Public Transport and Ticketing in Europe
Interoperability begins on our own doorstep and must not end at national borders. That is why we work closely with our partners in neighboring European countries.
These are the French Agence française pour l'information multimodale et la billettique (AFIMB), the Belgian Calypso Network Association, the British ITSO and, of course, the International Association of Public Transport (UITP).
Founding member of the Smart Ticketing Alliance
Together with our partners AFIMB, Calypso, ITSO and UITP, we founded the Smart Ticketing Alliance (STA) in 2015. The STA is a non-profit association that promotes cooperation between national and regional smart ticketing systems to create interoperable smart ticketing across Europe. One focus topic of the STA is, for example, account-based ticketing.
Visit STA
How ticketing works in Europe
Use bus, train and streetcar with one ticket? In Germany, that's standard; abroad, it's a rarity. There are also only a handful of countries where access to public transportation is free of barriers, gates and barriers. Electronic ticketing, on the other hand, is also widespread in other European countries.
In the Netherlands, for example, the five largest transport companies founded Trans Link Systems in 2002 and introduced the OV-chipkaart electronic ticket.
The career of the Oystercard also began in London in 2002, when the chip card was distributed on a trial basis to 80,000 employees of the transport company Transport for London. Since 2003, the Oystercard has been available to everyone as a season ticket (weekly and monthly tickets) and as a prepaid card for individual journeys with billing based on the best-price principle.