A Toronto mother is fuming after her 13-year-old son was left stranded at an Aurora GO Transit station when his Presto fare card malfunctioned.

Tonya Richardson said her son Jude attempted to board the GO bus at Wellington St. E. and Hwy. 404 at shortly after 7 a.m. on Tuesday.

He was on his way to school in Toronto after staying overnight at his grandfather’s home in Aurora, which he does several times a week after taking dance classes in the town north of Toronto.

Richardson said Jude’s grandfather dropped him at the station and waited until he got on the bus, but when Jude tapped his Presto card to pay the fare, it was rejected. Despite the fact that he was an unaccompanied minor, the driver told him unless he could pay the fare he had to get off the bus.

“I get a call on my cell from Jude’s phone and he’s in absolute tears, he can barely catch his breath,” said Richardson, who charged that GO had “abandoned” her child.

She said Jude’s cellphone died and he had to walk down a busy roadway to get to a pay phone to call her back. He spent the next hour outside the station, until she was able to arrange for his grandfather to come back and pick him up.

“This is in the middle of nowhere. There’s no warmth, there’s no closed-off environment. So he was sitting in the elements for over an hour,” Richardson said, adding that her son was hurt and embarrassed by being kicked off the bus.

She said the card shouldn’t have been rejected, because she subscribes to Presto’s auto-load function, which automatically adds money to the account if the balance falls below $20.

But when she checked her account online after the incident, the website said the Presto card had been cancelled, despite the fact she had never asked to close the account.

Anne Marie Aikins, a spokesperson for Metrolinx, the provincial arm’s-length agency that operates GO and the Presto system, said the problem was likely related to a widespread outage that hit Presto on Nov. 16, when an employee accidentally cancelled thousands of cards.

“He was doing some sort of an update and he literally pressed one button wrong and it cancelled a bunch of cards,” said Aikins.

Although Presto cards are used by transit agencies across the Greater Toronto Area, Hamilton and Ottawa, the problem affected only cards used to tap on for GO trips. Aikins said Metrolinx quickly recognized the problem and ensured it couldn’t be repeated, but affected customers still had to either get a Metrolinx employee to unblock their card or follow the steps to do it themselves. Richardson didn’t know that.

Aikins conceded that no matter the reason the card was declined, the bus driver should have let Jude board.

“Given the boy’s age, he should not have been denied entry to that bus,” she said.

“Even if you’re not 100 per cent sure why their card isn’t working, you can deal with that after the fact. Let them on the bus … The driver shouldn’t have done what they did”

Aikins said GO staff are specifically trained to accommodate children, young adults and riders with special needs, and are instructed to make exceptions if they don’t have the proper fare.

The bus driver involved has been interviewed by supervisors, but Aikins said that for privacy reasons she couldn’t disclose whether the employee was facing disciplinary action.

The local Metrolinx supervisor reached out to Richardson to apologize, and on Thursday an employee met Jude on his way to dance class and gave him a new Presto card loaded with $120.

Richardson said she hoped Metrolinx would review its policies for bus drivers to make sure no other child experiences the ordeal her son went through.

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“Metrolinx has to know and evaluate and educate these drivers,” she said.

“This can’t happen again.”

The Presto system has experienced technical problems before. Its deployment on the TTC was plagued with reliability problems, with a high number of card readers and payment machines malfunctioning. Metrolinx says most of the problems have been addressed, and reliability of card readers on the TTC is now at least 98 per cent.

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