The TTC’s full transition to the Presto fare card system may be delayed again, with the agency now saying it doesn’t know when it will complete the switch.

Last summer, the TTC said it would stop selling older fare media such as tickets and tokens by August 2019, and stop accepting them by the end of this year.

But in a report released Thursday, the TTC said “those dates have now been put on hold to ensure the smoothest possible transition for our customers. No definitive decisions have been made on a new stop selling/stop accepting date at this time.”

The statements were buried midway through the report, which is about formalizing the TTC’s policy to introduce disposable paper Presto tickets.

The “limited-use” tickets would replace tokens and are designed to allow customers to pay for one or two rides at a time without having to buy a permanent Presto card. The agency began selling them at two subway stations this week.

In an email, TTC spokesperson Heather Brown said the agency decided to pause the phaseout of older payment forms because the organization hasn’t yet finalized policies to ensure social service agencies that currently buy tokens in bulk to give their low-income clients aren’t negatively affected by the switch to Presto tickets.

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“We do not want to stop selling tickets and tokens until we have further consulted with social service agencies that purchase in large quantities and have our plan in place,” Brown said.

“We don’t have new dates yet. Once we do have them we will widely communicate them to our customers.”

Although Presto devices have struggle to meet reliability targets in the past, the TTC says those issues aren’t behind the potential delay.

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Organizations such as drop-in centres and homeless shelters say it’s crucial to be able to give clients TTC fare so they can get to to medical appointments, employment programs, food banks and other supports.

The groups have raised logistical concerns about replacing tokens with disposable Presto tickets, in part because the tickets come with an expiry date.

The TTC is proposing an expiry date of one year after the purchase date for tickets bought in bulk. Tokens never expire.

Susan Bender, manager of the Toronto Drop-In Network, said it would be challenging for already under-resourced organizations like hers to ensure Presto tickets are distributed and used before they go out of date.

“For our organization administratively to be on top of whether the tickets have expired or not is just another layer of administration that is onerous,” she said.

Bender and others have also warned that the TTC limiting Presto ticket sales to Shoppers Drug Mart locations and subway stations would make them hard to get for vulnerable people in some parts of the city.

With Presto already in place across the transit network, until the agency phases out older forms of payment it will bear the expense of operating two fare systems at once.

Brown said the delay in phasing out older fare media could cost the TTC up to $16 million in 2020, a figure that represents savings the agency was supposed to achieve by getting rid of tickets and tokens next year but now may not realize.

Those foregone savings would be partially offset by up to $7 million in Presto fees the TTC wouldn’t have to pay if customers were able to use tickets and tokens for longer — as the TTC has to pay Presto, which is a division of the provincial transit agency Metrolinx, a 5.25 per cent fee on every fare card transaction.

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This is only the latest delay to the TTC making the full switch to the smart card system, which was designed to modernize the agency’s fare collection operations.

In 2015, the TTC said it would phase out older forms of payment midway through 2017, but that was later pushed back to 2018.

In January, the agency did mark a significant milestone in the transition when it discontinued Metropasses and began exclusively offering monthly passes on Presto instead.

The TTC agreed in 2012 to adopt Presto under pressure from the Ontario Liberal government of the day. Although the fare card was supposed to lower the agency’s fare collection costs, the TTC said last year it will be more expensive than the older system.

Ben Spurr is a Toronto-based reporter covering transportation. Reach him by email at bspurr@thestar.ca or follow him on Twitter: @BenSpurr

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