The NTA has chosen a company to bring in contactless fare payments on buses, trains and trams – Dublin Inquirer

The National Transport Authority has awarded a contract to Spanish company Indra to replace “the aging legacy Leap card system nationally”, an NTA spokesperson said. 

The plan is that the new system will let people pay their fare for the bus, Luas, or train with their contactless bank card or phone or other device. 

At its 22 March meeting, the NTA’s board approved the award of this “framework agreement” to Indra, which calls itself “one of the leading global defence, aerospace and technology companies”.

“This is a significant contract worth hundreds of millions of euros over the potential term of the contract,” Indra said in a 29 April statement. 

The project will help get people onto buses quicker, making it easier to pay without cash, and also to pay the best fare without stopping to tell the driver where they are going, according to the website of the BusConnects project, the ongoing redesign of the bus network. 

That should help the whole bus network flow more smoothly, the website says. “The second biggest source of bus delays, after traffic congestion, is the payment process at bus stops.”

“This is a large and complex technology project and it is likely to take between three to four years to fully roll out the new system,” it says. “Exact timelines will be finalised in the coming months as the newly appointed supplier commences the detailed design stage of the project.” 

The project

The new system Indra has been hired to install will accept payments by bank card, mobile phone or smart watch, the company’s April press statement said.

“Moreover, thanks to Account-Based Ticketing (ABT), a much more advanced and efficient model, customers will be guaranteed the best fares and discounts in keeping with their profile or the group to which they belong,” it said. 

The project will come to the greater Dublin area first, the NTA spokesperson said last week. It will cover “buses, trams, trains and commuter buses, a large proportion of which is part of the overall BusConnects Programme for Dublin”, he said. 

“The capital cost of the solution in GDA is not finalised but is of the order of €100m covering ticket machines, platform validators, train station gates, the cloud based back-office software solution etc.,” he said.

Who is Indra?

Indra doesn’t just do ticketing systems, it’s also a defence contractor.

Indra, a Madrid-based defence, aerospace and technology company, installs railway ticketing systems, road traffic toll and signalling systems, and air defence systems, among other products . 

The company’s 2023 “sustainability report” said it believed that its defence business made its business less attractive in several ways. 

“The recent conflicts in Ukraine and Israel may have had a negative impact on public perceptions of the defence industry,” the report says. “This … may affect defence companies’ ability to form long-term relationships with investors, employees, or stakeholders in general.”

In the report, a section called “Impact of the conflict in Ukraine on Indra’s business” says that “the company ceased its operations in Russia and Ukraine at the beginning of the conflict”. 

That section is followed by a section titled “Conflict in the Middle East”. This section does not say Indra ceased operations in Israel at the start of the conflict in Gaza.

Indra has not replied yet to queries sent Friday asking what contracts it has in Israel and how it would respond to calls to avoid doing business in that country, given its ongoing war crimes in Gaza.

United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese told the UN’s Human Rights Council in March that “There are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide … has been met.” 

In 2014, Indra sent a delegation that talked to “Israeli companies in the fields of transportation, security and security (Homeland Security) and digital medicine”. 

It is not clear whether Indra has won any security- or defence-related business there since then. 

However, the company won a contract in 2022 to put in a toll-ing system on “Highway 20, which connects Tel Aviv with the rest of the country” , and maintain it for 10 years. 

Asked about Indra’s defence business, and the company’s work in Israel, a spokesperson for the NTA said, “The procurement of this solution and the appointment of Indra as a transport technology ticketing service provider was conducted in full compliance with EU Public Procurement regulations.”