CONTACTLESS AND PHONE payments on public transport will be rolled out as part of a pilot scheme in the first half of 2023, according to Transport Minister Eamon Ryan.

Former Dublin Bus CEO Ray Coyne estimated earlier this year that the bus operator would allow for debit card payments on its services from late 2023.

When asked when he expected contactless and phone payments to be in place across all public transport operators, Transport Minister Eamon Ryan said that implementing it was a “priority”.

A spokesperson for the Minister confirmed that the National Transport Authority were aiming to pilot contactless payments on buses across some Public Service Obligation (PSO) services – including Bus Éireann and Dublin Bus – starting in Q2 2023.

Ryan said that there has been a change in the number of rural services that accept leap Cards, and that there have been over 80,000 Young Adult Leap Cards issued so far.

He admitted that there has been a “real issue” surrounding the IT system across the Irish bus network in recent months.

“Everyone knows about it, the difficulty in terms of getting accuracy on the real-time information system and on keeping the schedule and that’s caused by a variety of reasons,” he said.

Dublin Bus has since apologised for the issues surrounding its real-time information system, telling the Oireachtas Transport Committee that “our services have on occasions fallen below our own high standards”.

While one reason was a lack of drivers, Ryan said that the existing IT system was old and “creaking”.

“It’s an older system, and it needs to be replaced and modernised. They put a lot of patches in, that means that is back now to much higher accuracy now, the problems of two or three months ago are diminished but we do need a much wider entire IT system.”

He added that the National Transport Authority (NTA) were “committed” to investing everything they can into a new IT system.

Ryan also said that it was key that more rural, Local Link services also saw improvements to their IT systems.

He said that these services were now “starting to scale up” and that they needed to see the benefits alongside service providers like Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann.

“What we’re going to need is, in towns right across the country is small signage for that new Connecting Ireland Local Link service and much better web information as to where the buses are, when they’re coming and so on.”