative and will exclusively use disposable and re-usable contactless smart cards with embedded chips. "The proposed solution will also be interoperable so commuters can use the same contactless smart card for different services: the Gautrain, Gautrain station car parks and the Gautrain bus feeder and distributor system," known as Rea Vaya, in Johannesburg.

But City of Johannesburg spokesman Kgamanyane Maphologela says the city must still decide on a vendor for its part of that system. "Rea Vaya and Gautrain fare systems are intended to be interoperable, ie, we plan to be able to read their tickets, and they will be able to read ours," he says, but it "does not mean the same commercial suppliers of the equipment".

"In due course, the city will be calling for expressions of interest, and subsequently for tenders for the Rea Vaya fare system," Maphologela adds.

Maphologela has previously said the city`s solution "will most probably be a smart card system based on bank-issued smart cards - where commercial banks provide the back-office financial management and payment of operators or government - as opposed to smart cards issued by operators or fare system vendors".

"This type of e-payment system offers opportunities - among other things - to increase the proportion of users who are included in the banking system," he says.

City executive director of transport Bob Stanway has said phase 1A of the Rea Vaya project is to be in place for the Confederations Cup and phase 1B is to be in place for 2010. The two phases together will cost R2 billion. The full phase one will be completed by 2013 and the whole system will be fully deployed beyond 2020.