Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. So, we’re kind of diving into controversy
again. I’m not trying to aim for controversial
videos, but I did want to discuss a few things, my thoughts on them.
So, today we’re going to be talking about the Presto card.
Okay guys, so, Presto card, if you don’t already know (but I imagine most of you do),
is Toronto’s smart electronic tap fare card. It’s the equivalent to London's Oyster card,
or Hong Kong's Octopus card, or Tokyo’s Pasmo card, or Vancouver's Compass card.
It’s a tap card that you use to pay for transit.
Seems pretty simple right? Turns out it's not at all simple.
So, Presto has a lot of issues. When you think of a tap card - as computer
scientist/software developer - when I think of a system like a tap card, I immediately start thinking
of how the architecture and stuff would work. Turns out, it doesn’t seem like the people
at Presto who originally designed it really thought about these things, because the Presto
architecture is not very good. Stuff is stored directly on the card itself,
which, in our day of connection everywhere to the internet, doesn’t seem to make a
ton of sense. And it turns out, since the Presto card has
so little memory capacity on the chips on the card itself (within the card) you cannot
actually load more than a certain number of passes, so there’s a lot of issues, because
Toronto’s non-integrated fares means that you might have passes from three different
agencies, or you might have fare exemptions or different things; they load up on the card,
and you have all these weird glitches, etc. Some people actually need to carry two Presto
cards, because they need to have certain fare exemptions and the like.
A much better architecture would be simply having an ID for each card, that‘s the only
thing on the actual chip of the card. When you tap it, the system just looks in
a table for that ID, and figures out all the data regarding it.
I understand that the internet was not everywhere when the Presto card system rolled out. however,
there’s 3G, there was all these mobile cellular data.
Having a system like that that uses all the data on the card itself just seems kind of
silly.
Anyways, more issues with the Presto. So, currently with Presto, if you want to
say, have a default trip on GO, you have to override everytime you want to do a different
trip instead of just tapping at both terminals. For example, the default trip means that if
you‘re tapping on regularly at one station and then getting off at another station, they
can make it so you only have to tap on at one station, and then just automatically charges
you for the other station, because this is your default trip.
However, say you want to go to a different station, you’d imagine that you could just
tap on at your first station, tap off at your second, it would say “oh, i’ve tapped
off at my second station, that must mean i’m not doing my default trip”, and it would
charge you that price. Turns out that's not the case: you have to
tap, click an override button, and then tap out.
It seems simple, but from a user experience perspective, it's horrible!
Tons of people are going to forget to do this, and it's just not a good system.
That brings us to the next inconvenience of the Presto system.
The readers across at least the TTC -- which is the vast majority of the readers and transit
ridership in the GTHA -- are not compatible with credit cards and mobile payments.
This is a huge issue, because one of the greatest things about a system like Vancouver is that
they were able to roll out only a few years after compass actually rolled out (which it
rolled out late), they were able to roll out Visa and Mastercard and mobile wallet payment
straight to the terminal. And people were actually excited, this is
really cool. If you’re say, running late for a meeting,
you already have your credit card in your pocket, so it’s really easy for you to hop
on a bus and just tap your credit card if you’re not a regular transit rider.
It just makes transit more accessible. Doing whatever we can to make transit more
accessible is important, because making it easier and easier and lowering the barriers
to using something like transit just makes it more attractive, improves our ridership,
and helps us reduce emissions. So the big issue is the lack of ability to
do these things.
Another thing is, Presto doesn’t have any cool features. A system like Hong Kong’s
Octopus card or Tokyo’s Pasmo card, or actually IC cards across Japan is that you can actually,
once you load your funds onto your card, you can use that card at vending machines and
the like. If the Presto card was built on the same architecture
as NFC cards like your credit card or your debit card, that’s something I can actually
see happening. But since the architectures are strange and
the design is odd, I don't expect that to ever be able to happen, and that’s disappointing,
because a mobile fare card should make it more convenient to use the card than to have
to go to a ticket office and physically buy tickets.
And that's why Presto falls fat in my mind. What do I expect to happen in the future?
I’m not sure. But right now, Presto just isn’t good enough.
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Have a good night, thanks for watching.