Grand River Transit

[danbrotherston]

And of course, Presto has already moved onto supporting visa and debit cards directly for boarding, something that is, if not world leading, is at least a stand out feature...and something that EasyGO doesn't even have on the radar (I'd be shocked if council even knows it's a thing...since I doubt any
of them are remotely interested in transit), and who the fuck knows how much it will cost us to pay our incredibly incompetent contractor to build.

How would you implement this without Internet connectivity on the buses? With any system?

The whole point is that this is neither my job nor my problem. Presto has achieved this. This is the whole point. Whether they achieved that by deferring CC processing till the end of the day and just eating failed transaction costs or by putting the incredibly advanced 5G payment technologies previously only available to pizza and Chinese food delivery people doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that we would have this feature if we used presto.

All because presto wouldn't play by our special rules and bid in the process that we (and we alone) decided was the ONLY way to select a fare payment processor.

Or, to see it from the region's point of view, because Presto refused to consider the customer's (that's the region) requirements and said "it's our way or the highway." If Accenture and Thales had refused to respond to RFPs, they would never have been selected to develop Presto. But now that Metrolinx has Presto, they will refuse to respond to RFPs.

Sole-sourcing government procurement contracts, whatever could possibly go wrong with that?

This kind of adversarial framing harms us (you know, the actual users). If the region had prioritized OUR interests they would have worked to get the best experience for US the ridership rather than the council, bureaucrats, and the most politically powerful citizens who largely do not ride transit.

If that was EasyGO then fine. But since it isn’t, using a process excuse is bullshit. They should have worked with presto because that is what would have delivered the best experience for us the actual people using the system.

Instead they weren’t working for us.