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nfitz
Superstar
No, not implemented. 5 rides on Presto today on the 506. Would have cost $8.70 last week. Cost $14.50 today!
Edit - Brad says they hope to have the daily capping working in February.
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rbt
Senior Member
It doesn't and you get that portion of the trip for free. I've experienced 2 breakdowns and both were handled this way. Very infrequent service though, so it was a 30+ minute wait both times. Driver didn't turn on the Presto device in the replacement bus the second time; even if you tried to tap it wouldn't have taken.
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EastYorkTTCFan
Senior Member
So here's a screen shot of some of mine the ones from today are interesting. I took the subway from Dundas to union and got on one of the streetcars and saw 4415 behind me on 510 spadina so that's what the transfer is. Alos I ave a metro pass but was playing around with my presto card to see what would happen. Alos there were fare inspectors at spadina and the driver of the streetcar let us know as we were waiting behind another car
EastYorkTTCFan
Senior Member
also i've noticed that you can now add a monthly pass for the ttc now onto a presto card
Megaton327
Senior Member
Source? There's been no announcement on it, and when I go to load a monthly pass on the Presto website and select TTC it says "Monthly passes are currently unavailable for this transit agency" like it always has...
EastYorkTTCFan
Senior Member
Ok just checked and I can't get it to do it now but it did earlier today i didn't actually add it then but i did see some steps that i am not now when i try too
nfitz
Superstar
Looking at that summary - they reset the loyalty count every day - so that's presumably for the daily rate capping - odd then they didn't activate that at the same time.
DSC
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It seems a bit confusing to me that if you make a transfer and the fare charged is $0 you are shown you have $0 balance. Surely the balance should be what it was before - in the screen shot above $10.25. When you tap on you also get your balance, does a "transfer tap on" show a $0 balance too?
DSC
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This is a cautionary tale from Montreal (from Gazette).
If, as the old saying goes, a camel is a horse designed by committee, I shudder to think how many committees were involved in the conceiving of the Opus card reader.
The widely maligned device, which hit the market in July, has been a certified flop, selling a paltry 9,510 units in its first six months, according to a recent report in Métro. (To be fair, that’s still about 9,500 more than I would have predicted.)
For perspective, consider that there are some 600,000 OPUS users who reload their cards monthly in and around Montreal, which means only 1.6 per cent of those potential customers shelled out for the reader.
Even more damning, the ill-fated gadget cost local transit agencies whose fares operate on the OPUS system — as well as the federal and provincial governments, who also kicked in funding — $7.6 million dollars to develop. That works out to just over $757 per user, a rather inefficient use of our tax dollars, to put it gently.
For those who aren’t familiar with the device — and really, why should you be, given its well-deserved obscurity? — some background: selling for $16.66 (including shipping and taxes), the reader, which plugs into the USB port of one’s computer, allows users to reload fares onto their OPUS cards from home via a website. As with most matters involving our public transit systems, the card reader arrived well behind schedule, having originally been promised for 2013, which would at least partially explain its comically outdated technology.
So comical, in fact, that the best thing to come out of the card’s launch this summer was the derisive hashtag #InnoverCommeLaSTM that sprang up on social media in its aftermath, which saw users lambaste the woeful OPUS card reader with far more ingenuity than went into developing the gizmo.
Ostensibly, the reader was intended to tame the crazy lineups that form at train and métro stations on the first of the month with transit users looking to load their OPUS cards with that month’s fare — a mission that has failed, since the number of people who have purchased it is too paltry to have made so much as a dent in waiting times.
The Edsel-like debacle could, and should, have been foreseeable to everyone involved in the card reader’s release. The exact same model went on sale in Paris in 2013, and was similarly shunned by the 4 million regular transit users there, where it has sold just 80,000 units in two and a half years, according to a Radio-Canada report.
The fact that this plug-and-play reader is the best we can get would be laughable if it wasn’t such a perfect example of how far behind the curve the STM, AMT and other local agencies are when it comes to employing innovative technology to improve the often unpleasant public transit experience.
Consider the STM’s much vaunted iBus system, which would use GPS locators installed on buses to allow riders to track their bus’s progress in real-time. It’s a technology that has been available in several North American cities for years, and was originally scheduled to launch here in 2014. But — stop me if you’ve heard this before — it has been delayed repeatedly, and is now scheduled to launch only this fall. And we all know how much the STM loves to stick to a schedule. (While the STM likes to play up its technological savvy by vaunting the fact that 13 of its 68 métro stations are now part of a cellular network, the city of London has done no less than hook up 250 stations in its Underground — virtually the entire system — with free Wi-Fi.)
As you probably know, smartphones have, for so many of us, become the technological focal point of our lives. (In fact, readership statistics suggest you probably are reading this column on yours right now). Considering what we can already do with them — banking, streaming music and video, booking vacations — the fact that in 2016 we still cannot use our phones to do something as basic as pay for fares and use them to board our buses, métros and commuter trains is simply incomprehensible.
When the OPUS card reader was launched last summer, STM chairman Philippe Schnobb suggested that such a smartphone fare payment system was years away, confirmed by a recent Radio-Canada report that revealed the STM was only in the earliest stages of testing such a system — a laggardly timeline that all but assures it, just like the Opus card reader, will be a hashtag-worthy farce.
bboshra@postmedia.com
If, as the old saying goes, a camel is a horse designed by committee, I shudder to think how many committees were involved in the conceiving of the Opus card reader.
The widely maligned device, which hit the market in July, has been a certified flop, selling a paltry 9,510 units in its first six months, according to a recent report in Métro. (To be fair, that’s still about 9,500 more than I would have predicted.)
For perspective, consider that there are some 600,000 OPUS users who reload their cards monthly in and around Montreal, which means only 1.6 per cent of those potential customers shelled out for the reader.
Even more damning, the ill-fated gadget cost local transit agencies whose fares operate on the OPUS system — as well as the federal and provincial governments, who also kicked in funding — $7.6 million dollars to develop. That works out to just over $757 per user, a rather inefficient use of our tax dollars, to put it gently.
For those who aren’t familiar with the device — and really, why should you be, given its well-deserved obscurity? — some background: selling for $16.66 (including shipping and taxes), the reader, which plugs into the USB port of one’s computer, allows users to reload fares onto their OPUS cards from home via a website. As with most matters involving our public transit systems, the card reader arrived well behind schedule, having originally been promised for 2013, which would at least partially explain its comically outdated technology.
So comical, in fact, that the best thing to come out of the card’s launch this summer was the derisive hashtag #InnoverCommeLaSTM that sprang up on social media in its aftermath, which saw users lambaste the woeful OPUS card reader with far more ingenuity than went into developing the gizmo.
Ostensibly, the reader was intended to tame the crazy lineups that form at train and métro stations on the first of the month with transit users looking to load their OPUS cards with that month’s fare — a mission that has failed, since the number of people who have purchased it is too paltry to have made so much as a dent in waiting times.
The Edsel-like debacle could, and should, have been foreseeable to everyone involved in the card reader’s release. The exact same model went on sale in Paris in 2013, and was similarly shunned by the 4 million regular transit users there, where it has sold just 80,000 units in two and a half years, according to a Radio-Canada report.
The fact that this plug-and-play reader is the best we can get would be laughable if it wasn’t such a perfect example of how far behind the curve the STM, AMT and other local agencies are when it comes to employing innovative technology to improve the often unpleasant public transit experience.
Consider the STM’s much vaunted iBus system, which would use GPS locators installed on buses to allow riders to track their bus’s progress in real-time. It’s a technology that has been available in several North American cities for years, and was originally scheduled to launch here in 2014. But — stop me if you’ve heard this before — it has been delayed repeatedly, and is now scheduled to launch only this fall. And we all know how much the STM loves to stick to a schedule. (While the STM likes to play up its technological savvy by vaunting the fact that 13 of its 68 métro stations are now part of a cellular network, the city of London has done no less than hook up 250 stations in its Underground — virtually the entire system — with free Wi-Fi.)
As you probably know, smartphones have, for so many of us, become the technological focal point of our lives. (In fact, readership statistics suggest you probably are reading this column on yours right now). Considering what we can already do with them — banking, streaming music and video, booking vacations — the fact that in 2016 we still cannot use our phones to do something as basic as pay for fares and use them to board our buses, métros and commuter trains is simply incomprehensible.
When the OPUS card reader was launched last summer, STM chairman Philippe Schnobb suggested that such a smartphone fare payment system was years away, confirmed by a recent Radio-Canada report that revealed the STM was only in the earliest stages of testing such a system — a laggardly timeline that all but assures it, just like the Opus card reader, will be a hashtag-worthy farce.
bboshra@postmedia.com
nfitz
Superstar
The bottom line is that Opus is much more limited and restrictive than Presto.
It's big failing is that you don't load cash onto it. You have to load tickets and passes. Which means you have to preload tickets and passes for EVERY agency that you might use. And then it can only handle 3 different agencies fare products at once.
And it's other failing, is that you can't just purchase something online, and it loads onto your card when you tap somewhere. You have to go in person.
Yes, they rolled it out faster and cheaper than Presto. I'm glad we've moved slower!
It's big failing is that you don't load cash onto it. You have to load tickets and passes. Which means you have to preload tickets and passes for EVERY agency that you might use. And then it can only handle 3 different agencies fare products at once.
And it's other failing, is that you can't just purchase something online, and it loads onto your card when you tap somewhere. You have to go in person.
Yes, they rolled it out faster and cheaper than Presto. I'm glad we've moved slower!
ShonTron
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I've had to transfer between GO buses due to a breakdown; we were told not to tap on or off the second bus, so I got a fare reduction.
As for transfers GO isn't interested in the route, just the zones one taps on and off at; it'd simply acknowledge a tap off of any bus and a tap onto any other as a transfer as long as its within the fare window. Presto often gives a transfer credit as well for some reason.
EastYorkTTCFan
Senior Member
that's interesting i hadn't noticed that before, but the same thing happened with a fare inspection on UPX back in october unfortunately I can't pull that up anymore as preto will only show your history for the last there months.
nfitz
Superstar
Here's an example:
GO is similar:
It is, what it is. Not sure it impacts anything.
