NEW DELHI: The final phase trials of the contactless E-ticketing app 'Chartr' will begin in all 2990 buses of Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System (DIMTS) Ltd. from Monday. The Transport Department of the Delhi Government is all set for its one-month final phase of trial of the contactless e-ticketing services that was launched in August 2020, and scaled up in the wake of the COVID pandemic. The trial would cover all the routes of DIMTS buses. In the last week of February, the trial of this app was extended to all 3760 DTC buses till March 31st.
The trial is being conducted by a special Task Force constituted for this purpose by the Transport Minister which consist of expert members from the Transport Department, Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC), Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System Ltd. (DIMTS), Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-D) and World Resources Institute (WRI). The mobile e-ticketing App has been developed with the technical support of IIIT-Delhi.
ber 473. The total number of buses increased to 550 thereafter in a phased manner. In DTC, the trial of this online ticketing app was started in September last year on route 534 in Gazipur and Hasanpur depots. It started in a total of 35 buses from both depots. After the success in these depots, e-ticketing was scaled in all depots of DTC in a phased manner. Currently, e-ticketing is live on a trial basis in all buses and routes of DTC. The trials also included exhaustive passenger surveys, to ensure maximum commuter-friendliness of the App.
The total daily ticket booking through 'Chartr' app is around 10, 000 per day. In the last 10 days, the ticket count through this app has witnessed a 10% day on day increase. The percentage of total tickets booked through this app on a daily basis is 1.5%, which has gone up to 6% on certain routes. Approximately 67% of the total Pink tickets booked is through this app. Feature for booking daily passes were also added during later phase of trials. So far approximately 4 Lakhs tickets have been booked using the 'Chartr' app.
The Transport Department in collaboration with IIIT-Delhi has trained all the Depot Managers and staff of around 50 Depots. They in turn have trained their conductors. Conductors play a crucial role in the whole system, hence training them on how to use the app and help passengers in buying a ticket was of utmost importance. Further, IIIT-D team helped the trainers and conductors in case they face any difficulty.
The online ticketing app 'Chartr' has seen a progressive increase in the number of users since the start of its trial. More than 2 lakh people have downloaded this app since its release. It supports both Hindi and English languages. The passengers can take an e-ticket through ‘Chartr’ mobile App after boarding the bus. The App can be downloaded from Google Playstore which is now available as a full version. One can also WhatsApp ''Hi'' on 9910096264 to get the App URL. A user can also see all stoppages of a bus and can view by typing the name of the stop, all the buses arriving in the next half an hour with details like Expected Time of Arrival (ETA). The ETA also gets updated in real-time during the passenger's journey in the bus. Once the passenger reaches their destination as entered in the App, the ticket becomes invalid.
In case a user knows the ticket fare, he/she can also open the App and click on “BY FARE”, scan the QR Code of the bus, select Buy New Ticket and choose the payment option to get the ticket. In case a user knows the route, source and destination, he/she can click on “By Destination”, select the Bus Route and Source stop, select Destination stop, click on Buy and Scan Bus QR code and choose the payment option to pay and get the ticket. A user can buy up to 3 tickets for a journey. The App automatically suggests Pink Ticket (free) for female passengers based on the gender entered by the user. A female passenger can buy up to 1 Pink Ticket for each journey. More features such as the option to buy a monthly pass, pre-booking of tickets i.e booking tickets before boarding the bus, postpaid ticketing, etc. are likely to be included in the app in near future.