I did it, thanks! Walked right onto Bay St.
After Union is revitalized, you essentially have 6 or 7 ways to board the train, only 3 requires entering Union Station.
- York West teamway
- York East teamway
- York Concourse
- Back of VIA concourse (for 24/25/26/27 + future 28/29)
- Bay Concourse
- Bay West teamway
- Bay East teamway (except 24/25/26/27)
That's how they plan to double number of simultaneous passengers. More enter/exit options. It's a wee bit bottlenecked during construction, though.
I've had Presto Errors before. It was often caused by a newbie presto mistake like messing up tap-on / tap-out randomly. Sometimes it resolves itself overnight (after the penalty is automatically applied) but you should haul ass to a GO wicket, that's when you can easily get a refund: ASAP after your mistake. TTC/Shoppers cannot help with refunds, but GO cashiers are very flexible in giving your refunds for Presto mistakes if you're quick to visit the wicket.
Go to the GO customer service to get those fixed, they also will refund you for accidental double charges (e.g. Tap at Bay teamway + tap at York concourse, in less than 15 minutes -- it doesn't recognize that as a duplicate tap properly, all being Union Station readers but the readers far apart don't recognize duplicate taps at opposite ends of the station -- I tap, I miss the train, I walk to York Concourse to relax with food, I tap again (oops), I get charged again) as it's quite obvious that's a double-tap. Sometimes they won't refund you for a forgotten tap-out, but you can also explain you're a 1st time GO commuter and plead inexperience, they will sometimes be accomodating with refunds for forgotten tap-outs (if you see the cashier the same day especially), especially if you also then immediately register your default commute pair to eliminate the need to tap-out.
Have you registered your Presto card yet? Lose card, never lose money -- Online website lets you transfer balance to a brand new Presto card. One can pull hair at Presto deployment frustrations, but it's already pretty mature on the GO train network now (And TTC should be pretty mature in two years).
At any GO wicket cashier (there's one on Bay East teamway, if you don't want to haul yourself all the way to York concourse) you can tell them to program a default destination pair onto your Presto Card. So you only need to "Tap-On" rather than "Tap-Off" whenever travelling your main commute pair. That eliminated 90% of my Presto errorss from forgotten tap-outs, because the tap-out is now made optional on the common commute pair.
With the time savings of experience and the Bay Teamway, I bet you're faster than your original car commute now. Ha.
Over the years, see how much your car use decreases. Maybe when your car wears out (e.g. Time to replace car) you might instead use carshare -- begin using Zipcar/Enterprise/Car2Go/etc for spontaneous tap-card cars that you can immediately drive spontaneously on the spot (just like bikeshare, but you have to pay hourly). You can even be members of all of them, for easier access to nearby cars, if that's important, too. Costs me about 15 dollars for 2 hours all-in -- tax/gas/insurance/kilometerage included for one spontaneous grocery shopping trip. You actually pay more than that in average car ownership costs for a less-frequently-used car still on its monthly payments + gas + insurance averaged.
While I used carshare extensively, I own a car now due to frequent out-of-town trips and the change to my commute (no all-day 2-way GO train service yet to Hamilton -- it stops at Aldershot which I have to drive to, unless I want to catch Hamilton #16 Express which isn't as productive to telecommute my laptop on). I used carshare for many years, and frequent spontaneous (non-work-related) random use of the car still cost me less than $200/month all-in (gas, insurance, driving) -- and no maintenance worries. I could book a long weekend trip two weeks in advance (about 25% cheaper than a car rental for that long weekends, on the frequent-user plan), but I also often stood in front of a parked carshare car and booked it for an hour's driving, on my phone right on the spot, drove it away like a bikeshare. With an advance booking by website though, I even pre-booked carshare for a 10-day roadtrip to USA, and it cost about 25% less than car rental on the frequent-drive plan. Carshare (plus bikeshare that first began) was the way of my life until I had to get a car due to frequent use, but now my car use has fallen but now I have an almost paid-off reliable econobox which I'll push to its 15th year and then go back to carshare after the Hamilton LRT and AD2W GO trains is built.
