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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

This Crazy Train's Presto Chronicles, Chapter 15: Tap-tap-taparoo

My Presto card is capable of voodoo magic.

Last night I was in the Bay Street tunnel waiting for the LSE 7:17 pm train. I was early, so I tapped my card at 6:52 pm.
$7.64 was deducted, which is correct. All was well.

At 7:06 pm, I made the mistake of standing in front of one of the Presto machines while helping a person with directions when the machine chimed. $3.75 flashed on the screen. The hell? My card was in my pocket. I was standing about 100 centimetres away.

Now what? With 11 minutes until the train leaves, I went over to the customer service desk at the bus terminal only to be greeted with a long line-up.

Forget this, I thought. I'll deal with this crap at Oshawa. I had no idea what would happen when I boarded the bus so I needed an answer. I headed back to the tunnel and went upstairs to board the train.

Here's the sequence from my card's usage log:

30/01/2012 20:23:00 Oshawa GO Station Rail E-Purse Load Value $7.55 $70.80
30/01/2012 20:21:00 Oshawa GO Station Rail Cardholder Configuration Event
30/01/2012 19:13:00 Union Station Rail E-Purse Fare Payment -$3.75 $63.25
30/01/2012 19:06:00 Union Station Rail E-Purse Fare Payment -$3.75 $67.00
30/01/2012 18:52:00 Union Station Rail E-Purse Fare Payment -$7.64 $70.75

When I got to Oshawa, the CSR was in disbelief because in order for all this to happen, the override button has to be pressed. Secondly, I shouldn't have been able to tap twice, let alone a third time. I didn't even know a third charge had been deducted. I guess when I walked past the card reader again, it went off.

I told her I pressed no buttons. Keep in mind, I missed my bus over this so if I was playing a game, I obviously have no priorities in my life, such as getting home to my family ...

I was annoyed but I was gracious about it. Shit happens, I get it. But I wasn't standing there randomly pressing the override button and tapping just to see what would happen.

I was refunded my ghost fares. Now I'm all paranoid and have wrapped aluminum foil around my card. It matches my hat.

11 comments:

Squiggles said...

Hopefully it is a stylish hat as well, my fellow Mad-Fellow.

All this does tell me to not leave the card in an outside pocket of my purse for easy swiping. That and other assorted paranoid fantasies about how GO will screw me out of more money a month.

April said...

$3.75 is a bizarre amount even if you did press the override button. It normally takes off $4.20 as that is the lowest cost of a ticket on the GO system. Where did $3.75 come from?

lswgirl13 said...

Something like that happened to me when I started using PRESTO way back in the summer of 2010. GO tried to tell me that some cards are very sensitive and basically it was MY FAULT according to them. I was reimbursed though.

C.J. Smith said...

That's what the CSR asked.
I was off sick until January 13 so the full loyalty discount wouldn't apply to me. She had no idea how that amount was configured.
Now, considering the taps, maybe it did push me into loyalty range?

Matt said...

@April – End of the month, once you hit 36 rides, the fares reduce. That might explain it.

Matt said...

Mercifully, I have never had any issues with my Presto card. No ghost fares, nuttin’.



Closest thing to a “problem” I had was one time shortly after switching to Presto when I got onto a local transit bus, I tapped my card, it showed a fare deducted, but the bus driver said the machine was reporting to her a “card read error” and that no fare was actually deducted. I thought for sure we were at an impasse; city buses come with only one Presto reader which recognized my card, but reported an error, and although it showed I had paid a fare on my end, it did not on the bus driver’s side of things (and we all know transit drivers do not like letting people ride for free). Complicating the matter is that I could not re-tap on that lone machine for 15 minutes due to the programming of the Presto machines (I guess to avoid 1 card paying for multiple passengers?).



Fortunately, the driver recognized me and remembered that I had used my card several times already without a problem, so she trusted that I wasn’t using a fraudulent card. I got to the GO Station, tapped there, and the fare deducted accordingly. I suppose it was just a system glitch on the city bus, because there hasn’t been an issue since

James said...

My guess is the over ride button was stuck and the machine was sweeping constantly for any cards to complete the transaction. The $3.75 is even more confusing however.

lswgirl13 said...

Matt is right, you would have taken more than 36 rides, I believe it's an 87.5% discount? Mine goes from down to something like $1.29, then after 40, ZERO!!!

Anonymous said...

There exist wallets with a fine mettle mesh lining the interior. This forms a Faraday cage and prevents scanners of all sorts from working on the contents of the wallet.

Good for cases like yours and to prevent crooks from scanning your credit cards with RFID tags built in.

Subliminal said...

While the average rider might do a trip requiring one vehicle, bus or train, there are some that take a bus and then another bus or a bus train combination and they need to transfer from one to another in as little as one minute so, from what I heard, it is possible tap multiple times in a short period as you make a trip like that. The card seems to be not as "smart" as people think it is or should be and vice versa when it comes to Presto's idea of the possible behavior of the users of this self serve card.
This to me does not look like a failure of the override button, rather the users and programmers are living in different worlds when it comes to the performance of this card where the rubber of reality hits the road.
$3.75 probably is the charge for what looks like the next segment of your trip and when your first tap-on is a full fare tap-on to Oshawa without a tap-on/tap-off pair it has no idea about the direction of your travel from the single first tap.
Thats my guess.
The cards should be able to have more complex default rides that people constantly take so it doesn't require multiple taps to string together fares when you simply want to go from A to B regardless of how many buses and train rides it requires to do it. These cards and the interactions of their software and the users seem to be no substitute for the real brain power of the old system that was the interaction of the users, sellers, and bus operators in the use of the previous ticket system.

And if you happen to drive a Chevy Volt to the train station I feel your pain but applaud your thirst for adventure as all the bugs get worked out of these things.

Squiggles said...

@Subliminal:

The bugs should have been worked out BEFORE they forced the card on the entire system.

There has been nothing but grief for some people. Granted others have not had an issue, but to me the "bugs" are something that should have been thought of and worked out a year or two ago when they were "testing" the cards.