News   Nov 18, 2024
Tower Crane Installed at 1071 King West While Building Gets Height Bump
 954     1 
News   Nov 18, 2024
City of Toronto Introduces Measures to Protect Renters and Boost Affordable Housing Supply
 449     0 
News   Nov 18, 2024
Canada Lands Company Submits Application Outlining Downsview West District
 1.4K     1 

Metrolinx: Presto Fare Card

Jonny5 said:
Transfer window issue update: I received a phone call this morning from Garrick McIntoish, Media Relations and Issues Specialist for PRESTO. It went to voicemail and he followed up with this emai which is a summary of what he said:



I am guessing they realised the two hour "tap on to tap on" rule will simply not hold up and are trying to now figure out how to adapt the system to make it work. I imagine someone's head exploded when I pointed out some GO train trips themselves are more than two hours. I am also wondering if this rule is the result of a system design for GO trips that assumes if you do not tap off within two hours that you must have forgot and then it dumps your card into the dreaded "underpayment" mode.

I am pleased by this response but await word from him tomorrow on how they will address the problem.
Click to expand...

A non-lakeshore cyinic (not that I am one ;) ) might suggest it was an oversight caused by GO not really realizing that not everyone of their customers lives in Oakville and has all day every day two way train service so the whole notion that someone would ride the GO (or any transit system) and not complete their journey in under two hours is quite foreign to them.
 
Though there are GO routes that are longer than 2 hours. The travel time from Niagara Falls to Union Station on GO (schedule 12) is over 2.5 hours; I'd think it would be a lot longer on bad traffic days.

While it's hard to imagine regular commuters doing this every day, it's not difficult to imagine a student at Brock heading home on a Friday and taking a GO Bus/train from St. Catherines to Union, and then changing to another GO Bus ... let alone the local transit connection later on.

Similarily, the Peterborough Go Bus/Train (Schedule 88) is over 2.5 hours direct from Trent University to Union. There could easily be over 3 hours from a tap-on at the GO bus at Tren, to the tap-on on a GO Bus at Union, heading to Mississsauga.
 
I agree. The 2 hour limit for GO trips is insufficient. It should be 4 hours, which is the amount of time you have to use a GO ticket after you've bought it.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
I agree. The 2 hour limit for GO trips is insufficient. It should be 4 hours, which is the amount of time you have to use a GO ticket after you've bought it.
Click to expand...
I frequently have taken my return trip in under 4 hours. Which is what happens when you live near a GO station, and your typical trip is only 20 minutes.
 
Coruscanti Cognoscente said:
Not exactly typical of GO riders.
Click to expand...
Seems pretty typical of what I see on a Saturday if I head to a soccer game. There are hundreds if not thousands of people making similiar trips each game.

But even if it wasn't, Presto needs to be designed to handle all possible trips. I fear they failed when they didn't go for mandatory tap-on; tap-off on all GO vehicles. I'm not sure they can come up with an algorithim to handle all the possibilities that area created otherwise.
 
During my University days, my GO trip was exactly one hour from Union to Brampton, and transferring to Brampton Transit.
 
I've been using Presto only on the TTC and I have had problems with loading my card... and now I've just learned that you can only set up your card for requested reloads or for autoloads, but not both, and even then the autoload doesn't really work, since I need to tap my card on a balance checker to confirm it, and only Union Station has one!

In other words, it is even more of a hassle than buying tokens!
 
A system designed by a company which is not a software company, not an expert in transportation systems, and who is developing the system for a government customer which also hasn't done this before. How could it possibly go wrong?

Tokens aren't as cool. Just go to www.prestocard.ca to see why. If you can't believe marketing hype what can you believe? I water my plants with Brawndo because it has electrolytes.
 
It's interesting to see who has bidded on the TTC Open Payment tender: http://www2.ttc.ca/gsopp/R39PN10871.HTM

ACS TRANSPORTATION SOLUTIONS
CUBIC TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
INGENICO CANADA LTD.
INSIDE CONTACTLESS
LG CNS AMERICA INC.
MPAYY, INC.
PRECASH INC.
SCHEIDT & BACHMANN
THALES TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
VISA CANADA CORPORATION
WORLD DEBIT SERVICES LTD.

No Accenture - conflict of interest perhaps?
 
I think it is interesting that Ottawa is getting on board as well. Imagine if every public transit system in Ontario, plus inter-city services such as Via, Ontario Northland, Greyhound, and Coach Canada got on board, and Toronto didn't? Adam Giambrone needs to get over his "center-of-the-universe" complex and figure out that people use transit to travel into and out of Toronto, not just inside of it.
 
Electrify said:
I think it is interesting that Ottawa is getting on board as well. Imagine if every public transit system in Ontario, plus inter-city services such as Via, Ontario Northland, Greyhound, and Coach Canada got on board, and Toronto didn't? Adam Giambrone needs to get over his "center-of-the-universe" complex and figure out that people use transit to travel into and out of Toronto, not just inside of it.
Click to expand...

Imagine if you could use your cell phone as a payment identifier in Toronto, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles (all of these cities are in trials of Open Payment) but Ottawa, GO Transit, and 905 regions are stuck on an antiquated system that New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, etc. implemented in the late 90's and eliminated less than 15 years later.

Presto has a maximum lifetime of 10 years. No transit agency will have a electronic fare system based on anything but Open Payment by 2020. Even Presto plans on spending tens of millions to move toward that protocol and begin phasing out their own internal protocols. The real issue here is that the province isn't abandoning Presto and the multi-hundred million dollar contracts associated with it and re-tendering for a standard implementation.


If Presto was ready in 2005 and Toronto was avoiding it, the story would be different. Presto was not ready in 2005 and frankly is not ready today for the volume of transactions TTC would throw at it. ~10,000 transactions per day is a far cry from a couple of million transactions per day (tap in, tap to transfer, tap out).

Having extensive telephone company billing experience, it seems entirely likely that the TTC can get an Open Payment system deployed before Presto gets deployed to all of the areas which have signed on. Several of the firms tendering do have existing large-scale open payment deployments at retail chains (some gas chains and Tim Hortons have been using this for a while) or experience with very high transaction volumes.
 
Last edited:
rbt said:
Imagine if you could use your cell phone as a payment identifier in Toronto, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles (all of these cities are in trials of Open Payment) but Ottawa, GO Transit, and 905 regions are stuck on an antiquated system that New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, etc. implemented in the late 90's and eliminated less than 15 years later.
Click to expand...

You pretty much have to IMAGINE it, don't you?
Some of those cities have been in "open trials" for years and certainly none has declared they're shifting to that system next week along with the rest of them, creating a happy, magic transit-payment situation.

It does indeed to require a vivid imagination to envision a situation in which Toronto is suddenly one of the world leaders in transit-payment technology.

It seems to me, given that Toronto's anti-Presto sentiments aren't new, that it wouldn't have mattered if Presto were implemented 5 years ago. TTC still would have been dragged kicking and screaming away from its tokens, even when Open Payment was about as viable as transporter technology. That's why their bleating now strikes me as the City crying wolf, no matter the clear advantages to open payment.

For me the issue has never been about which system is better. It's always struck me that the TTC wants to be the dog wagging the tail and that no matter what the province would have come up with, they would have wanted something of their own, no matter what their chief funder, the board of trade and everyone else says.

In fact, I remember getting to talk to all the mayoral candidates way back in 2003 and asking about introducing some kind of electronic payment system and David Miller was all about sticking with what we had, given the costs of implementing any kind of new system (nevermind the savings from not having to pay token collectors, sorting the cash etc.). The point? Toronto was predisposed to be against it even before Presto was announced.

That said, wasn't it made clear that Presto will somehow be compatible with, or be adjusted to include open payment?

I know I said it upthread but this isn't about superior tech or what's best for riders: it's merely a game of political chicken between Toronto and the province.
 
Last edited:
I'm not a computer programmer, but I suspect that Presto and Open Payment will not be compatible. The best we can hope for is a hybrid reader that accepts both types of cards so I can use Presto or Open Payment, whichever technology I feel works best for me.

Heaven help me if I have both a Presto card and a Paywave credit card in my wallet at the same time.
 
You must log in or register to post here.

Back
Top