Thoughts on a tweet
@mfac19 tweeted:@mayormiller prevent the TTC from wasting the precious $$ on studies for payment systems when the province is handing it to you on a platter@mayormiller tweeted:
@mfac19 Disagree. TTC wants to let you use your credit card and other systems; Province wants one system, and TTC to pay$300 million for it.From my perspective, we need to keep in mind the greater policy objective. The narrow policy objective is to minimize costs and maximize output for yourself and those you care about. You can't really fault anyone for having this mentality. However, the greater policy objective of region-wide transit integration is what matters here. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the environment, the economy and our quality of life doesn't care about Steeles. One region, one system should be the goal. Anything above and beyond that greater policy objective is fine by me. Anything below that greater policy objective is a recipe for disaster.
posted by Andrae Griffith @ 2:31 a.m.
2 Comments:
Fortunately the payment mechanism has very little to do with fare integration.
There are hundreds of different financial backends with different implementations, and yet your Canadian credit and bank cards are both taken by virtually all of them.
Communication between the systems is the important piece for fare integration and the ability to use the same identifier(s) on both systems.
The province is trying to save face for getting locked into a single vendor at a very high price.
TTC can integrate fares with GO and even accept presto cards for payment (Presto stated they will be implementing the Open Payment protocols) without being a member of Presto itself.
I'm not really worried about the technical ability of the two systems being compatible or not. It's as simple as adding a few (hundred) lines of code.
What I am worried about is the attitude of the people designing that system. Of course X can integrate fares with Y and accept A or B for payment, but that's a policy decision that they have to make independently of the technical standards. From what I've seen, no one seems willing to address that policy question.
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