One thing to remember as you read about the latest setbacks in the Toronto Transit Commission’s implementation of the Presto card fare system — now going on eight! smash! years! since it was approved by the board with no definite end in sight — is that this whole thing was forced on it. The TTC had another plan, not just in mind but out for tender, and with a contractor already selected to implement it, as the latest official report on the evolving fiasco details.

That was in 2010. The TTC realized then that the future was in “open-payment” systems that let people tap their credit or debit cards, or use their phones. By now you’re certainly familiar with it. That’s how many of us buy coffee, groceries and most everything else.

The province’s Presto card didn’t do that, so the city and its transit agency looked for someone who could. They were still going to let provincial agency Metrolinx bring Presto to the TTC, but they’d do open payments, too.

Then-premier Dalton McGuinty and his transportation minister, Kathleen Wynne, spiked that idea. As the implementation update report says, they insisted that the city go with Presto alone, under threat of severe reprisals: “The province and Metrolinx indicated that billions of dollars of funding for some existing TTC programs that had been promised publicly (provincial gas tax, new streetcars, Eglinton and Scarborough transit initiatives) could be in jeopardy without Presto. The adoption of Presto was thus approved in June 2011 ...”

Metrolinx promised then that open payment and the other advantages that come with such an “account-based” system would be fully part of what Presto would handle as it was introduced. And that, according to the report, is the biggest outstanding thing Presto still cannot do, and will not be able to do for the foreseeable future. The whole technology Metrolinx developed is incompatible because it ties information directly to a card, instead of tying various cards to an account where information is stored. No work has been done on open payments since 2016, and Metrolinx won’t commit to any timeline on it.

That’s not the only problem. The Presto machines still aren’t reliable enough. There’s no good way for single-fare users to transfer from a bus to a subway when they need to pass through fare gates. The cards and update machines aren’t available in enough places.

All that, and the main justification for foisting this provincial vanity project on Toronto has not been fulfilled: “Most importantly,” the report reads, “the goal of implementing the Presto electronic fare payment system was inter-regional fare integration, which is not sufficiently supported by the current system.” You still cannot use Presto to pay for some regional transit services that pick up passengers in Toronto.

Half a billion dollars and all these years later, it still doesn’t work.

These days, the province screwing up Toronto’s business is a pretty frequent topic of conversation. It’s been a generations-running theme, but recently it is all anyone talks about at city hall. But this is one obvious case where Premier Doug Ford isn’t to blame. You would think he’d want to pounce on it.

I mean, if you were a politician who wanted to make “open for business” your slogan, whose fondest narrative is that your predecessor fouled everything up beyond recognition, and your family political brand was all about customer service — well, fixing Presto would be a gimme, wouldn’t it?

Instead, Ford has so far been laser focused on creating chaos and turmoil on all kinds of files where there was no obvious need to do so. (And then, it appears, taking off several months from the people’s business to lay low until after the federal election.)

Meanwhile, it’s pretty clear that Presto is the previous provincial government’s fault. It has left us trying to tailor our fare policies and customer behaviour to the limitations of an obsolete and inadequate technology that was forced on us, rather than finding a technology that can manage the fare system and customer behaviour we want.

There’s no end to the implementation of that bass-ackwards process confirmed yet, no end to the struggles of dealing with it in sight.

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