GMV takes on the modernization of Pamplona’s Transporte Urbano Comarcal
The technology multinational GMV has won the public tender for supply, installation, integration, commissioning and maintenance of the fleet-management and passenger-information system, the communication system and onboard electronic fare-collection system on the buses of Pamplona’s district transport system, Transporte Urbano Comarcal (TUC).
TCC, as the firm holding TUC’s service concession, has turned to GMV for the new technological supply of a 150-bus and 541-bus-stop public passenger-transport system serving 340,000 residents on 25 day lines and 10 night lines.
Under this recently awarded contract GMV will be rolling out the new fleet-management, communications and ticketing systems and also providing technical aftersales support during the 4-year warranty period plus maintenance for 5 years thereafter.
The supply scope of this new fleet-management and passenger-information system will include a new Control Center and onboard equipment fitted on 150 buses. This onboard equipment includes new voice-, IP- and data-communication devices for the driver, all governed by an automatic power management system. The passenger-information setup will connect up to the bus’s inside and outside information panels while also catering for driver announcements to passengers, automatic announcements of bus-stop arrivals for the visually impaired plus a groundbreaking system of onboard bluetooth location beacons to inform bus-stop-waiting blind people of the position of the bus upon arrival. Other features are ridership counting devices and an eco-driving system.
The Control Center, for its part, will be fitted with advanced features of fleet management, regulation, efficient-driving analysis and alarm management to make the service easier to run and more interoperable with other systems, using for this purpose an architecture based on open protocols and market standards.
The communications system will include onboard IP communications for 150 buses that deal with all information exchanges with the Control Center as well as providing passengers with onboard Wi-Fi access.
The new electronic fare-collection system will include its own control center and onboard equipment for 150 buses, comprising mainly driver consoles, passenger read-write units and inspection terminals. All this will not only cater for the current TUC farecard but will also increase integration capacities with EMV contactless bankcards and the reading of QR codes, facilitating future operability with other means of transport. Furthermore, the new system will also be able to phase in compatibility with the future Single Navarre Farecard (Tarjeta Única de Transportes de Navarra: TUTN) and the future Spanish Contactless Card (Tarjeta Española Sin Contacto: TESC). The equipment will be enabled for all these aforementioned farecards both in physical form and as emulated by cellphones using NFC technology.
The EMV payment standard will allow any bankcard holder, whether physical or virtual in his or her cellphone, to access the means of transport directly without any need for previous registration or ticket purchase and in the certainty that a post-payment system will guarantee him or her the most favorable fare in accordance with the actual use made of the public-transport system. The new system will also harden security in card-terminal transactions, since the EMV card validates transactions on the basis of the information stored in its chip.
With this project the Comarca of Pamplona (the Comarca is Spain’s sub-provincial administrative division) and the concessionaire TCC, taking up GMV’s completely integrated, state-of-the-art fleet-management and passenger-information, communications and ticketing system, groundbreaking in its capacity and interoperability, become true public-transport trailblazers in Spain, showcasing the latest technological developments.
In 2018 GMV has also won a far-reaching EMV ticketing contract for running the public transport system of the whole Balearic Isles plus a new EMV ticketing system for the urban transport of Almeria city. This new contract award in the Comarca of Pamplona makes GMV a Spanish leader in the implementation of EMV technology in the public transport sector.