GO Transit

[taylortbb]

I presume the expectation will be that you're headed toward a GO stop or station on that journey, and if asked can confirm which route/trip you'll be taking. Yes, you could game it, but not overly easily.

The shameful thing is that this would probably not be policed nearly as aggressively as actual passengers on ION...

I'm so tired of this...

This has been in effect for years. All that's changed is the discount amount (it used to be only a partial credit of GRT fare). I haven't seen any complaints of excessive enforcement.

GRT gets reimbursed by Metrolinx for the forgone fare, so there isn't really any local incentive to aggressively enforce.

[danbrotherston]

The shameful thing is that this would probably not be policed nearly as aggressively as actual passengers on ION...

I'm so tired of this...

This has been in effect for years. All that's changed is the discount amount (it used to be only a partial credit of GRT fare). I haven't seen any complaints of excessive enforcement.

GRT gets reimbursed by Metrolinx for the forgone fare, so there isn't really any local incentive to aggressively enforce.

No no, I wasn't meaning that the GO discount would be policed...of course it wouldn't be...

My point was that they WOULDN'T police GO the same way they police GRT in general BECAUSE GO transit riders are almost exclusively upper middle class.

[Bytor]

If I remember correctly, for the "original" version of this were it was only 50¢ or something, you tapped your linked EasyGO card on the Presto terminal immediately after tapping off the train your Presto card. That would put a flag on your EasyGo card so that when you tapped on to a GRT bus with it you would only get charges $2.36 instead of $2.86.

Am I misremembering?

Assuming that I am not, then this process would still be the same and you don't merely show you Presto card and get on free. You still gotta tap on the fare box or the toll pole. As such it wouldn't be subject to they abuse that people are describing above.

[ac3r]

It's too bad we didn't end up getting Presto, because EasyGO sucks and now that we have it, Presto can't apply to take over (well, perhaps they could, but it would be a nightmare to transition). It would be so much easier to just have one card for a multitude of Southern Ontario transportation systems instead of relying on a wallet full of different cards.

[Acitta]

It's too bad we didn't end up getting Presto, because EasyGO sucks and now that we have it, Presto can't apply to take over (well, perhaps they could, but it would be a nightmare to transition). It would be so much easier to just have one card for a multitude of Southern Ontario transportation systems instead of relying on a wallet full of different cards.

In what way does EasyGo suck? I have never had any trouble with it.

[plam]

It's too bad we didn't end up getting Presto, because EasyGO sucks and now that we have it, Presto can't apply to take over (well, perhaps they could, but it would be a nightmare to transition). It would be so much easier to just have one card for a multitude of Southern Ontario transportation systems instead of relying on a wallet full of different cards.

Yes, it's convenient, but it also seems to be problematic and expensive.

[ac3r]

It's too bad we didn't end up getting Presto, because EasyGO sucks and now that we have it, Presto can't apply to take over (well, perhaps they could, but it would be a nightmare to transition). It would be so much easier to just have one card for a multitude of Southern Ontario transportation systems instead of relying on a wallet full of different cards.

In what way does EasyGo suck? I have never had any trouble with it.

I find my card fails to read a lot of the time. I'll often get an error message on the little pillars at the LRT stops or on buses. Perhaps it's just my card or something, but it's rather annoying. The fare kiosks are also pretty slow as well or have issues with payments, particularly when it comes to using the tap method. It'll often fail to work, so then you need to insert the card which for some reason is always sooooo slow at processing payment compared to tapping.

I guess it works most of the time and serves its purpose, but it'd be much simpler to have Presto since there are 11 other systems in the province already using it.

[Rainrider22]

Better yet an app... use your phone

[danbrotherston]

It's too bad we didn't end up getting Presto, because EasyGO sucks and now that we have it, Presto can't apply to take over (well, perhaps they could, but it would be a nightmare to transition). It would be so much easier to just have one card for a multitude of Southern Ontario transportation systems instead of relying on a wallet full of different cards.

In what way does EasyGo suck? I have never had any trouble with it.

I mean we've been through this before.

The hardware is garbage, it fails very frequently.

The website is garbage, the UX is an outright disaster, the backend pretty seriously at the beginning.

Since the beginning things have improved, the service backend has not had a complete failure like we saw at the beginning, transient failures have improved. The hardware is still garbage, (remember at one point, so many units were broken, that they didn't have enough spares to swap in working units at all the LRT stations), but with a more reliable backend, it seems to be online more often. The website UX is still utter garbage.

So things are better, but we spent a lot of money, and went through a lot of pain in order to have a system which isn't compatible with the rest of the province.

Just one in a long line of bad decisions our government (and staff) has made.

[Bytor]

So things are better, but we spent a lot of money, and went through a lot of pain in order to have a system which isn't compatible with the rest of the province.

Just one in a long line of bad decisions our government (and staff) has made.

Given that Presto not only did not bid on RFP, they also outright refused to add the features that GRT required even if the Region had paid them, I'm confused as to why people still think it was some huge debacle that we don't have Presto.

Not to mention that every Presto installation has had their own significant issues, usually far worse than what we went through with EasyGO.

[taylortbb]

The hardware is still garbage, (remember at one point, so many units were broken, that they didn't have enough spares to swap in working units at all the LRT stations)

A lot of of the hardware is the same hardware Presto uses. EasyGo and Presto use slightly different models of fare vending machines, but they're from the same series by the same vendor. Presto also uses the same tap poles as ION stations for some of the GO/UPX stations. Presto doesn't have a combo cash/tap fare box, because Presto doesn't handle cash fares anywhere (which is a huge weakness of the system).

I'm confused as to why people still think it was some huge debacle that we don't have Presto.

Not to mention that every Presto installation has had their own significant issues, usually far worse than what we went through with EasyGO.

I think the question is one of value of integration with the rest of the province. Presto would have been individually worse for us in some ways, but there's significant value in being the same as the rest of the province. GO/GRT fare integration should be seamless, but it never will be as long as we're not on Presto.

You are correct though that every Presto rollout has had major issues. I think EasyGo had about an average number of problems for a fare card rollout, and I'm benchmarking not just against Presto but against other systems elsewhere in the world. The rollouts are generally terrible for the same reasons all rollouts of enterprise software are generally terrible.

[Bytor]

My understanding is you just show your Presto card and they let you board.  For multi-bus trips to get to the station, I'm assuming they'd give you a transfer?

My cynical view on this is that I could just board any bus with my Presto card and get free transit anywhere in the region. I'm hoping they have safeguards to keep people from doing this, but it's hard when you're not on a route that directly connects to the GO station.

I thought it was that you had to tap your linked EasyGO card on the Presto terminal after tapping your Presto card (GO is tap on and off, variable fares), and then you needed to tap on to a GRT bus or ION. I don;t remember there being a local discount when transferring to GO, only from.

[Bytor]

GO/GRT fare integration should be seamless, but it never will be as long as we're not on Presto.

It could be, though. We both use the same NXP DESfire EV1 or EV2 cards. I'm not sure which one, exactly, but the they both work the same way.

The flash memory on the card is partitioned analogously like a hard drive, and each partition is called an application. Each partition/application can contain multiple "files" of varying structure, optimised for different purposes. Each application has two password key, read and read+write, and two for the whole card as well. With the whole card passwords you can you can list, create and delete applications but you cannot read the application's files. With just an application password you can access that application's files and nothing else. I believe you need the application write password to change it's, and not the whole card write password.

So all it really takes is a software change at customer service stations and kiosks to enable multiple organisations to use the same physical card.

I take my EasyGO card to the customer service centre at Benton and King and they zap ip to ass a GO transit application and a MiWay application, both with agreed upon preliminary passwords. Then when I tap at a GO Presto terminal it rewrites the GO application passwords to the proper ones and sets up the files. When I get off GO and then get onto a MiWay bus, that fare box changes the passwords on the MiWay application to the proper ones and initialises the MiWay files.

Obviously the integrations can go much deeper by sharing read passwords, or even the write ones, but I leave that to your imagination, but simply sharing one physical card as if it were three virtual cards would be relatively easy without requiring complex accounting ad payment schemes between agencies.

[dtkvictim]

GO/GRT fare integration should be seamless, but it never will be as long as we're not on Presto.

It could be, though. We both use the same NXP DESfire EV1 or EV2 cards. I'm not sure which one, exactly, but the they both work the same way.

The flash memory on the card is partitioned analogously like a hard drive, and each partition is called an application. Each partition/application can contain multiple "files" of varying structure, optimised for different purposes. Each application has two password key, read and read+write, and two for the whole card as well. With the whole card passwords you can you can list, create and delete applications but you cannot read the application's files. With just an application password you can access that application's files and nothing else. I believe you need the application write password to change it's, and not the whole card write password.

So all it really takes is a software change at customer service stations and kiosks to enable multiple organisations to use the same physical card.

I take my EasyGO card to the customer service centre at Benton and King and they zap ip to ass a GO transit application and a MiWay application, both with agreed upon preliminary passwords. Then when I tap at a GO Presto terminal it rewrites the GO application passwords to the proper ones and sets up the files. When I get off GO and then get onto a MiWay bus, that fare box changes the passwords on the MiWay application to the proper ones and initialises the MiWay files.

Obviously the integrations can go much deeper by sharing read passwords, or even the write ones, but I leave that to your imagination, but simply sharing one physical card as if it were three virtual cards would be relatively easy without requiring complex accounting ad payment schemes between agencies.

I just checked mine, it is the V1 FYI. It's been a couple years since I looked into it, but it's frustrating and unreasonable that the data is encrypted and unreadable by the card owner. I wanted to using an existing app or write a quick one myself to display my balance, but it's impossible with the way our card are currently configured. This is not an issue with other transit cards around the world. The transit cards in Japan even store some trip history (source and destination, cost of trip).

Japan is also an example of many disparate cards and systems that have come together under a single interoperable network. I don't know just how different the systems were from the start, and what the scale of software and hardware replacements were, but it proves that it's possible.

[danbrotherston]

So things are better, but we spent a lot of money, and went through a lot of pain in order to have a system which isn't compatible with the rest of the province.

Just one in a long line of bad decisions our government (and staff) has made.

Given that Presto not only did not bid on RFP, they also outright refused to add the features that GRT required even if the Region had paid them, I'm confused as to why people still think it was some huge debacle that we don't have Presto.

Not to mention that every Presto installation has had their own significant issues, usually far worse than what we went through with EasyGO.

The features we requested and the RFP process is not some commandments handed down from on high.  *WE CHOSE* them...

And we chose them KNOWING that Presto wouldn't qualify if we did.

Other cities adopted presto, we are not special, no matter how much GRT staff proclaim we are. We are not the only city with a transit system, with this exact fare structure and with colleges with student passes.

Despite all this we added requirements that Presto could not meet and choose a process the would not participate in.

We knowingly (and possibly intentionally) excluded them.

Blaming the process that WE created is pretty transparent bullshit...it's the kind that lead people to hate their governments.

As for presto having issues, I'm sure they did. But at the end of those issues, there is a benefit to choosing presto.  And while the UX on the Presto site is also mediocre, it is nowhere near as bad our farecard garbage.