People in West Yorkshire are now using the MCard travel smartcard to make around £30 million worth of bus and train journeys each year. As many as 400,000 journeys having been made in just one week.
First introduced in 2014, West Yorkshire’s MCard is now the leading smart card travel in the North and one of the largest and most successful outside of London’s long-established Oyster card.
MCards can be loaded with a range of multi-operator bus and train travel products, including weekly or monthly tickets and day-savers, which are all designed to give passengers the best value for money when travelling.
They can be used on buses and trains throughout West Yorkshire with passengers using their MCard simply to tap on as they board any bus or at train station ticket gates.
Pink cards, which are the most widely used MCard don’t have a photograph on them, so they can be shared to spread the savings among family and friends.
White Pay-As-You-Go MCards can be topped up in £5 increments, and young people with one of the range of blue Young Person’s Photocards or with a green 19-25 Student card can buy money-saving weekly or monthly bus travel.
Using an MCard Family DayRover, up to five people can travel throughout West Yorkshire for as little as £12.60. When bought in multiples of 3, 5 or 10, MCard Bus Day Savers provide countywide bus travel for only £5 per day, and Park and Ride smartcards from Elland Road or Temple Green from just £2.70 per day.
Full details of the MCards available and the saving that passengers can make can be found at www.m-card.co.uk(external link) .
MCards make it easier for people to use local bus and train services, as well as helping to reduce delays while people search for cash and wait for change.
West Yorkshire Combined Authority is committed to improving the local transport network, which in turn underpins our local economy by connecting people with jobs and businesses with customers and suppliers. Making bus and train travel simpler, more affordable and more reliable with MCard, is part of this work.
When MCards were introduced, in 2014, top-ups were available at bus stations Travel Centres and at 700 West Yorkshire Payzone stores.
Now, cards can be topped up online and there are automatic MCard ticket machines at Bradford Interchange and at Castleford, Dewsbury, Halifax, Huddersfield, Keighley Leeds Pontefract and Wakefield Bus Stations. There are also MCard ticket machines at 38 of West Yorkshire’s 69 rail stations.
And, over 11,000 people in West Yorkshire have downloaded the MCard app that enables them to buy and load travel tickets anytime, anywhere straight from any Android smartphone.
West Yorkshire Combined Authority is also using MCards to increase efficiency by using the data collected when smartcards are tapped on bus ticket machines or station ticket gates to calculate accurately the amounts to reimburse bus and train companies for MCard journeys made.
MCards are fully compliant with the ITSO Specification, which is a secure technical electronic platform that covers all components of transport smartcard schemes and defines how different smart ticketing systems should ‘talk’ to each other.
Building ITSO into MCards ensures they can be read by smartcard reading infrastructure available at main rail stations and on the vast majority of buses, including those run by the almost 50 bus companies in West Yorkshire.
People can find out more about MCard and the app at www.m-card.co.uk(external link) following @MCardtravel(external link) on Twitter or visiting the MCard Facebook page(external link)