Grand River Transit

[danbrotherston]

I would suggest that the best thing EasyGO could do now is support payment by Visa/MC and then you solve most (but not all) of the problems we have (you get fare payment integration for most users, pay by phone, etc. but we don't get a unified interface to view and collect all your spending). But I have no idea what excuses/problems will roadblock this, I suspect they will not be small in size or number.

I wonder how hard it really would be to enable NFC payments by phone (essentially a virtual EasyGo card on your phone). Creating one for the Japanese stored-value card systems (PASMO and SUICA) or UK (Oyster) is quite simple, and it gives you a full charge/reload history on the phone. I believe that from a SUICA reader perspective the phone is just a card.

Not everyone wants or can use a smartphone, but those people would be able to continue using the existing EasyGo cards.

I am not saying that it would be hard, but it solves only a tiny fraction of the use cases that the other solves.

Yes, I can now pay with my phone, but I still need a separate app, money pool, etc.

If you enable visa payment, you get integrated fare payment with other systems (that also support visa+mc which right now includes Presto), you get visa+mc payment, you get reduced friction to occasional transit use (no keeping track of an extra card, and people who have never taken transit can just board a bus with their visa) and you also get phone payments because many (most even) bank cards support apple pay/google pay.

I really think going through the effort of supporting phone payment is just missing the point...supporting visa+mc is much more meaningful, and if EasyGO cannot do this, then we should clearly scrap EasyGO...I'd say supporting visa+mc payment is the only path forward where keeping EasyGO makes any sense.

[dtkvictim]

On a different topic, are the EV buses in service yet? I have seen one in testing, but have not spotted on in revenue service yet.

Yes, I've seen them around.

According to this GRT article, some have been in service since February.

[neonjoe]

On a different topic, are the EV buses in service yet? I have seen one in testing, but have not spotted on in revenue service yet.

Well, that is awesome. I know a lot of people poo poo EV buses, and there are probably higher priorities, but most of those people have not stood at bus stops getting covered in diesel soot while getting deafened as a stinky diesel bus pulls out of the stop. EVs really make a meaningful improvement to bus rider comfort. I've been on a few EV buses in NL, but none operate in my city, which still uses very comfortable hybrid buses, but even then, the difference was noticeable.

I agree, I've ridden the New Flyer EVs in Toronto they are definitely an improvement from a comfort perspective

[taylortbb]

Governments in most cases cannot engage a vendor without RFQ/RFP for large contracts. Doing so would be to establish a sole source/single source contract, which is generally not permitted and can only be done under certain circumstances outlined in the relevant laws & bylaws.

One of the "certain circumstances outlined in the relevant laws & bylaws" is "with the consent of regional council". The regional purchasing by-law explicitly gives them an out to skip the RFP when they feel it is appropriate.

Do you think we had an RFP for the purchase of Flexity Freedom LRVs? No, we didn't. Metrolinx (aka the provincial government) had already done an RFP, and awarded an LRV contract, so we decided their RFP was good enough and we'd just join that (and waive the regional RFP requirement).

Then it comes to Presto. Metrolinx (aka the provincial government) had already done an RFP, and awarded a fare card contract, so we decided their RFP wasn't good enough and we did our own (and didn't waive the regional RFP requirement).

Do you not see the parallel between these two situations? The purchasing by-law didn't change. The fact that Metrolinx ran an RFP didn't change.

You need to tap student cards for more than just proof of payment. The taps provide valuable information to tell who transferred where, something you need when you have multiple routes stopping at a given place and you need to know which ones to prioritize synchronizing to each other and to provide the shortest delays for the most people.

Having transfer data from students is certainly valuable, but it has to be weighed against everything else. Presto does now support upass programs, and it's pretty obvious that was going to happen eventually. Going with EasyGo got us student transfer data a couple years sooner, but it cost of a bunch of money, left us behind Presto in featureset (e.g. no mobile app, no open payment, etc), and the use of a separate card means we have no Go Transit transfer data (and never will). Was all that worth it to get upass transfer data a couple years earlier? I don't really think the data is that important. They'd survived without it since the upass began, surviving another couple years without it hardly seems like a crisis.

Also, Presto wouldn't do paper tickets or the Mobility Plus vehicles.

At the time, yes, but Presto now does both of those things. Going with EasyGo let us get those things a few years sooner, but at significant cost. If we'd gone with Presto we'd already have a mobile app, instead that's something else we have to pay to develop ourselves.

I'm not saying there's zero positives to EasyGo over Presto. But there's plenty of downsides too, and no hard lines that absolutely prevent use of Presto (the RFP requirement could trivially have been waived). I don't think the benefits were worth the costs, but I understand opinions can vary on that. If you think that student transfer data a couple years sooner was worth millions of dollars and years of headaches... you are entitled to that opinion. But I don't think GRT is enough of a data-driven organization for that to have been worth it.

[ac3r]

EasyGO is a bad experience for the customer. Nobody seems to care about that.

Yes, EasyGo isn't the best experience. But let me ask two questions:

• Did we know that the user experience would be bad when EasyGo was selected 10 years ago? Payment by phone etc did not exist back then.
  
• Is EasyGo user experience impossible to improve, and thus the entire system must be scrapped?
  

We can also look at it this way:

• Did we have any concrete reason to accept that some basic small Toronto suburb had any evolutionary tricks up its sleeve that would have made EasyGO the superior choice over a product millions of people in the nation's greatest cities had already been already reliably using?
  
• Yes.

Trying to defend EasyGO as a preferable choice over Presto makes as much sense as arguing against universal power sockets. Heck, even USB lmao. Interoperability IS A GOOD THING. There's nothing EasyGO does which Presto cannot. Everything it can do, it amusingly manages to do worse.

[tomh009]

Trying to defend EasyGO as a preferable choice over Presto makes as much sense as arguing against universal power sockets. Heck, even USB lmao. Interoperability IS A GOOD THING. There's nothing EasyGO does which Presto cannot. Everything it can do, it amusingly manages to do worse.

I'm not defending anything. But we already have EasyGo today, and it may make more sense to improve it rather than rip everything out and do a whole new implementation (which is not a cheap thing to do).

[tomh009]

I am not saying that it would be hard, but it solves only a tiny fraction of the use cases that the other solves.

Yes, I can now pay with my phone, but I still need a separate app, money pool, etc.

Does Android require installing an app? On an iPhone, I simply selected to add SUICA as a card to the wallet (and I was able to transfer an existing card balance). It's a separate money pool, but that's exactly the same as any stored-value card. And I can now add money to the card using Apple Pay, without going to a station etc.

I'm not saying that this is the bee's knees, but it might be an easy win to improve the experience.

[Bytor]

This archived PDF of P&W meeting from 2013 has a lot of good in-depth explanations.
EasyGO came in at roughly $11M. How much do you think an MoU with Mextrolinx/Presto would have cost us, and based on the timeline issues mentioned in that PDF, how late do you think it would have been?

EasyGO was also very late.

As for cost, I have no idea, but I know what is most expensive...doing EasyGO, having a worse system, then sometime in the future, doing Presto anyway, because our shitty system is holding us back.

It was a year late. But that doesn't answer the question I asked you. Presto has a long and storied history of being multiple years late on some of its implementations, and operational problems an order of magnitude greater than what we have ever had with EasyGO. Look up the history of the TTC implementation and how many years that took.

Oh horse puckey.

You need to tap student cards for more than just proof of payment. The taps provide valuable information to tell who transferred where, something you need when you have multiple routes stopping at a given place and you need to know which ones to prioritize synchronizing to each other and to provide the shortest delays for the most people.

But we weren't tapping student cards BEFORE Presto, and if we really wanted to get students to tap a card, we could have given them Presto cards.

Presto has nothing to do with tapping student cards on GRT.

They didn't tap them because we didn't have any tap terminals on the buses and the drivers had to look at every student card to see if it was valid like how they had to look at the old-style paper transfers. It slowed down boarding immensely.

Also, Presto wouldn't do paper tickets or the Mobility Plus vehicles.

Calling not getting Presto "bullshit" requires ignoring a whole lot of information about the problems with it.

"Presto wouldn't do paper tickets"...neither does EasyGO...and yet it remains physically possible to pass a piece of paper to a transit vehicle driver, nothing about presto prevents this.

EasyGO absolutely does paper tickets. Any time you use cash on a bus you get a paper ticket. Anytime you use cash or credit at an ION kiosk you get a paper ticket. It's how the system provides transfers when you're not using the fare card.

If you're getting that piece of basic info about EasyGo wrong, what else are you also getting wrong?

The point of calling all this "bullshit" is not that there isn't some nominal reason, but that none of these requirements are insurmountable or frankly even slightly difficult to overcome.

Presto refusing to add certain functionality needed by GRT certainly is "insurmountable" by the Region because there was absolutely nothing the Region could do to make Presto change.

[Bytor]

People are either ignorant or forgetful of all the hassle that Presto implementations have been over the years, and how the problems were always much, much larger than any we've had with EasyGO.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presto_card

→
The Presto rollout on the TTC's surface transit fleet have been marred with abnormally high failure rates of the readers themselves[15] and cost overruns.[16] A TTC position paper noted that faulty Presto card readers used by fare inspectors on the proof-of-payment streetcar system was making it "difficult to get customers to comply with inspections" and costing the TTC in lost fare revenue.[17]

→
The rollout of the fare system and accompanying replacement fare gates on the TTC's subway network was met with poor reliability[21][22] and issues with processing transactions. Presto was forced to use its existing software back-end for other municipal transit partners that have completed the roll-out, as the TTC has yet to develop its own dedicated infrastructure to process the larger volume of transactions it typically handles.[23] The new fare gates suffered from persistent mechanical and software problems, prompting the TTC to suspend the rollout for a month to work with the contractor, Scheidt & Bachmann, to resolve reliability issues.[24] As a result, over 2,000 motors on more than 1,000 gates had to be replaced in addition to numerous hardware and software updates.[25] The June 2018 deadline for the complete roll-out of Presto for the TTC will be further pushed to 2019 due to these ongoing issues, prompting a delay in the phasing out of cash fares, tokens and other legacy fare media.[26] As a result, the TTC will face higher fare collection costs as it incurs "transitional costs" of operating parts of Presto and the legacy fare regimes concurrently over the next few years.[27][28] A situation TTC board member John Campbell describes as "totally inefficient".[29]

→
While Presto was designed for complex fare transactions between GTA transit agencies, up until the fourth quarter of 2019, the system on TTC buses was not able to support the payment of special surcharges for TTC express downtown buses and TTC trips that enter Mississauga and York Region where a Miway or YRT fare was required. As of late 2018, the TTC Presto system at large continues to experience abnormally high failure rates.[31]

→
The 2018 Audit Work Plan by the auditor general of Ontario noted that the number of reports of Presto collection machines not functioning properly is likely under-counted and a breakdown in communication between Metrolinx, the TTC, and two of its vendors led to operational issues.

[Bob_McBob]

You're just making stuff up. The region doesn't refuse to change, they literally just awarded a new recycling contract which includes the new bins.

You'd think so, but since the region is no longer responsible for recycling, the new contract with rolling bins is only for garbage and green bins. Circular Materials assumed the existing contract with Miller Waste, and it has apparently been extended until something like 2030, with manual pickup because Miller doesn't want to invest in any new equipment. So it's going to be blue boxes and recycling blowing down the street like usual for quite a while yet.

[danbrotherston]

@Bytor, it’s clear you hate presto. But comparing TTCs rollout with ours is disingenuous. TTC is the biggest and most complex transit system in Canada. If you want me to feel that Presto is so bad that it was likely to be delayed more than EasyGO then you gotta show it failing on comparable systems, I don’t believe there are similar examples which is why you keep Coming back to TTC and that weakens your argument.

But it’s clear you aren’t budging on this. All I’ll say is that these arguments you make about compelling to me. Using presto as our fare card wouldn’t have precluded anything we’ve discussed. If you want to convince me (or others) you’re going to need different, less BS arguments.

[tomh009]

I think the key point is that while Presto may now have the functionality the region was looking for (except maybe paper tickets?), at the time of the RFP they were unwilling to commit to any of that--and thus did not respond to the RFP. Effectively, it was their way or the highway, and the region did not want to give up on what they viewed as key functionality. So, for better or for worse, we ended up with EasyGo.

You may not agree with what the region's RFP requirements were, but they were public knowledge, and any bidder would have had the option to deliver those.

[danbrotherston]

I think the key point is that while Presto may now have the functionality the region was looking for (except maybe paper tickets?), at the time of the RFP they were unwilling to commit to any of that--and thus did not respond to the RFP. Effectively, it was their way or the highway, and the region did not want to give up on what they viewed as key functionality. So, for better or for worse, we ended up with EasyGo.

You may not agree with what the region's RFP requirements were, but they were public knowledge, and any bidder would have had the option to deliver those.

EasyGO didn't have all the functionality either, the region would have preferred interoperability...but they valued it lower than other things...lets not pretend that is an objective decision, things rarely are. It was a subjective value decision made by people at the region. It wasn't the only one: the value of interoperability vs. getting features want now, the value of a known quantity (presto) vs. the unknown expectations of a new system we commission, and yes ALSO the value of our own fiefdom vs. co-operating with a larger organisation. All of these things played a role in the decision...ALL of them. And NONE of them are objective.

I am not saying that the people who made this decision are bad, I'm sure they made the decision they felt was right, and possible even questioned their own biases. I only say that they made value judgements (ones that I happen to disagree with) and also that not all of their motivations are publicly stated here. I'm very tired of people hiding behind the false pretense of objectivity. If we (well, politicians/ceos/etc. mainly) were all just a little more honest with the decisions we make things would be a lot better.

[taylortbb]

at the time of the RFP they were unwilling to commit to any of that--and thus did not respond to the RFP.

Regardless of featureset they weren't going to respond to the RFP. Metrolinx's position was that they are a government agency, they don't respond to RFPs. They aren't staffed for it, and it wouldn't make sense to do so. Presto had already been competitively tendered through an RFP process, and Metrolinx felt that was enough.

No different than our LRV purchase, Metrolinx wouldn't have responded to an RFP for that either.

[KevinL]

I think our current paper ticket/transfer system could still work alongside Presto; I don't know if any other transit agencies that use Presto have anything similar but I can't think of any reason it couldn't.