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Foreword

The Public Transport Fares Toolkit is part of a comprehensive library of reference and capacity building resources. They have been prepared by the World Bank for policymakers and senior technical managers in urban transport. This particular resource is part of a public transport toolkit suite, including the Urban Bus Toolkit and the Passenger Transport ITS Toolkit.

The objective of the toolkit is to provide a basic understanding of all aspects of Fare Collection Systems for urban passenger transport related to their policies and practices. The toolkit serves as a step by step guide that helps urban transport leaders, and the organizations that they lead, to plan, design and implement an enhanced fare collection system to improve the sustainability and effectiveness of the passenger transport system in their cities.

It provides capacity development support in understanding:

  • The potential policy and operational objectives for the fare collection system
  • The fares practices and concessions that can be planned to attain those objectives
  • The operational procedures that can be followed to fulfill those practices
  • The technologies that can support the effectiveness of those procedures

The target users for the toolkit are policy and investment decision makers in cities considering whether to enhance their fare collection systems. The focus of the toolkit is on urban passenger transport; it does not seek to address the full domain of extra-urban or inter-city passenger transport, nor the unique needs of demand-responsive transport. The policies and practices covered in the toolkit are based on an initial assessment of the strategic issues and institutional frameworks that govern the selection of objectives for the fare collection system.

The toolkit is based on field research in the first half of 2011, and thus represents general international practice at that time. However, fare collection is a constantly developing sector, both in its applications and its technologies. The interested reader will be able to examine the latest developments through links to live sites that are provided in the website part of this toolkit. There is also a wide range of suppliers of the technologies, and each has their own websites where more information can be found.

This Fares Toolkit consists of two parts:

  • A short Companion Guide which provides a brief introduction to the Toolkit and the material it contains, and instructions for the use of the website;
  • A Website, which elaborates the contents of the Companion Guide, and provides more detailed information for the policy maker and the system operator.

The Toolkit has been prepared under the supervision of Ajay Kumar, OP Agarwal and Sam Zimmerman from the World Bank, and has been funded by the Sub-Saharan Africa Transport Policy Program (SSATP).