No integrated transport ticket until 2010

The long-awaited integrated ticketing system for public transport will not be fully operational until 2010, the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA) has told Dublin City Council.

Councillors from all parties last night said they were shocked and disappointed the single ticketing scheme for buses, Dart, Irish Rail, Luas and metro systems will be delayed for at least three years, and that €13 million of the €50 million budget for the project has already been spent.

Tim Gaston, director of the project, said the RPA hoped to launch limited integration with the "smartcard" for use on both Luas and rail services in September 2009, but a fully integrated card for all journeys on any type of public transport and some private buses would not be available for at least a year after that.

Following the integration of the scheme, which Mr Gaston said would be used by some 250,000 passengers a year, cash customers would pay more for their journeys than those using smartcards, he said. Smartcards could be topped up in shops, online, at station kiosks or from a user's bank account.

Integrated ticketing was proposed in a report by an Oireachtas transport committee in the late 1990s. In November 2000, then minister for public enterprise Mary O'Rourke approved a plan for the introduction of the smartcard system from late 2002.

However, little progress was made and the project was handed over to the RPA, which was due to introduce the scheme in 2005.

When in 2006 there was no sign of a smartcard, the RPA appeared before another Oireachtas transport committee and said it had begun a procurement process to find a company to develop the cards the previous year. Confusion arose when it emerged Dublin Bus was simultaneously seeking companies to develop its own smartcards.

In July 2006, then minister for transport Martin Cullen established the Integrated Ticketing Project Board to develop the project.

Dublin Bus will still be introducing its smartcards in the coming months, Mr Gaston said. All participants would now "build" their own system, he said, and a separate company would be established to integrate them.

This would collect the revenue when a customer buys or tops up a smartcard, and distribute the proceeds to the owners of whichever mode of transport the customer uses, within 24 hours of the journey.