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

[chickenfeet]

No idea about what happens with a breakdown though I can't imagine why it would matter with a train as the readers are at the station not on the train. But, Presto copes all the time with multi-segment, multi modal trips. It even copes with, for example, a trip involving two different transit authorities so if one takes a GO train then an Oakville bus it calculates the lower combined fare regardless of which comes first. I have been using it for three years and have not had a single problem other than TTC buses showing up with no reader or the reader not working.

[graydon]

Breakdowns matter with trains at, for example, Union Station; you have to tap out and tap back in because of where the dead train unloads and the live train loads being different sets of tracks. Presto can't cope with this at all, and its default for not coping is to assume rider fraud and charge two maximum fares. (This has happened to me, recently. This is not a hypothesis.)

Presto SAYS it copes with multi-segment, multi-modal trips. It doesn't; what it does is have you pay a fare to the TTC, then a fare to GO, and so on. You couldn't support a multi-carrier single fare trip with Presto.

All Presto has for state is "on" and "off" and the ID of your card and the id of the readers. It hasn't got any notion of "participating in a route" or "headed in the general direction of thus-and-such destination". It's got a line, not a graph.

Until it gets a lot more state and a signalling mechanism, it CANNOT have a graph, too, which is a big problem because busses will break down and Presto's response to being confused is to charge you two maximum fares. (This is policy; this has happened to me recently.)

It looks for all the world like the point was to assign some transit revenue to a political client and never mind if it worked. (So far as I can tell, Region of Waterloo is getting zero help with Bombardier because they had the effrontery to issue an RFP (to which Presto didn't submit) rather than dictate Presto use. Presto really doesn't want to have to deal with anybody technically ept.)

I think the whole snarl greatly confuses the issue around "why are we charging transit fares at all?"