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I generally like the app, have always been able to get my tickets to activate with one click. My biggest complaint though is the odd deadzone for cell signals downtown (always at the Downtown West Kerby station for me, anyone else?....) I have sometimes accidentally bought 2 tickets, since it said my payment didn't go through, so i repeat the exercise, only to see 2 tickets in my ticket wallet. Not a big deal I suppose.
 
So I submitted a complaint/recommendation re: the single ticket expiration. This is the response I got:

“The My Fare app requires an expiration date on products, though the actual amount of time is our decision. When we chose the expiration time period for our tickets and passes, we based our decision on a few things: recommendations from our app developer, best practices from other cities, and on balancing the convenience of using My Fare with the risk that some people would abuse the system by buying fare products and not validating them properly.”

I’m not sure the relevance of the last sentence re: abuse of validation, because you have to validate you ticket to scan it on the bus, and then for the C-train, if someone was going to bilk the system, they wouldn’t buy a ticket and not validate it, they just wouldn’t buy a ticket period.
 
adamyyc said:
“The My Fare app requires an expiration date on products, though the actual amount of time is our decision. When we chose the expiration time period for our tickets and passes, we based our decision on a few things: recommendations from our app developer, best practices from other cities, and on balancing the convenience of using My Fare with the risk that some people would abuse the system by buying fare products and not validating them properly.”
Click to expand...
Yep, that's it. It's clear that it's much shorter than peer cities using the same app, so it's not a recommendation from the app developer, and it's not best practices -- other than maybe CT wanted the tickets to expire after one day and they got talked up to 7. But it's clearly supported in the app and it's anywhere between 5 times and 50 times shorter than comparable cities.

So it's obviously the idea that people will buy a single ticket and keep it in their phone, then activate it if peace officers board the train.

But CT has for years said they have very high compliance rates on the LRT despite it being proof of payment. I'm not sure why they think that this has changed or would change. There's no reason for someone to not activate a ticket if they are taking a bus at any point in their journey, since they'll have to show it to the bus driver. Their 2022 ridership statistics show that they had 103.3 million boardings, but only 56.9 million riders, which is 1.82 boardings per rider on average. (If you subtract the free fare LRT, then it's 1.93 boardings per rider.) So the majority of transit riders must be riding buses. And the pie charts above show that the app is perhaps 1/3 of their revenue, so we're now talking about a fraction of a fraction -- the LRT only riders who aren't using passes or TVMs who aren't honest.

Sounds to me like a great opportunity for one of those beloved pilots; extend the ticket expiry to 90 days, then check and see how much fare collection drops relative to current. My guess is it's small enough that additional ticket sales make up for it. (Especially since people will buy multiple tickets if they expire 90 days from now, and some of those will expire unused -- free money for transit.)
 
adamyyc said:
I’m not sure the relevance of the last sentence re: abuse of validation, because you have to validate you ticket to scan it on the bus, and then for the C-train, if someone was going to bilk the system, they wouldn’t buy a ticket and not validate it, they just wouldn’t buy a ticket period.
Click to expand...

I think there are plenty of daily riders who would buy 1 ticket for the week and only activate when necessary. So they'd go to paying $14.40 per month instead of $112. But, since the current system does allow for this, the delta for going to say a 30 day expiry might be like $10.80, depending on frequency of ticket checks.

So it does seem silly to allow the $98 dollar loss, but clamp down on the last $10 after that.

I do wonder if the rigidity of making monthly passes follow the calendar month is another little factor that leads to some of this fare evasion. Breakeven for a monthly pass is 32 trips. Most months have between 19-23 regular business days. It doesn't take many days off or alternate travel mode days or delay in buying the pass days to drop below that. How about offering a 7 day pass for $28?
 
lemongrab said:
I think there are plenty of daily riders who would buy 1 ticket for the week and only activate when necessary. So they'd go to paying $14.40 per month instead of $112. But, since the current system does allow for this, the delta for going to say a 30 day expiry might be like $10.80, depending on frequency of ticket checks.

So it does seem silly to allow the $98 dollar loss, but clamp down on the last $10 after that.

I do wonder if the rigidity of making monthly passes follow the calendar month is another little factor that leads to some of this fare evasion. Breakeven for a monthly pass is 32 trips. Most months have between 19-23 regular business days. It doesn't take many days off or alternate travel mode days or delay in buying the pass days to drop below that. How about offering a 7 day pass for $28?
Click to expand...
They'll be able to fix this once they add readers on the platforms to activate the tickets
 
whatchyyc said:
I hope what they do is add rows of readers at the ends of platforms, rather than readers scattered about randomly in stations and on platforms like in Edmonton
Click to expand...
I think the reason they put the readers throughout is so there isn’t a bunch up of people looking for their tickets and blocking the entrance during peak times. That’s a frequent issue on systems with fare gates.
 
ByeByeBaby said:
100%. It's mean and cheap and has no reason to exist. Would any other customer facing business work this hard to make it difficult for customers to pay? Amazon patented one-click ordering in 1999; it was a 'game changer'. Here's the process for buying a transit ticket - once you have gone through the process of setting up your credit card in the app:
  • Open app
  • Click "buy ticket"
  • Click "adult single ticket" (add clicks if you want to change person type)
  • Click to accept ticket rules
  • Click to select number of tickets (at least one is the default)
  • Click proceed to payment
  • Click place order
  • Enter your CVV (3 numbers)
  • Click to activate ticket
  • Click to activate ticket
  • Click to activate ticket, no really, you have to click three times to activate a ticket. I only have to click OK twice to format my hard drive.
And if you're not a frequent user of transit (aka a potential customer that can be won over with a good experience), you have to go through all the purchase clicks every single time because the ticket expires in such a ridiculously short time. I'd be happy to buy 10 at a time and risk a ticket expiring if I had a year to make that happen; but a week?

It's not a technical problem; I looked through a dozen major/relevant agencies that use the same Transit app that CT does; about half of them don't have any mention of expiry -- and perhaps that means that they don't expire their tickets. Of the ones that do mention it:

Pittsburgh, Denver - 45 days
Salt Lake City - 90 days
Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati (and other Ohio agencies) - 180 days
Saskatoon - 365 days
York Region ON - tickets "never expire"
There are other best practice things that we could and should do like fare caps -- rather than buying passes in advance
Click to expand...
Maybe CT doesn't want to deal with refunds? The more stored value and the longer the expiry, the greater the chance of a customer pursuing refund of unused value
 
It looks like council approved the new RouteAhead 10 year update, but I haven't seen any news about it.

I watched some of the July 4 meeting here and took some screenshots:

Screenshot 2023-07-05 at 12.16.48 AM.png

Screenshot 2023-07-05 at 12.17.07 AM.png
 
Not in that session. I did a quick Google and he seems to be opposed to bus stop consolidation and concentrating service in select corridors.
 
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