Failing Presto fare gates madden passengers
TTC says reliability of gates is improving, but concedes that 12 per cent are out of service at any given time.

thestar.com
By Ben Spurr
Jan. 17, 2017

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 instead.

“It was a bit of a drag,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot of time to spare. It worked out, but he could have been late.”

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 now 376 fare gates at 41 of the agency’s subway stations, and about 12 per cent of them don’t work at any given time.

That’s an improvement from November, when about 18 per cent of the gates were offline at any given moment.

Brown said various problems can cause the gates to fail unexpectedly. The figures also include a small number of gates that are deliberately taken offline, she 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 sometime in 2018. (The TTC had said the switch was supposed to take place sometime this year, but the date was pushed back.)

Card readers on TTC buses and streetcars, as well as self-serve reload machines at stations, were all 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 automatic 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, a German-based company called 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 on Tuesday.

Asked about reliability figures for the fare gates, Anne Marie Aikins, a spokesperson 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.

Brown, the TTC spokesperson, stressed that the agency has deliberately implemented Presto slowly, and, in stages, in order to address any problems before all the agency’s 1.8 million daily riders are asked to switch to the fare card next year.

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 TTC 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, trouble-shooting is getting any better.”