Another Sign that the TTC Presto System is Broken

[jsburbidge]

For the next few months, the Wellesley buses which normally have a connection inside the Wellesley subway station are stopping on the street, due to construction in the station.

They have notices that Presto card users need to transfer using a paper transfer - supposed to be rendered obsolete by Presto - to avoid being charged twice (i. e. a tap on to the bus will be counted as a new trip rather than a continuation of a trip).

This in turn indicates that their system is inflexible and probably unmaintainable.

Comments

[graydon]

I wonder how they're going to handle the cases where the trip takes longer than two hours?

(surprisingly easy to do on Blue Light bus routes....)

Single-continuous-trip is hard on the drivers, so I hope you're right TTC policy has had a rush of sense to the head.

If a transit trip is a bunch of segments and nodes where you change vehicle (and we can model "transit system" through types of vehicles), I'm pretty sure you can't make pay-on-exit work for a multi-segment trip because there's no way to detect exit other than tapping. "I am continuing my trip" has to be a different physical sensor from "leaving now" and Presto hasn't got that and I am fairly sure can't have that; the mechanism they've got is pretty much strictly flipping a bit.

Some sort of NFC phone-app-or-fob would be a much better bet for really doing what Presto is supposed to do. But what Presto is supposed to do is really ambitious.