Presto seeing problems out of the gate
Automated turnstiles leave riders searching for another way out
Jerzy Jarmasz was on track to have his son at school on time when the pair arrived at Dufferin subway station Monday morning.
But there was just one problem: when they tried to leave by the Russett Ave. exit, the one closest to the school, they couldn’t get out. Both of the new Presto smart-card-enabled fare gates that the TTC recently installed there were out of order and would not open.
Frustrated and in a hurry, Jarmasz said he and his son had to double back and leave by the station’s main entrance.
“It was a bit of a drag,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot of time to spare.”
The TTC is in the midst of replacing all its subway turnstiles with the new automatic fare gates, which are crucial to its plans to modernize the transit system.
But customers have complained about problems with the devices, and the issues aren’t limited to Dufferin.
According to TTC spokesperson Heather Brown, there are 376 fare gates at 41 of the agency’s subway stations, and about 12 per cent don’t work at any given time.
That’s an improvement from Novem- ber, when about 18 per cent of the gates were offline at any given moment.
The figures also include a small number of gates that are deliberately taken offline, Brown said.
As the Star has previously reported, the TTC and Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency in charge of most aspects of Presto, have been grappling with reliability problems affecting other components of the fare card system, which is supposed to replace all tickets, tokens and passes on Toronto’s transit network in 2018.
Card readers on TTC buses and streetcars, as well as self-serve reload machines at stations, were hit with outages last year that the TTC conceded were unacceptable.
Although Metrolinx owns the Presto software and most of the devices deployed on Toronto’s network, the TTC is responsible for the fare gate program.
This is designed to facilitate the switch to Presto and allow the TTC to eliminate its fare collector positions.
The employees will instead be redeployed as roving customer service agents, a move the TTC has described as transformative change that will vastly improve passenger experience.
Each row of the gates costs between $25,000 and $30,000. The first ones were installed in March of last year.
According to Brown, depending on the source of the glitch they can go down for only a few moments and reset themselves, or be knocked out for much longer and require maintenance.
The TTC says a significant cause of malfunctions is the translucent doors, which are supposed to open automatically once a fare is paid, can fail if customers push on them.
That’s something the agency says TTC users, who are used to shoving through turnstiles, are prone to do.
A software upgrade performed in December has made the gates more resilient, Brown said, but “there are some other software and hardware issues that have also been identified.”
She said the TTC is working with the devices’ manufacturer, German-based company Scheidt & Bachmann, “on planned enhancements that should correct the performance of the fare gates.”
Scheidt & Bachmann also manufactures the Presto readers and self-serve reload machines that have malfunctioned.
A representative of the company didn’t return a request for comment Tuesday.
Asked about reliability figures for the fare gates, Anne Marie Aikins, a spokes- person for Metrolinx, said her agency and the TTC are “both working hard to make it a system people can rely on, like the customers on Presto’s 10 other transit systems do, on a daily basis.”
Despite previous problems, TTC CEO Andy Byford told reporters Tuesday he’s confident the fare card system is becoming more dependable. Performance measures from Metrolinx and the TTC “suggest that we’ve broken the back of these reliability issues,” he said.
Although Presto devices have been available on all buses, streetcars and at least one entrance of every subway station since last month, only about 7.7 per cent of trips are paid for using Presto.
While not all of the fare gates are working, some customers aren’t fussed about the Presto problems.
“They always have at least two or three (gates) open, so it’s never bothered me,” said Christina McAllister, 24, at the main entrance to Dufferin station.
Others, such as Jarmasz, will need more convincing to believe the payment system is on its way to being reliable.
“It doesn’t inspire confidence. I fully understand that any time you implement . . . a massive system like this, there are going to be problems,” he said.
“But it almost seems like it’s getting worse. I don’t get a sense that the problem-solving, troubleshooting is getting any better.”