Still Waters
New Member
Any automated fare collection system will allow the ticket collectors to be removed. Presto or Open Payment would both do that. Both would require that the collectors be replaced with Fare Inspectors, probably more of them. In the case of Presto, include also specialized maintenance staff for the new, less robust electronic fare equipment, and a whole raft of new IT people to look after the software and computers that would be needed to keep the system working on the scale needed to serve the TTC's ridership. Presto will not result in savings, it will end up costing the TTC a lot more money, certainly a lot more than any of the smaller transit agencies will have to pay, considering that they get higher subsidies as a proportion of their operating budgets.
Open payments would allow most of the ongoing and capital costs to be borne by the private companies that already have all that capability in place. Why reinvent the wheel? The problem is, over the last few years, no one on the Presto team wanted to listen to the TTC's warnings that it had no money to implement Presto, and now that crisis has come to pass, everyone involved is quite happy to let the TTC take the fall for a supposed "power play" against Metrolinx. It's nothing of the sort, of course, only an attempt to protect it's already-stretched budgets from further outside-imposed drains. There's nothing wrong in principle with full implementation of Presto on the TTC as long as everyone agrees to pay the associated costs. But it seems to me there are better things to do with that money -- like increase actual service on the system, or reduce some of the planned upcoming service cuts.
Open payments would allow most of the ongoing and capital costs to be borne by the private companies that already have all that capability in place. Why reinvent the wheel? The problem is, over the last few years, no one on the Presto team wanted to listen to the TTC's warnings that it had no money to implement Presto, and now that crisis has come to pass, everyone involved is quite happy to let the TTC take the fall for a supposed "power play" against Metrolinx. It's nothing of the sort, of course, only an attempt to protect it's already-stretched budgets from further outside-imposed drains. There's nothing wrong in principle with full implementation of Presto on the TTC as long as everyone agrees to pay the associated costs. But it seems to me there are better things to do with that money -- like increase actual service on the system, or reduce some of the planned upcoming service cuts.