Tokens give way to Presto starting next year on TTC

By mid-2017, the TTC will no longer accept tickets and tokens.

Thestar.com
June 22, 2015
By Tess Kalinowski

The TTC will begin phasing out the sale of tickets and tokens next year as it progresses with the wide-scale roll-out of the Presto smart card.

The old fare media will be sold until the end of 2016 and accepted until mid-2017. But at some point, those tickets and tokens will be phased out completely, said TTC chief customer officer Chris Upfold.

“There will be vending machines in every station so you’ll walk over to the vending machine, use your debit or your credit card or you put cash in there and you will load up on your Presto card which you then tap on at the subway or the streetcar,” he said.

Riders will also be able to buy a Metropass or a quantity of trips the same way, although how those bulk buys will work has not yet been decided. There will be a report discussing possible solutions in November.

Eliminating the tickets and tokens is the only way to ensure most customers convert to Presto, he told the TTC board on Monday.

It means that subway collectors’ jobs will change too. Instead of being stuck in a booth they will be redeployed to help customers in the stations.

By next month, 26 subway stations will accept Presto and by the end of the year every streetcar in the city will have the readers. They will be on the buses by the end of next year.

In 2017, the TTC’s Presto, unlike other Toronto area transit properties using the smart cards, will also include open-payment technology that will let its riders pay their fare with a debit or credit card or on a mobile device.

There are 40 million TTC tokens in existence - 20 million in circulation and 20 million in the TTC vaults.

Among the other undecided issues is whether riders who use more than one transit system on their trip will have to tap on and tap off the different systems separately. Metrolinx is looking at integrating fares so they don’t have to do that.

But the thorny issue of which transit system foregoes the second fare has yet to be worked out, said Upfold. “That has always been the problem with those cross-boundary transfers is, who is giving up the second fare,” he said.

Even though children 12 and under can ride free on the TTC, they will need to carry a Presto card so they can access the new automated fare gates being installed on the system.

The TTC needs about 1,000 of the new fare gates.