Grand River Transit

[dtkvictim]

You're right but you're wrong. Yes, there are certain expectations, but bravado is right the limitations of our payment card here is EXTREMELY well advertised especially in this forum. It's totally possible to forget it (especially because it is inconsistent--going to a machine is instantaneous). And being angry at customer service is entirely unwarranted.

Yes, I would hope someone on this forum paid enough attention to not miss that detail. But frankly when you are designing a product for a mass audience you just have to accept that education and warnings simply don't work. A very large portion of people don't read instructions or details, they just operate on intuition.

I don't condone anger or berating anyone, customer service or not (we are all people regardless of what we're doing...). But I do think GRT customer service and bus operators should understand this common limitation of the system. I would prefer them giving out free rides over potentially losing a customer for life, so long as abuse of the system can be kept in check. Or better yet, give operators the option to force cards without a balance into the negative (perhaps up to a certain limit where it's clear the customer is just trying to be a cheat).

Edit: I should clarify, I replied to to dtkvictim because I wanted to include the earlier comment, but this following is a broad reply generally and not directed at any one specific person.

This part I do not get. There are MANY problems with EasyGO--even if we leave aside the IMMENSE teething problems it had (remember when they wiped their entire database and started again? FFS!), and leave aside that it was late to deploy, and even after they were deployed the equipment broke constantly.

They DO NOT work well now. The 24-48 hour delay is ONE problem. I also was unable to pay for the train, because for some reason the fare machine will not accept my TD debit card, nor my TD Visa, nor my Wise Visa, nor my ING (Dutch) Visa. I have FOUR payment cards and not one would work...what kind of bullshit is that. I was able to use three of the cards in every previous part of my trip including boarding multiple transit systems in the GTA.

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.

Honestly, I don't understand the hatred of presto. Yes, they didn't bid, because that's not what they do. If we were going to choose presto it wouldn't have been through the bidding process. I don't know why people here find that so inconceivable. A dozen other transit agencies have done so, why the fuck are we so special?! This is nothing more than a shitty excuse for not choosing presto.

By the way, accepting cash fares and transit passes isn't hard. London (who also chose to implement their own stupidly incompatible, but yet exactly the same transit fare card) accepts both cards and cash (and tickets too for that matter). They do it by having two boxes on the bus...it isn't complicated.

And of course, now if you travel to Toronto, you need two separate transit cards with two separate stored dollar value accounts...how much bullshit is that.

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.

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. Why anyone here (hell anyone outside the region's bureaucracy) uses this bullshit justification...I will never know.

It boggles my mind that there are still people who think Presto would be a bad thing. For god sakes, I cannot believe you are making me agree with ac3r. I certainly don't think we're ever going to switch...GRT is probably the reason I am going to have to keep carrying cash when I travel...

Thanks for the clarification lol. But for the record, I am not opposed to Presto at all. I even have a card from living in Ottawa which would have been nice to reuse and benefit from interoperability.

That's a shame to hear that payment issues still exist. I had the issue you're describing for a very long time at specifically City Hall Station; I assumed something wrong with that terminal. I actually failed to pay for my trip because of that once, and the fare checkers were "fair" checkers in this case, understanding that their issues aren't my fault.

My personal experience was that issues like that had been resolved and the new terminal software works way better. I hadn't seen others complaining online anymore either, so I could only assume EasyGO was at least working adequately at large.

[Bytor]

I'm going to hazard a guess that you work in some sort of engineering related profession, and not anything product or customer related,

I have many years of experience in frontline technical support in addition to my other IT experience of a more engineering bent.

because this post sounds like how the majority of my coworkers think. Yes, we understand how it works and why it works that way (but the general public at larger never will). Yes, once you understand there is a potential 48 hour delay it's not terribly stifling and can be worked around.

But for at least the last decade people think of a "payment cards" of any kind as an instantaneous and usable anywhere. I'd wager over 80% of the population doesn't know and doesn't care to know that payment terminals in shops are internet connected, and so the thought that payment terminals on busses aren't connected but would need to be isn't a logical train of thought for them. Today it's even expected for mobile/popup shops, food trucks, etc. to accept credit and debit payments backed by mobile connections, and most cash only places obviously take a hit.

If you build a product that goes against consumer expectations for technical reasons, that's fine, but you need to be sympathetic to the position you've put your customer in. Have some humility and shame, not anger towards the confused customer (and customer service should reflect that, short of accepting abuse whether verbal or of the system).

You're assuming that I expect people to know. I don't.

I do expect people to be willing to accept some trivial amount education so they can avoid the same problem again. And the explanation I have as to how it works was very abbreviated
and definitely not technical in any way.

I do expect people to treat customer service reps fairly, which RainRider22 did not, by their own words. Hence the YTA judgement. I mean, they think that their call to GRT customer service was an encounter with "GRT management", but is was really just them bullying a CS rep.

[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.

[Bytor]

When a  bus gets back to the barn at the end of the day, the mechanic giving it the once over sets the farebox to a WiFi AP at the barn. At that point in time it uploads a record of all transactions it did, and downloads a bundle of updates, such as you adding funds to your daughter's card.

Manually? Can’t it just connect once it receives the WiFi signal? For that matter, couldn’t they install their WiFi network at a few major transfer points and terminals and have most buses pick up updates sooner than end-of-day?

Potentially, yes. However, It depends on the hardware. These aren't exactly AMD Threadrippers with 64 cores and a terabyte of RAM. Heck, they aren't even my 7 year old Xeon E5-2620 v4 with 160GB RAM.

They'll probably be late '00s-era, early '10s chips, toughened for the industrial world, with 1 GB RAM, running Windows CE 7 (or whatever the proper name for it is these days). And it likely takes them an hour to download and apply all updates due to limited memory and local storage space for processing. So even with WiFi APs outside the barns, they wouldn't be able to update very much in a 5-10 minute stay at a place like Ainslie, or UW station. And few stays at timepoints are that long.

[Bytor]

[quote="danbrotherston" pid="112423" dateline="1703423183"]
This part I do not get. There are MANY problems with EasyGO--even if we leave aside the IMMENSE teething problems it had (remember when they wiped their entire database and started again? FFS!), and leave aside that it was late to deploy, and even after they were deployed the equipment broke constantly.
[quote]

This is where a meme pic of a PRESTO fare gate or terminal on a TTC bus says "Hold my beer".

If you think EasyGO's problems were "IMMENSE", then, my friend, you know nothing about the problems PRESTO had.

Why did it take the TTC 3 years of testing (2009 to 2012) then a contract signed in 2012 that was supposed to be finished by 2016 but, thanks to multiple halts, was not done until 2019, and after that has had multiple system-wide outages, including one this year?

[Bytor]

0

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.

No, we're not. Multiple agency support aside, there's no technological reason we can't have a system that accepts credit and debit and an app that on phones with NFS can either update your card directly or be a virtual card, or use Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc… S&B supplies those capabilities to other systems, and the Region of Waterloo just has to want to pay for it. S&B does the development, everybody else that uses it has already subsidized it, so we wouldn't be on our own. feature parity is possible.

Indeed, back in October at a council meeting is was said that the Region hopes to have and app and credit & debit tap fare payment by fall 2024.

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.

IMNSHO, PRESTO needs to be reorganized from a system vendor into a standards setter and transaction clearing house.

A standards setter in just that it lays out the data structures on cards and how fareboxes and kiosks and agency apps access things, and what the hardware and software needs to comply with to be compatible. They can certify existing third-party system vendors as pre-approved as well as certify new vendors that a municipality wants to use in the future.

A transaction clearing house for fares. When you pay with stored value from one agency for a ride with a different agency, the different agency reports it to PRESTO who then pays them, and PRESTO then collects from the original agency. Also, if somebody buys $25 stored value for GRT through the PRESTO app, PRESTO would pay that to GRT.

And then legislate that all Ontario transit agencies must use PRESTO as soon as their hardware has been certified.

I can think of a lot more complicated scenarios, like if the TTC and GRT wanted to honour each other's monthly passes, but then I think there would need to be some subsidization by PRESTO on behalf of the provincial government given the wildly varying monthly pass costs and how many trips a month you'd need to make before it becomes worth it. So maybe the TTC reports to PRESTO a ride with a GRT monthly pass and PRESTO gives the TTC $3 but only collects $2 from GRT?

[danbrotherston]

This part I do not get. There are MANY problems with EasyGO--even if we leave aside the IMMENSE teething problems it had (remember when they wiped their entire database and started again? FFS!), and leave aside that it was late to deploy, and even after they were deployed the equipment broke constantly.

This is where a meme pic of a PRESTO fare gate or terminal on a TTC bus says "Hold my beer".

If you think EasyGO's problems were "IMMENSE", then, my friend, you know nothing about the problems PRESTO had.

Why did it take the TTC 3 years of testing (2009 to 2012) then a contract signed in 2012 that was supposed to be finished by 2016 but, thanks to multiple halts, was not done until 2019, and after that has had multiple system-wide outages, including one this year?

TTC as a system is almost two orders of magnitude bigger than GRT, it's not surprising that they had significant issues. They were one of the later agencies to join presto. Other smaller systems which are more comparable to ours, have not had a similar scale of issues.

But I'll ask you, do you not feel that EasyGO was smooth and painless? Again, they didn't just haven an outage...they had to wipe their entire database...AFAIK presto never had such an extreme situation. And that's before we remember that the fare systems were so unreliable that they ran out of spares and could not longer keep fare payment running at every station reliably and we have only a handful of stations.

[taylortbb]

there's no technological reason we can't have a system that accepts credit and debit and an app that on phones with NFS can either update your card directly or be a virtual card, or use Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc…

I never disputed the technical feasibility, I disputed the financial feasibility. We certainly can pay S&B for all those things, but I don't think S&B's software isn't as standardized and "off the shelf" as you suggest. Adding all those features to our system, especially open payment, likely ends up costing a non-trivial amount of money. It sounds like we'll buy some of them, like the app, but if we went with Presto we'd get all of them without having to buy any of them.

[Bytor]

TTC as a system is almost two orders of magnitude bigger than GRT, it's not surprising that they had significant issues. They were one of the later agencies to join presto. Other smaller systems which are more comparable to ours, have not had a similar scale of issues.

But I'll ask you, do you not feel that EasyGO was smooth and painless? Again, they didn't just haven an outage...they had to wipe their entire database...AFAIK presto never had such an extreme situation. And that's before we remember that the fare systems were so unreliable that they ran out of spares and could not longer keep fare payment running at every station reliably and we have only a handful of stations.

I've never said that EasyGO was problem free. All I have ever done is point out that PRESTO's problems have been far greater than you or many others seem to remember or want to acknowledge.

It wasn't unproblematic for YRT, as this link shows, and the fact that the 905 agencies did it first and were finished before the TTC even signed the contract to get PRESTO, their implementation should have far, far smoother as the majority of bugs should have already been worked out. Saying that the TTC is huge is just a cop-out.

That database problem you mentioned? While people had to set up auto reloads and the like all over again, it did not affect what was on anybody's card or your login to the website.

[danbrotherston]

TTC as a system is almost two orders of magnitude bigger than GRT, it's not surprising that they had significant issues. They were one of the later agencies to join presto. Other smaller systems which are more comparable to ours, have not had a similar scale of issues.

But I'll ask you, do you not feel that EasyGO was smooth and painless? Again, they didn't just haven an outage...they had to wipe their entire database...AFAIK presto never had such an extreme situation. And that's before we remember that the fare systems were so unreliable that they ran out of spares and could not longer keep fare payment running at every station reliably and we have only a handful of stations.

I've never said that EasyGO was problem free. All I have ever done is point out that PRESTO's problems have been far greater than you or many others seem to remember or want to acknowledge.

It wasn't unproblematic for YRT, as this link shows, and the fact that the 905 agencies did it first and were finished before the TTC even signed the contract to get PRESTO, their implementation should have far, far smoother as the majority of bugs should have already been worked out. Saying that the TTC is huge is just a cop-out.

That database problem you mentioned? While people had to set up auto reloads and the like all over again, it did not affect what was on anybody's card or your login to the website.

I never said it was unproblematic for the other 905 agencies...only that it was less problematic than it was for TTC. To me, comparing the us with the issues TTC faced is a cop-out...because the agencies are not comparable, it's much more similar to the issues faced by other 905 agencies...and specifically the later ones.

And I am not saying that presto had no issues...but all systems have issues...EasyGO also had issues...and in my opinion they comparable to or worse than what the average Presto operator faced.

As for the database problem, I remember it well...but auto-reload is a core component and many people were surprised that it was broken. Yes, it was less than having the card values wiped, but that wouldn't have actually happened if the database is wiped, because those values are stored on the cards themselves (in addition to the database) -- and for that matter we don't actually KNOW if the card value database was wiped because that would have been transparent to us as users.

[tomh009]

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?

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?

[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.

[taylortbb]

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?

It's totally normal for governments to not bid on each other's projects. The region pays the cities to clear snow from its roads, it doesn't make the cities go through a bidding process against private contractors. When the region decided to purchase LRVs from Metrolinx, it didn't make them bid. I can easily list a dozen other examples.

Responding to a payment system RFP would easily be a full time job for months for 3 FTEs. Metrolinx isn't staffed for that, and it would be silly to do so. Presto isn't a commercial offering, it's a government service.

The region has no problem waiving the RFP process when working with governments (including with Metrolinx for the LRV purchase). For Presto it was nothing but a convenient excuse they could give the public.

[Bytor]

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

Batching at the end of the day. That's the way PRESTO is implementing credit card and debit tapping. I would speculate that it's partially because of how they have you tap both on and off for the fares-by-distance set up the GO uses, and because the terminals on the buses do not have internet access.

You going into a store and paying for something with a credit card and being able to see that immediately is a modern graft onto the old batch processes that used to tally things up from a literal paper trail that businesses would submit to VISA/MasterCARD/etc… So is the debit card system. The terminals you use at a store, many of them can store transactions if their internet collection is offline and then upload them later. Stripe also has a similar store-and-forward option for their client apps when mobile or wifi data is not available. All of that is all based on those old batch processing paradigms.

[Bytor]

Presto isn't a commercial offering, it's a government service.

Then PRESTO should have been flexible enough to say "OK, we'll implement those fare types for you", or ONgov should be subsidizing PRESTO installations. And I mean actual subsidies, not by making gas tax transfers contingent on adoption.

PRESTO/Metrolinx/ONgov is just as culpable for this as the Regional Municipality of Waterloo is.