Contactless payments on buses, trams and trains could be with us on some services by Easter.
Transport Minister Eamon Ryan is keen on the proposal that would let people tap their cards or phones to pay for public transport fares.
The Leap card has been very successful and this would be the next step for making payments easier for passengers.
A spokesman for Mr Ryan said last night: “The NTA are aiming to pilot the scheme on some PSO (Public Service Obligation) services from Q2 2023.”
Mr Ryan was speaking to reporters during a Christmas roundtable interview.
He said: “It is happening now, there is a change happening.
“Rural bus services are all increasingly going toward Leap Cards.
“This year's a record, there’s 80,000 Youth Leap Cards issued, driven by that 50% fare reduction we’ve done.”
Mr Ryan also addressed the criticisms of public transport IT infrastructure.
He said: “There has been a real issue around the IT systems in our bus network.
“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. “One being a shortage of drivers, difficult getting drivers but secondly that the IT system, its 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 and I don't have the exact date in terms of when that full contactless system will be in place, but it is a a first priority.
“I'd a meeting with Local Link the other day, if I can, relating to that.
“They’re 14 organisations that started 30 years ago and provide what was originally very much a kind of a local service for kind of quite small or quite kind of a local pickup and smaller kind of routes, but they're starting to really scale up and in this Connecting Ireland bus system that we're we're delivering and I think that's an opportunity to really, not just provide new routes, but also modernise the fleet and give them the IT systems as well.
“I think one of the most important things, it's not just Dublin Bus, it's not just Bus Éireann, it is the likes of the new Connecting Ireland services. So when I met them the other day I was saying, 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, so there's no shortage of resources.
“The NTA, in a meeting with them a few weeks ago on this issue, they've committed to invest everything we can in the IT system."
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