Name: Varun Mevada

Guide: Prof. Jayesh Pillai

Course: Interaction

Credits: Mumbai Railway Public Relation Office

Design Intervention in the Ticketing System of the Mumbai Local Train

The city’s lifeline—Mumbai’s local train- is the crucial mode of public transport. It aides 7.4 million people per day. Ticketing is a core aspect of the entire operation. The project focuses on exploring modes of ticketing and their impact in the real world and then intervene in the ticketing system / mode to improve and reduce the effort and time of the user.

Today there are 5 different methods to book an unreserved travel ticket for the Mumbai local, but most of them remain unexplored by the audiences due to various reasons such as lack of knowledge, intimidation by technology and low standards of the automatic ticket vending machines.

The objective of the project is to understand the existing modes of ticketing and their immediate impact in the actual world. The project scope is to find out the need gap of these modes and intervene and try to increase the impact in terms of usage of certain modes of ticketing and help users to purchase tickets more easily and swiftly.

The next step was to investigate the problems of the existing app. User studies revealed some insights why people are not using mobile app. Based on these stages the problem statement was defined.

The idea is to intervene on a system level. Removing GPS barriers will give them more flexibility to book tickets from anywhere. Taking inspiration from the coupon vending machine the idea is to install QR code scanners near the entrances to validate tickets.