Digitalized Ticketing system
India has one-third of the biggest cap in terms of population compared to the US or any country in Europe. It has a very large market for all kinds of b2b, b2c, c2c, c2b. in a place like India, transport has been a very huge demanding industry I.e an example, Tamilnadu a province in India which holds 67 Million of population alone. Technology has been widely spread across the nation yet there was no digitalized system that can help people to live better for a day to day activities like public bus transportation.
Chennai is the capital of Tamilnadu which holds a 7 Million population in the entire city. MTC (Madras Transport Corporation) is a huge public bus transportation system running in Chennai. MTC has a total of 830 routes with its largest terminus being the M.G.R. Bus Terminus in Chennai. There are problems that were faced by every passenger traveling across the city.
- Fair exchange
- Paper wastage
- Missing tickets
- Theft identifications
- Tracking bus
- Tracking the records
- etc.,
Fair exchange:
The fair exchange has been really a huge issue in MTC services.
if you bring 100 rs for a 10 rupees ticket these are cases that mayhappen
you may get a ticket but will be asked to get the change at the end of travel, passengers may forget the remaining when landing at the destination or the conductor may give less fair due to not having exact change or you may not even get a ticket and asked to get down immediately after you board
Paper wastage:
7.5 Millions of people travel a day across Chennai. all these passengers will get printed tickets from an Automatic Bus fare ticketing machine or solid paper tickets. Technology improved over many years but tickets have never changed their form. all these are one-time tickets that are of no use at end of the journey. estimated wastage of 7.5 million people tickets per day would be thousands of paper roles which indeed not a good eco-friendly way of living a life
Missing Tickets:
Passengers get their tickets after they board the bus but there are changes they miss the tickets and during random checking, they get caught traveling without tickets. The MTC leaves a penalty of Rs 500 for traveling without a ticket or the necessary concession passes.
Theft identifications:
Compared to other countries Indian transportation always has a very huge rush in public transportation that being said stealing, theft, pickpocketing, etc been happening for a very long time. After the incident happens there is no trace of who was traveling along with the passengers to help with law investigations.
Tracking bus:
Tracking transportations are very common these days yet public transportation never had any such innovations to help people's lives better. Tracking can be done in various ways, one possible way is having GPS attached to the bus. But the count total MTC buses are 3688. It is not possible to spend on this large system to support GPS trackers on it.
Crowdsourcing is the best way to collect the details from passengers or conductors when the ticket gets issued and for which bus and which stage. these details can be used to show a real-time tracking of buses at ease
Tracking the records:
At the end of every trip, the conductor has to submit the report of the trip stats and belonging which will be calculated among the ticket consumption and other stats like stage details with a number of passengers on-boarded, conductors have a huge work of noting every nit of stage details and provide tickets appropriately. This may end up balancing inconsistencies with respect to the stats. They may need to compensate with their own pockets.
Yet there are a lot of unidentified problems in the current way of obtaining a ticket to travel in public transportations.
To provide a viable solution for this, India can move forward with automated ticket vending but as the population strength is huge due to that it's trivial to assume people will get their tickets with humps. The ecosystem doesn’t support the same way as other countries do.
A simple mobilized and digital solution would do, say an application that can book tickets for us, get the ticket verified by the conductor and help complete the journey without hustle.
We developed a prototype solution which is TickE. TickE is an MTC ticket booking application that helps in booking tickets for MTC busses, finding routes, tracking buses, viewing fares, viewing history of travels, and maintaining wallet and balance to track travel expenses in public transport for end users. And for conductors, validate tickets, start a trip with a bus number and trip number, maintain stage sheets, and balances, track the number of people onboard, stats about a trip at the end, submit wallet belongings, etc., all the above problems have been greatly identified and can be solvable using this application. We made a prototype that completes a journey of this ticketing
This is a simple rough prototype that we came up with a few years before with PHP, MySQL, and android (java). We planned to evolve this into a fully-fledged application with flutter for mobile app development and Golang for backend development, Postgres as the primary database.
Update 7th July 2022:
Some of the cities in India have already started implementing digital ticketing systems. Cities like Bangalore, and Mumbai were ongoing the digital process whereas Chennai is on its way to engaging passengers with digital ticketing.
Ticket server — https://github.com/hsivakum/mtc-ticket-server
Ticket mobile app — https://github.com/hsivakum/mtc-bus-ticket
Conductor app — https://github.com/hsivakum/conductor-scan
