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(07-17-2019, 08:38 PM)neonjoe Wrote: [ -> ]
(07-17-2019, 07:35 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: [ -> ]This is in fact why the terminal was located away from the mall.  This is why I will not shop at fairway mall.
It may be the tenant (the Bay) more so than the landlord. Fairview Park keeps posting about iON on their social media. Conestoga tickets riders who park in their lot.

It wasn't the tenant who forced the terminal away.

And they can post about it all they want, the terminal has moved, they're going to have to live with that.  As for Conestoga mall, I don't care much if they ticket drivers who want to ride the train, I do think it's a dick move and kind of stupid, but it's not really the same as targeting transit riders.
The mall owns the land, not the tenant. Obviously the landlord doesn't want to alienate the tenant, but Ion carries thousands of potential shoppers every day, and having them closer to the mall seems like it should be better for the mall. My sense was that they were considered transit riders, not desirable consumers, so the idea was to keep them as far away as possible. So I'll stay away completely, including when I have something to buy.
(07-18-2019, 07:16 AM)MidTowner Wrote: [ -> ]My sense was that they were considered transit riders, not desirable consumers, so the idea was to keep them as far away as possible. So I'll stay away completely, including when I have something to buy.

So in your mind if the transit stop was 20 feet closer, more people would shop at the mall? People are able to walk into The Bay from the current location without any issue. I feel like this is a mountain out of molehills situation.

To presume that the Mall viewed transit people as bad customers, is a bit far fetched. However I can see The Bay drawing issue with it as their vestibule was constantly full of people standing around waiting for the bus in the Summer and Winter. They're a business not a shelter.
(07-24-2019, 03:01 PM)JHerbin Wrote: [ -> ]To presume that the Mall viewed transit people as bad customers, is a bit far fetched. However I can see The Bay drawing issue with it as their vestibule was constantly full of people standing around waiting for the bus in the Summer and Winter. They're a business not a shelter.

As someone that's talked to more than one GRT person about their experiences dealing with the malls, there's a pretty huge gap in how they view things. Conestoga sees GRT as a huge source of customers, and works to make sure it's a convenient way to get to the mall, giving up the prime parking in front the main entrance. Fairview does not share this view, and sees GRT as mostly delivering people that use facilities but don't buy anything, and prefers they be off mall property.
(07-24-2019, 03:05 PM)taylortbb Wrote: [ -> ]As someone that's talked to more than one GRT person about their experiences dealing with the malls, there's a pretty huge gap in how they view things. Conestoga sees GRT as a huge source of customers, and works to make sure it's a convenient way to get to the mall, giving up the prime parking in front the main entrance. Fairview does not share this view, and sees GRT as mostly delivering people that use facilities but don't buy anything, and prefers they be off mall property.

Well that's likely accurate.
I imagine that's heavily informed by their respective customer bases - Conestoga caters far more to transit-dependent university students.
I take the ION basically the whole route, and you can watch the demographic shift from students to lower income people as it progresses southbound.
(07-25-2019, 10:41 AM)danbrotherston Wrote: [ -> ]If you must tweet videos of how to remove your card from a machine, your UX is very broken. Honestly, the company which built our fare payment system should be blacklisted from all government contacts in the future.

If we blacklisted every company that produces tech with terrible UX from government contracts, there'd be no companies left to bid on them. I think the core problem is that UX just isn't a part of the evaluation criteria when bidding.

Even if UX was an evaluation criteria, the bids for the fare card systems were $11M, $13M, and $16M. Pretty much all government tendering favours price so heavily that the extra points for good UX would never overcome being $2M more expensive.
(07-25-2019, 03:04 PM)taylortbb Wrote: [ -> ]I think the core problem is that UX just isn't a part of the evaluation criteria when bidding.

A good case for making it part of the criteria.
(07-25-2019, 03:04 PM)taylortbb Wrote: [ -> ]Even if UX was an evaluation criteria, the bids for the fare card systems were $11M, $13M, and $16M. Pretty much all government tendering favours price so heavily that the extra points for good UX would never overcome being $2M more expensive.

Not if it was a requirement.

However, the real problem is that good interface isn’t something you can just tick off on a checklist. It’s easy to check something like “all elevator maintenance personnel must be in good standing with the TSSA”, but impossible for an inflexible bureaucracy to check “user interface doesn’t suck”.
It's also a ridiculous price to pay for a system like this.

The TVMs are insane. They're doing less work than my smart phone, yet somehow they're getting hot enough to ruin the thermal paper. There's giant racks of equipment at each station...doing what?

This shouldn't have cost 11 million dollars...

I'm no expert on construction or building roads, or building trains, but this stuff *IS* my domain, and it's ridiculous. And it isn't a government problem either.
It shouldn't have potentially cost millions more by going with another contract to implement common sense features. If you're in the business of designing machines like this, it should come to mind that: these things need to be usable by people with disabilities. It doesn't take a team of engineers to come up with a little pocket to put a card in for 1 minute.

The ION is useful, but it was a complete shambles to get here and now transit riders are still stuck with a very buggy fare payment system and the train is still without a working ATS system (as far as I know) greatly limiting our speeds...not that it can really go fast anywhere but the completely grade separated areas, because of the terrible drivers.
(07-25-2019, 06:31 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: [ -> ]It's also a ridiculous price to pay for a system like this.

The TVMs are insane.  They're doing less work than my smart phone, yet somehow they're getting hot enough to ruin the thermal paper.  There's giant racks of equipment at each station...doing what?

This shouldn't have cost 11 million dollars...

I'm no expert on construction or building roads, or building trains, but this stuff *IS* my domain, and it's ridiculous.  And it isn't a government problem either.

https://rapidtransit.regionofwaterloo.ca...emEFMS.pdf

258 Fareboxes, 32 TVMs, 38 PFVs, portable reader devices for fare inspectors, backend server systems, access points for data uploading to bus fareboxes, PCI-DSS compliant network segmentation of systems at all garages, TVM and customer service locations and anything else that such a system requires. It's not cheap. It's labour-intensive and requires a lot more work that very few get to actually see. The vendors that bid all had modular systems that could be assembled and programmed into a complete system.
There's no way to use an EasyGO fare card for two people on Ion, is there? That was possible on buses, and I assume still is- one just asks the driver to deduct two fares from the same card. I see no way to do that at the platform, and Keolis staff apparently "know nothing" about the fare system, which is fair enough.

Do children really need their own fare card to get the concession rate? That seems true, too, but a bus driver I asked about it the other day kind of threw his hands on the air about the whole EasyGO system, and just let my kid on for free. So I don't know, but I'll go downtown and ask one of these days.