The development of an open data exchange toolkit is the latest sign that progress is being made on the thorny question of multimodal ticketing and journey information across rail, air and urban transport, as UIC’s Bertrand Minary explains to Nick Kingsley.
The International Union of Railways has, under the leadership of Director-General François Davenne, come to see itself as the ‘back office’ of the world’s railways, retaining a critical role in managing standards and sharing technical know-how across railways in quite different operating environments.
But UIC also has a burgeoning role in acting as a facilitator of modal integration, according to the association’s Passenger Director Bertrand Minary. Putting rail in place as a backbone of the wider public transport ecosystem — initially in Europe but in future globally — is a key ambition, and one that underpins what Minary describes as a ‘revival’ of the UIC Passenger Rail Forum, which is being led by incoming chair Federica Santini, President of Italian regional operator Trenord.
Minary recognises that much work lies ahead to tackle the Gordian knot of passenger information, booking, payment and journey management if a truly multimodal travel market is to emerge. UIC has already been trying to tackle some of the roadblocks for several years — it is a key player in the development of the Open Sales & Distribution Model. This is the data-sharing architecture underpinning the ticketing Roadmap developed by the Community of European Railways & Infrastructure Managers. According to UIC, ‘OSDM is crucial in opening up system connections between retailers, distributors and mobility providers to sell international rail and public transport in Europe’. However, the Ticketing Roadmap itself is not without its critics — new entrants’ association AllRail has suggested it would prefer to see wider adoption of the ‘tried and tested’ Transmodel NeTEx standard, which would cover all surface transport modes.
Photo: Mauro Consilvio
Rail access to Malpensa airport near Milano improved in late January with the opening of an extension of the branch serving the airport to nearby Gallarate, creating a through loop.
Meanwhile, UIC has been building bridges with other industries as well, as part of efforts to formalise data transfer between different modes. In February 2020, UIC and the International Air Transport Association signed a memorandum of understanding covering co-operation in standard setting and interoperability, with a focus on data exchange to support intermodal travel.
Building blocks
Minary says that through the partnerships developed in 2020-25 with IATA, increasingly with UITP for urban transport and through the developments on OSDM, the ‘building blocks’ for a more connected data environment to foster cross-modal links are now in place. The next five years will be about delivering some tangible case studies of multimodality in action.
‘So now these building blocks are ready to be deployed, or are already in use’, he says. ‘In 2025-30, our mission is to create the bridges with the other modes, which means we need to adapt our systems, and also from their side we need to capture the right information flows.’
However, one of the challenges is the pace of change across the whole transport sector — in aviation, for example, the dominance of a handful of major distribution platforms has been eroded by the rise of low-cost flights and an increasingly ‘peer to peer’ approach to flight booking. Bringing flight information and connection times into an OSDM-friendly format is one of the tasks facing Minary and his counterparts at IATA, although the potential benefits of better integration at airports between rail and air has been captured by the recent MultiModX research project.
Tram-plane: the Bergen light rail network includes a line serving the Norwegian city’s airport, offering a direct interface between local public transport and international aviation.
But Minary suggests the landscape is significantly more complex when it comes to integrating rail with urban public transport. ‘There are still not really any standards’, he says, noting the fundamental challenge of reconciling the ‘origin and destination’ nature of railway ticketing with the ‘fare zone’ approach of most urban transport authorities. ‘There are some very passionate debates going on about how best to develop this integration’, he admits.
Nevertheless, he is optimistic about some demonstration projects that he expects to be launched in the next few months. One is a real-time information sharing initiative that will combine data on trains and flight times at an airport, notifying users of any disruption in either mode.
Also emerging as a possible means to reconcile disparate technical and regulatory standards is an Open Multimodal Toolkit, which Minary sees as a framework for flexible collaboration (above). ‘We want to have this open multimodal toolkit available for third parties, and they can be onboard, and we can extend these partnerships to more providers over time.’
A flexible framework
According to UIC, the Open Multi-Modal Toolkit is an open framework designed to facilitate co-operation among diverse transport modes and service providers, enabling them to deliver a fluid, end-to-end mobility experience for customers. This model is particularly beneficial for public transport operators and mobility providers across the spectrum, including rail, bus, ferry, vehicle-sharing, parking, and ride-hailing services.
OMMT offers five core functions to deliver what UIC terms an ‘integrated passenger experience’. These are:
One Ticket: A single ticket for travel across different providers and modes.
One Purchase: Separate tickets bought in one transaction for various modes.
One Media: A shared media standard, such as a barcode, across different providers.
One Hub: Physical or digital hubs facilitating mode exchanges.
One Account: Account-based charging for mobility services without pre-purchasing tickets.
By adopting OMMT, UIC says providers can ‘avoid costly and bespoke system integrations, embracing instead standardised, internationally recognised, secure and tested specifications. This approach not only accelerates time-to-market but also reduces implementation costs and safeguards investments.’
Photo: pikselstock / Shutterstock
OMMT’s adaptable and flexible nature means it can support various business models and offer multiple travel options like advanced booking, digital ticketing and pay-as-you-go functionality. It can work with an array of existing technical standards, including Transmodel, OJP, NetEx, SIRI, GTFS and GBFS, focusing on dynamic digital interactions that underpin dynamic offers, resource reservation, secure validation and control, account-based travel and fair revenue sharing among providers.
OMMT is not a standard in itself, the association says, but rather it is made up of various UIC IRS specifications, several of which are incorporated into the EU Agency for Railways’ TAP TSI technical documents.
Google, Citymapper and Uber
That said, Minary is sanguine about the reality of how passengers use different modes today. For many, air travel is synonymous with using ubiquitous digital apps like Citymapper, Google Maps and Uber for navigating and travelling around the destination the passenger has flown to.
Asked how UIC’s multimodality initiative can insert rail more effectively into this mix, Minary says that rail operators have already embraced the GTFS data exchange protocols that underpin Google’s services, ‘although it’s not comprehensive enough for all of our needs’. Nevertheless, he feels UIC needs to accept the rise of Citymapper and Google Maps because ‘we want to avoid this fragmentation of IT systems and fragmentation of user experience at the end of the day’.
Yet perhaps most important of all is simply that the rail sector, through UIC, is able to focus on addressing these fraught technical and regulatory issues in a coherent way. ‘The railway sector is getting itself organised through the ticketing roadmap’, Minary insists. ‘That is what UIC is here for — to provide tools and find answers. So in 2025-30, we will see the sector pulling in a common direction to deliver something that is valuable for any player in the mobility sector, and we will deliver it in an open way.’
MultiModX proposes three areas of focus
As reported in December, UIC has been involved in a number of multimodal research initiatives aimed at breaking down barriers between modes and making journey planning and booking easier.
One of these programmes was MultiModX, which held a final event in Brussels in November and issued a white paper summarising its work in late December. Supported through the EU’s Sesar Joint Undertaking for aviation research and development, MultiModX was carried out by a consortium of TU Dresden, the University of Westminster, data analytics firm Nommon, the German aviation think tank Bauhaus Luftfahrt and the Airport Regions Council, as well as UIC.
The partners’ white paper is entitled ‘Towards passenger-centric multimodality in Europe’, and it seeks to make policy recommendations based on three complementary technologies for multimodal performance evaluation, air-rail schedule co-ordination and cross-modal disruption management.
The partners believe that their research has delivered evidence, analytical tools and policy-relevant insights for air-rail multimodal integration, delivered via what the backers term ‘three integrated Sesar Solutions’. These are:
Multimodal Performance Evaluation, which measures door-to-door passenger outcomes using a structured catalogue of passenger-centric indicators, extending existing aviation performance frameworks to multimodal journeys and providing open-source tools for evaluating multimodal networks;
Multimodal Schedule Design, which improves planned connectivity by optimising air and rail timetables within operational constraints, increasing feasible connections and reducing transfer times;
Multimodal Disruption Management, an approach for protecting passengers during disruption through co-ordinated, cross-modal recovery strategies that minimise stranded passenger numbers and preserve journey continuity.
The white paper says that each ‘solution’ plays a distinct and complementary role: one measures, one improves and one protects. Together, they form ‘an integrated package that supports evidence-based policymaking across the full journey lifecycle: from planning and booking to execution and disruption recovery’.
The partners add that three solutions have been validated using real-world data through a case study in Spain and refined through extensive stakeholder engagement involving airlines, railway operators, airports, global distribution platforms and policymakers.
Policy recommendations
The MultiModX results demonstrate that co-ordinated air-rail multimodality delivers measurable benefits for passengers and for the transport system as a whole.
At the planning stage, modest air–rail timetable adjustments (±10-20 min) significantly improve connectivity at multimodal hubs. In the case study, door-to-door travel times were reduced by up to 20% and the number of feasible connecting itineraries increased by 5% to 7%, without negative impacts on other services or the need for new infrastructure.
The MultiModX research suggested that even small adjustments to rail and flight timings could improve connectivity between the modes at airports.
The partners suggest that these findings confirm timetable co-ordination as a high-impact, low-cost policy lever. The full cost impacts on the supply side remain to be evaluated. During operational disruption, the benefits of multimodal co-operation are even more pronounced. Co-ordinated air–rail disruption management reduced the number of stranded passengers by approximately 17%, average journey times by 20% and service delays by up to 50%. Flexible rebooking across modes proved critical to containing the propagation of disruption, even when the perturbation affected only one mode.
From a passenger perspective, the researchers suggest that reliability, transparency and guaranteed connections deliver more than marginal time savings. Passengers value clear responsibility, credible recovery options and timely information. ‘Multimodal integration, therefore, succeeds only when it is designed around passenger confidence and protection, not solely around infrastructure or capacity’, the reports adds.
The document proposes seven targeted policy recommendations addressing performance evaluation, schedule co-ordination and ticketing, disruption management, capacity and enabling conditions for deployment.
Formation of a common European catalogue of passenger-centric multimodal performance indicators, building on the MultiModX framework.
Introduce modelling-based assessment as a standard for pre-regulatory policy evaluation. MultiModX demonstrates that modelling can assess passenger, operational and capacity impacts of policies such as short-haul flight bans, CO2 pricing, timetable changes or disruption-management obligations before implementation.
Enable and incentivise air-rail timetable co-ordination, particularly at TEN-T airports. Regulatory support for limited schedule flexibility, combined with monitoring of multimodal connection performance, would unlock connectivity gains that cannot be achieved through infrastructure investment alone.
Strengthen cross-modal disruption management and promote appropriate journey alternatives across modes. Evidence from MultiModX shows that co-ordinated recovery significantly improves passenger-centric outcomes. Translating this into policy would require incentives for co-operation, real-time data sharing and cross-modal rebooking, and would support the evolution of multimodal passenger rights toward genuine door-to-door service.
Align air and rail capacity planning. Multimodal strategies deliver their intended benefits only if sufficient rail capacity is available, particularly during disruptions. Capacity misalignment, therefore, represents a structural risk that must be addressed through co-ordinated planning.
Define EU-level multimodal connectivity targets, such as regarding population access to multimodal hubs, the quality of rail-airport links, and the availability of optimised air-rail connections. Such targets would make progress toward multimodality, measurable and comparable across regions.
Sustain long-term applied research and structured cross-sector co-operation. ‘While analytical tools are mature, operational deployment remains constrained by institutional fragmentation and limited mutual understanding between sectors. Continued research, joint training and operational pilots are essential to translate multimodal concepts into practice’, the partners say.