By Richard Powell, transport consultant and former head of engineering and transportation at Southampton City Council.

The stimulus for the Southampton "SmartCities" citizen smart card initiative was the bold promise by the Prime Minister in March 2000 that "by 2005 all public services that can feasibly be delivered electronically, will be".

One of Southampton City Council's responses to the initiative was to lead the SmartCities project, the objective of which was to develop a dynamic, multi-application smart card scheme to enable citizens to benefit from a smart card environment.

By 2004, the council and Southampton's university had produced two card "families", one each for their respective communities. The council's consisted of about 8,000 relatively expensive Palmera Protect hybrid cards, while the university had about 25,000 relatively cheap MiFare 1k cards, to which it was adding each year with its student intake. The outstanding and surviving feature of these two families was that the encodings of the MiFare elements were so designed as to be able, then and now, to share two applications, which were the university's franchised Unilink bus service ticketing and the city's libraries.

Otherwise, the concepts diverged. The council aimed generally for high-end application demonstrations, such as school catering and attendance, reward schemes and public key infrastructure, with the intention of being able to develop access to citizen services, such as electronic voting. This demanded the use of the contact chip. The university, meanwhile, focused on a much wider range of simpler applications on its 1k chip, generally using the card as a simple, but secure, key to multiple useful opportunities for its community.

The objective of the transport project was to bring the city's main bus operators up to the same level of smart card use as Unilink, using a bespoke version of the encoding developed by Wayfarer Transit Systems, since all main operators at the time used Wayfarer 3 ticket machines.

In addition, the Bus Smart Card project had to be integrated with two real time passenger information systems, one being developed by Hampshire County Council and the other by Southampton City Council, both as spin-offs of the ROMANSE Traffic and Travel Information System. The load this all placed on the electronic ticket machines involved replacing them all.

The Southampton project was launched in October 2003, with the objective of extending the benefits of smart card ticketing on the Unilink bus service to the services of the two other main city bus operators by February 2005, as the first stage of a proposed migration to ITSO ticketing. In spite of very considerable assistance from the government the first stage is still incomplete.

The inspiration and shadow of ITSO looms large in the project. ITSO was founded under government auspices in 1998 to facilitate the development of an interoperable smart environment by developing, operating and managing, a specification for it. It is a not-forprofit organisation that, in the author's opinion, was cast adrift to make its commercial way far too early, before its much-delayed specification was sufficiently robust to be usable. The cost to the supplier industry of testing to meet the constant updating of the specification has multiplied by a factor of up to seven from initial estimates, and costs are necessarily being passed on to an increasingly resistant local authority and bus industry market.

As a result, the concept has been undermined by being forced to adopt a pricing model for products and processes not yet market-ready, causing a sceptical bus industry to form a negative view of it. At the same time, the 2008 ENCTS changes required TCAs to put in an enormous effort in a desperately compressed timescale to produce over 10 million ITSO cards, the vast majority of which will only ever be used as very expensive flash cards before they expire in five years' time.

The reasons for the delays to the Southampton bus project were legion. Both in terms of transport and smart cards, the council was, and remains, under-resourced. The lack of a corporate smart card policy and strategy is a missing element that denies an appropriate focus for those seeking to implement related initiatives.

As the implications of smart card working, in terms of requiring the reengineering of some of their systems and processes, began to become apparent to the bus industry, the operators started to ask questions of system suppliers that the suppliers were not ready to respond to; issues surrounding system architecture, data flow volumetrics, and security had not been part of the normal discourse of the industry at the level of interfacing with ticket machine suppliers. The increasing and appropriate concerns of operators did not immediately trigger a corresponding response from the suppliers, with the development of some mutual antagonism, as well as further delays.

The issue of ITSO and concessionary fares changes impacted both directly and indirectly on the project. Directly because they all required changes of direction from what had previously been planned, and indirectly because they changed the shape and focus of the bus industry and its suppliers.

As far as the council is concerned, it may be that "initiative overload" from central government has contributed to distracting its attention from the benefits that the development of a citizen smart card promised to deliver. It does not have a coherent view about what it can or should do with smart cards, even though it has the platform, systems and in-house expertise to do them. These are of substantial interest locally in transport, where initial investigations into using ITSO smart cards on the council's Itchen Toll Bridge, in its car parks, on the ferries that link the city to the Isle of Wight, and even in conjunction with the football club for match-day transport and possibly even stadium entry showed promising possibilities.

The resources now created are of interest on a sub-regional basis, where the Transport for South Hampshire initiative is seeking a more integrated solution to transport issues for the area between and including Southampton and Portsmouth in a cooperative partnership between the three transport authorities that also involves operators of all modes of public transport in the area. The prospect of ITSO ticketing on the South West Trains franchise within the next couple of years opens up enormous interoperable ticketing opportunities. Different population sectors could and should be addressed through different manifestations of the card family, resuscitating the largely successful schools initiative, and making far better use of the involvement of the library service, with its key relationships with wider community sectors, its distributed service points, and its information service role, to mutual benefit.