

Chris Fox, CP24.com





The TTC says that tokens and other legacy fare media won’t be fully phased out until the end of 2019, more than two years later than initially promised.

According to an updated timeline provided by acting CEO Rick Leary in his June report, the TTC will stop selling paper Metropasses in favour of monthly passes loaded onto Presto cards as of the end of 2018 but won’t fully phase out tokens and printed daily and weekly passes until the end of 2019.

Back in 2015, the TTC had promised to phase out tokens and other legacy fare media by 2017, though delays in the rollout of Presto pushed that back considerably.

In his update, Leary said that the number of rides paid for using Presto was 10.2 million in April, though that number was short of the TTC’s own target by 2.2 million rides.

The number, however, did represent a 100 per cent increase from the previous April when there was only 5.1 million rides using Presto.

“The Presto adoption rate is expected to accelerate in 2018 with the introduction of additional Presto functionality and equipment. This includes additional Presto vending machines installed at stations and the two-hour time-based transfer feature that will be available to customers in August on the Presto card,” Leary wrote. “The TTC continues to work with Presto to enable new products, while phasing out legacy fare media.”

Presto users now account for 24.7 per cent of the TTC’s ridership while holders of Metropasses account for about 45 per cent of ridership.

Leary did point out that Metropass sales decreased by seven per cent between January and April of this year compared to the same months in 2017, likely as a result of more riders opting to use Presto instead.