Dubai: Buses in Dubai are now equipped with a new monitoring system that will keep an eye on commuters not swiping their Nol cards, the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has announced.
Branded as ‘Rasid’, the system will keep track of every commuter boarding and alighting a bus and whether a commuter has swiped the card or not.
“We have a new automated passenger counting system, which uses intelligent algorithms to detect each person boarding or alighting a bus. This will definitely help us catch those who evade paying their bus fare,” said Dr Yousuf Al Ali, CEO of RTA’s Public Transport Agency.
He said when tallied with Nol system, the data collected from Rasid will help in clearing disputes related to swiping of Nol cards.
“The system will help us collect and collate data from different systems, which will certainly solve disputes arising from some instances where people are not able to swipe Nol cards due to some technical reasons,” said Dr Al Ali.
He added that the system will help identify the stops and routes where the evasion of fare payment is high.
“The data collected will help us concentrate on the areas and routes where there is a higher rate of evasion and this will certainly help us in catching these fare evaders,” he explained.
However, the primary benefit of the system will be to help organise the bus network more efficiently.
“Through the system we will be able to find out about the ridership on different routes at various time, which will help us organise the routes and trips according to the demand,” he added.
Currently, only 100 buses are equipped with the technology and, by the end of this year, all buses will have the system.
The RTA currently operates 1,442 buses running on 107 routes transporting around 7 million riders in 179,000 trips per month.
The Nol card can be used to pay for all modes of transport in Dubai, including Dubai Metro, Dubai Tram, buses and marine transport.
More than a million people use public transport daily, using the Nol card to pay for their fares.
The minimum public transport fare in Dubai is Dh3 and the maximum is Dh7.5.
