Grand River Transit

[taylortbb]

When the region asked for bids, Presto was not interested. At all.

Presto (Metrolinx) was very interested, they just weren't willing to respond to an RFP. Because RFPs take lots of time/money to respond to, and governments generally don't bid on things between each other. When we joined another Metrolinx project, for Bombardier LRVs, we didn't make Metrolinx bid on LRV supply. We accepted that the LRV order had already been competitively tendered by Metrolinx, just like Presto was.

There's a reason why it has been adopted by transit agencies servicing millions upon millions upon millions of people in our nations most important cities and it isn't because anyone is putting a gun to the heads of people in oh...Brampton, Ottawa, Toronto, Durham, Mississauga, Hamilton, York and Oakville. They went with it because it makes sense to do so. As said, it just works. It has a lot of good features. It is accepted in basically every important urban centre in Ontario - sans ours, of course.

Metrolinx made funding for just about everything contingent on adopting Presto, so municipalities absolutely adopted Presto because of a financial gun to their head. Toronto tried very hard to do something other than Presto, but eventually the province told them funding for the Eglinton Crosstown was contingent on Presto adoption and the TTC gave in.

And there's the rub. It isn't. It wasn't there to add the needed fare products when we were looking at vendors, so why would it be there now?

I have zero faith in PRESTO/Accenture.

It wasn't there at the time because Presto was still focused on rollouts in the GTA, and getting the initial system running and stable. It's been almost a decade since, and the situation has changed a lot. The specific dealbreakers, like the upass, have since been overcome in other cities.

Presto has been far from a perfect system, but at this point the teething pains are mostly over and it works pretty reliably in the GTA.

Accenture is inept, but ultimately they're just a contractor. Metrolinx owns the system, and they're the ones that decides what Presto does or doesn't do. Accenture just gets (over) paid.

No, it doesn't. Every single transit system that has installed PRESTO has had significant problems with it far worse than we have had with EasyGO.

I don't think locals understand that.

Are you angry at EasyGO now? Prepare to be abso-fucking-lutely raging if we were to switch to PRESTO.

Ac3r definitely has too rosy of a view of Presto, and missed where it got forced on the GTA transit agencies. But I've never seen a major government tech system that didn't have launch issues. The question is how well it works now, and the answer seems to be "pretty well".

I know presto had issues before...SO DID EASYGO!...in both cases those issues are largely solved, but while presto now works mostly smoothly, supports some advanced features, and is a path forward towards greater integration and modernization of fare payment in Ontario, but we're stuck with our shitty and expensive custom solution, that isolates us from Toronto, and will cost us a fortune to custom implement anything that presto already has.

This is the key point I think. Waterloo Region isn't big enough to justify the overhead costs of running our own modern smartcard fare system, so we're effectively stuck on a technological dead end. We're not big enough to reasonably pay for developing an open payment system, but Metrolinx is. We can either move to Presto, or we can have a basic farecard system that never achieves feature parity with Presto/Oyster/OMNY/etc, the transit fare systems of major cities.