Grand River Transit

[JHerbin]

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.

[KevinL]

I imagine that's heavily informed by their respective customer bases - Conestoga caters far more to transit-dependent university students.

[JHerbin]

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.

[danbrotherston]

[taylortbb]

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.

[KevinL]

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.

[ijmorlan]

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”.

[danbrotherston]

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.

[ac3r]

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.

[trainspotter139]

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.

[MidTowner]

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.

[danbrotherston]

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.

I am aware of the scope of the system.

[Acitta]

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.

From Paying your fare on the GRT website.

"You can pay for another person or group of people if you have stored value loaded on your card. When you board, let the operator know how many people you are paying for. They will enter the number on the farebox, and the farebox will display the total fare. Touch your card to the smart card target to pay the fare."

"Group fares are not currently available on ION light rail."

[MidTowner]

Thanks! I swear, the last time I looked at that (probably around the time of the Ion launch), that line was not there.

Neither was the other one, "You cannot pay for a group if you have a valid monthly or other pass on your card." Weird.

Anyway, thanks for the info! I'm not going to worry too much about fares- it turns out, checking my history online, that I've been unsuccessful in paying for maybe a quarter of my train trips this month. Not good, but I'll just keep trying my best.

[avernar]

"Group fares are not currently available on ION light rail."

Workaround: Do a one stop ride on a bus then take the ION for the rest of the trip.