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To make matters worse, Hollis told me, system monitoring can’t even tell when the latter problem occurs. So the machines just sit there, useless, waiting to infuriate the next customer who will shortly thereafter have to suffer the indignity of paying cash for a train ride in 2016.

“We know that customers aren’t happy. We know the issues are out there,” Hollis told me in the GO concourse at Union Station, where we observed commuters recharging their cards (mostly) without incident. (In the TTC concourse it was 0-for-2: one was signed out of order; the other wouldn’t read cards.)

Metrolinx is already testing the “next generation” of these machines, said Hollis, which among other things have more computing “horsepower.” But “lack of horsepower” is only a suspected cause of the problem. “It could be the complex interaction between the machine and the credit card company and the network,” suggested Hollis, but “the vendor doesn’t have the data to understand what’s going on yet.”

Scheidt & Bachmann declined to comment. But Hollis said it has installed software in some units “to capture all the events so they … interrogate what’s happening in the machine.” That sounds promising. Except “all the events” and “what’s happening” describes … taking money off one piece of plastic and putting it on another piece of plastic. This does not inspire confidence.

Every rollout of new technology comes with glitches and growing pains. But fairly or unfairly, it’s stuff like this that establishes and bolsters an institutional reputation for incompetence. That’s a problem many transit systems have, the TTC and Metrolinx included, and in the TTC’s new fare system — a creation of the provincial government on which the TTC has bet the farm — their fates are intertwined.