Grand River Transit

[ijmorlan]

Trust, and enforcement. And a social understanding that for a fare inspection agent to demand proof of payment is not, in fact, an infringement of any rights.

[KevinT]

It would be nice to see the fare inspectors on vehicles other than ION, I'm totally in favour of all-door boarding on the artics.

[ac3r]

You know...I'm surprised there aren't companies trying to do for transit payments what Amazon Go did for shopping. If there was a way to just board a bus or train with your card in your pocket/bag/whatever and it would deduct the appropriate fare or confirm the presence of a pass as you walked in the doors, that would be pretty nice. Of course it wouldn't fully be able to stop fare evasion, it could at least make people pay so long as they had their card on them even if they had no intent to be honest and pay. The way we handle it now just feels so archaic.

[KevinL]

It's a neat proposal, but you would need to designate only one (no more, no less) of the RF-capable devices (credit cards, transit cards, smartphones/watches) on your person as identifying yourself for transit usage; otherwise it might over- or under-charge users. That would not be easy to explain or enforce to the general user base.

The standard that I believe the better agencies are striving for is 'open payment'; you do need to tap one of the above noted devices, but there's a large selection of such options and you're free to use whichever suits you.

[taylortbb]

You know...I'm surprised there aren't companies trying to do for transit payments what Amazon Go did for shopping. If there was a way to just board a bus or train with your card in your pocket/bag/whatever and it would deduct the appropriate fare or confirm the presence of a pass as you walked in the doors, that would be pretty nice. Of course it wouldn't fully be able to stop fare evasion, it could at least make people pay so long as they had their card on them even if they had no intent to be honest and pay. The way we handle it now just feels so archaic.

I believe Amazon Go stores effectively have "fare gates" where you have to scan the app before entering the store, so that they have payment information for you. Everything you take after then is automated, but you still had to tap/swipe/etc in.

Reading a fare card as you walked through the door would be challenging, the range on one of our fare cards is generally only considered to be a couple inches. The systems which scan inventory just by passing it through a frame use a much simpler read-only RFID technology, not one that requires bi-directional communication with the card being read. If we made our fare cards more like 407 transponders that would work, but those are bulky as they have a battery in them. No longer a card form-factor.

I can only think of two ways to implement what you suggest, that are realistic with current technology. 

1. Use facial recognition. GRT could have a facial database tied to accounts, and automatically recognize people as they boarded and deduct from their account balance. However, such a solution would be quite expensive, and unpopular for a number of (legitimate) privacy reasons. It also doesn't help with first-time riders.
   
2. Use a smartphone app. The BLE (Bluetooth low energy) signal from a phone would be strong enough to be reliably picked up by a reader on the bus, and there wouldn't be the bulk associated with a dedicated device containing a battery. The app could run always-on in the background, similar to how Tesla implements their phone key technology. However, one could just turn off Bluetooth on their phone and ride for free. Also, not everyone has smartphones, and sometimes people run out of battery.
   

I think open payment systems, letting people just tap their credit/debit card, would the logical evolution. Anything else has too many issues.

[plam]

I think open payment systems, letting people just tap their credit/debit card, would the logical evolution. Anything else has too many issues.

I'm not in that demographic, but there is a demographic of people who don't have cards. Probably more in the US, less in Canada, and almost zero in NZ ("the unbanked"). Come to think of it, I do not remember seeing any payday lending in NZ, but that's a different topic.

In Auckland it is impossible to get on the bus and pay cash. You can take the train (another reason trains > buses unless you are actually doing LRT right) but you can't take the bus. This can be really annoying; with open payment less so, unless you don't have a credit/debit card.

Probably these days if we went to China we'd all be in the "unbanked" category, with the prevalence of electronic payments...

[danbrotherston]

I think open payment systems, letting people just tap their credit/debit card, would the logical evolution. Anything else has too many issues.

I'm not in that demographic, but there is a demographic of people who don't have cards. Probably more in the US, less in Canada, and almost zero in NZ ("the unbanked"). Come to think of it, I do not remember seeing any payday lending in NZ, but that's a different topic.

In Auckland it is impossible to get on the bus and pay cash. You can take the train (another reason trains > buses unless you are actually doing LRT right) but you can't take the bus. This can be really annoying; with open payment less so, unless you don't have a credit/debit card.

Probably these days if we went to China we'd all be in the "unbanked" category, with the prevalence of electronic payments...

Travelling can definitely put one in the "unbanked" category based on how prevalent visa/MC  is in the country you're travelling to. While the Netherlands is heavily digitized for banking (some checkouts don't accept cash, I think self checkouts also only accept cards, and some entire stores also only accept cards, no cash at all) Visa is not ubiquitous. Many restaurants, stores, and even the entire major grocery chain Albert Heijn accepts only Maestro, the equivalent of Interac.

So if you travel to the Netherlands, from Canada or the US, best to bring cash because a lot of places won't accept visa (and frankly, don't advertise that fact at all).

Fortunately, most transit seems to take visa as well even on buses which is very cool, but I've never tried cash for transit.

And while the country has a famous and mostly excellent national fare card for transit, they are transitioning to using a visa (or maestro) payment card for the same purpose with the same universality, which is, frankly on brand for the country's generally excellently integrated infrastructure, they're even doing a nice thing where you'll be both able to access your transit records online for your visa card, and also billing you at EOD for your days total so that it's clearer how much you pay (rather than having a hold, and debit, and a credit every time you transfer between transit vehicles).

[clasher]

GRT summer schedule sucks. Last LRT left uptown at 2348, like wtf. The fare machine stopped working too so I couldn't buy a ticket for the bus and didn't have any cash. It certainly seemed like it was busy out.

[tomh009]

Travelling can definitely put one in the "unbanked" category based on how prevalent visa/MC  is in the country you're travelling to. While the Netherlands is heavily digitized for banking (some checkouts don't accept cash, I think self checkouts also only accept cards, and some entire stores also only accept cards, no cash at all) Visa is not ubiquitous. Many restaurants, stores, and even the entire major grocery chain Albert Heijn accepts only Maestro, the equivalent of Interac.

Similar, but not quite the same as Interac: Maestro is a proprietary (and old) debit card system. Mastercard has now discontinued it everywhere in Europe, and all Maestro cardholders are getting MasterCard debit cards. Apparently even Albert Hejn is now accepting MasterCard (and I think Visa) debit cards. Credit apparently not yet, but all stores are supposed to accept that by the end of 2024.

[danbrotherston]

Travelling can definitely put one in the "unbanked" category based on how prevalent visa/MC  is in the country you're travelling to. While the Netherlands is heavily digitized for banking (some checkouts don't accept cash, I think self checkouts also only accept cards, and some entire stores also only accept cards, no cash at all) Visa is not ubiquitous. Many restaurants, stores, and even the entire major grocery chain Albert Heijn accepts only Maestro, the equivalent of Interac.

Similar, but not quite the same as Interac: Maestro is a proprietary (and old) debit card system. Mastercard has now discontinued it everywhere in Europe, and all Maestro cardholders are getting MasterCard debit cards. Apparently even Albert Hejn is now accepting MasterCard (and I think Visa) debit cards. Credit apparently not yet, but all stores are supposed to accept that by the end of 2024.

Fair enough...I'm not certain what the actual debit card payment protocol is here, it's possible the few people I've heard say it have called it Maestro for historical reasons. All I know is that we have a debit card with no Visa or Mastercard branding that works at these places.

Perhaps a more interesting question is who runs these payment systems, Interact is a collaboration of all the banks in Canada. I'd be curious if other places have created similar co-operative organizations, and how far they reach (all of Canada is pretty small, and in Europe, it would be pointlessly small). That's the one advantage of Visa is utterly massive reach--albeit not yet into AH.

[ac3r]

GRT summer schedule sucks. Last LRT left uptown at 2348, like wtf. The fare machine stopped working too so I couldn't buy a ticket for the bus and didn't have any cash. It certainly seemed like it was busy out.

Why do we even have a summer schedule in a region with at least 650'000 people? It's stupid. There are still tens of thousands of people relying on transit no matter what time of the year.

[SF22]

GRT summer schedule sucks. Last LRT left uptown at 2348, like wtf. The fare machine stopped working too so I couldn't buy a ticket for the bus and didn't have any cash. It certainly seemed like it was busy out.

Why do we even have a summer schedule in a region with at least 650'000 people? It's stupid. There are still tens of thousands of people relying on transit no matter what time of the year.

I use transit more often in the summer than the rest of the year, to go to all the events happening in downtown and uptown. We took the train one rainy Sunday afternoon to Waterloo Park and it was absolutely packed.

[clasher]

I'd had a few pops so I was a bit pissed so I ended up with a 18$ cab ride. I'd normally just do a drunken walk home but my partner was in heels.

I could understand a bit less service along school routes but the LRT should run until 2am all year.

[Rainrider22]

I agree !!

[bravado]

I'd had a few pops so I was a bit pissed so I ended up with a 18$ cab ride. I'd normally just do a drunken walk home but my partner was in heels.

I could understand a bit less service along school routes but the LRT should run until 2am all year.

I’m becoming more confident that transit planners and GO Transit project managers never go out at night and never leave their houses on the weekend. Who makes these decisions?