Euclid, suppliers of customised smart travel management solutions, and Unicard, providers of smart ticketing and payment solutions to the public transport sector, today announced a joint initiative supporting concessionary bus travel throughout Scotland for disabled children under the age of five with a companion. Euclid and Unicard regularly engage in joint implementations and each company is independently contracted for the provision of services into Transport Scotland. A back-office solution comprising Euclid’s Fareshare platform and Unicard’s ITSO HOPS supports the extension of Transport Scotland’s National Concessionary Travel Scheme (NCTS) to accommodate eligible disabled under-fives and accompanying adult.
Children in Scotland under the age of five are eligible for free bus travel. However, the new legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament entitles eligible disabled children under the age of five to travel with a companion at no extra cost. To take advantage of the new scheme, disabled under 5s will be able to apply for a National Entitlement Card which provides eligibility to be accompanied by an adult companion travelling free of charge. The NEC is ITSO enabled, so every journey will be processed by Unicard’s HOPS as standard practice. Those transactions are then reconciled by Euclid’s Fareshare platform, which validates the concession, processes the usage data and calculates the correct reimbursement to the relevant bus operator.
Gareth Neal, Project Manager at Euclid: “Delivering the companion concession scheme provides a vital service that helps the community and we’re delighted to be making such a valuable contribution. Our solution classifies journeys and manages settlements with commercial operators, supporting all NEC travel schemes. By holding in excess of one billion transactions, Fareshare is used to generate reports, study passenger trends, analyse payments to operators and even identify fraudulent behaviour. Euclid will continue to support Transport Scotland as they adapt their travel schemes to provide more new passenger services”.
Sean Dickinson, CEO of Unicard, added: “We’re very proud to be playing an important role in delivering this concessionary travel scheme. The deployment marks another milestone in the long-term relationship between Euclid and Unicard. We’ve worked jointly on a number of major deployments across the UK, where our combined back-office solution has enabled customers to deliver concessionary and commercial services at scale. We’re committed to ensuring that all eligible passengers have access to concessionary travel, and our products and services enable the addition of new capabilities to meet the ever-changing requirements of the smart ticketing marketplace”.
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About Euclid
Based in Hampshire, Euclid is the largest ITSO smartcard provider, issuing concessionary cards from its secure bureau to 90% of English councils on a same day service. The company has over 30 years’ experience in smart / ID schemes, including software and hardware development. Euclid’s transport ticketing portfolio includes the Faredeal Concessions Management System which hosts almost 3 million concessionaires, also the Fareshare re-imbursement system. This latter is installed across numerous clients; it includes a reports module which utilises the world’s most powerful, associative indexing engine at its core, with data being compressed and optimised in-memory for maximum performance.
Customer service and on time / on budget delivery are critical for Euclid, with a demonstrable record of always achieving this aim.
About Unicard
Unicard is a provider of transport management solutions enabling Local Authorities and commercial transport operators alike to launch and manage their own smart ticketing schemes. The portfolio of fully hosted and managed solutions supports travel scheme expansion from single usage or concession, to multi-modal and multi-operator configurations.
Unicard’s solutions are built around a complete suite of software products using open and distributed architectures. We have direct relationships with organisations, but we also partner with third party service suppliers to ensure that our customers benefit from comprehensive travel solutions. This partnership culture also enables us to provide OEM software components to ITSO certified terminals and systems from transport equipment suppliers and system integrators.
About the National Concessionary Travel Scheme (NCTS)
The NCTS is managed by Transport Scotland on behalf of the Scottish Government and provide free bus travel for eligible residents of Scotland using the National Entitlement Card (NEC). The NEC also allows for free companion travel for eligible disabled people, which has been extended to include eligible disabled children under 5 from 1 April 2021.