Send this page to someone via email

Everyone is supposed to pay to ride the subway, bus or street car.

But what happens when you want to pay, and try to pay, but the onboard machine won’t let you?

“I typically pay with tokens but I just happened not to have any at this occasion so I tried to pay with debit,” said Alana MacLeod, a Humber College journalism student and Global News intern with Consumer SOS.

MacLeod says in early February, her foray from Spadina Avenue to the Spadina subway station turned sour when TTC fare Inspectors got involved.

MacLeod says she earlier attempted to use her debit card on the Spadina line, equipped with modern-looking machines.

READ MORE: TTC ridership among kids doubles after introduction of free fares

But she says in successive days, the debit card payment was not accepted.

Story continues below advertisement

As a result, on the second day, when confronted by inspectors who did not accept her explanation, she was assessed a hefty ticket: $240.

Inspectors wouldn’t believe she had tried and failed to be connected to bank machines aboard the street car line, she said.

The debit and credit machines on the newest TTC street cars have been a visible issue since 2016– when the transit commission previously shut down the payment service to make improvements.

But officials say you should not get ticketed by fare inspectors, even without paying, if you can show that you tried to make payment–but could not–because of mechanical issues.

READ MORE: TTC wants to recoup lost fares due to faulty Presto card readers

“If you get on to use the debit machine or Presto machine but they’re not functioning and you’ve got proof that you did try to pay for it — that’s not your responsibility,” said Stuart Green of the TTC, explaining that fare inspectors do not have ticketing quotas.

He said, instead, that the TTC has been given a mandate to enforce based on “the honour system” and fare inspectors are justified to ticket travellers who can’t prove they paid.

When Global News embarked on two separate trips, journalists found that five out of seven credit and debit machines were either out-of-order or failed to operate after a single use.

Story continues below advertisement

“They never work,” scowled a TTC passenger who observed one of the machines in front of a Global News camera crew.

Another woman, trying to pay for her trip using a token on Spadina Avenue, was similarly frustrated.

“I want to pay, I want to pay,” she insisted.