Improved passenger ticket control in easily accessible public city trams

RFID/NFC-based tickets in public transportation have become common over the years. The use of this technology brought many benefits along with it. As things were getting easier for passengers, ticket control in the majority of the tram/train network in European cities have not been changed a lot. Manual inspection of tickets is still being done by a ticket inspector onboard. It takes a fair amount of time for ticket inspectors to manual validate the tickets and it is not done on every ride. Therefore, randomly inspection of tickets and the processing time creates lots of opportunities for fare dodgers to hop on and off the tram without holding a valid ticket. This paper proposes a system which aims at reducing RFID ticket inspection time as well as simplification of the ticket inspection process. The results of the simulation show that it is possible to reduce inspection/validating time compared to the traditional method of manual inspection for every tram and possibly discourage fare dodging substantially.