There is no reason why their device couldn't immediately show recent aberrations for the vehicle such as Presto reader outages (as reported above), short-turns, accidents on the route (causing mass transfers), and other unusual events over the last couple of hours.
With the nature of the glitches showing so far on Presto system, I'd hazard you give the system credit for far more sophistication than has been shown.
Take the the rumour (with some factual statements by Metrolinx themselves that indicates this) that the payment machines the TTC will most likely have to have replaced can be rebooted and function again after glitching.
Now I'm an electronic tech, albeit not a computer one, (computerese drives me up the hard drive) but have designed my fair share of systems and interfaces involving logic circuits (mostly diode actuated either/or gates) and I can tell you that a reset circuit for a machine that's causing so much grief for the TTC right now should, by the descriptions ML themselves have described, be very easily addressed by a simple self-diagnostic and self re-boot logic circuit....but alas...nothing works as simply as they describe...or they're just putting out BS stories for the gullible public to swallow, as it's too embarrassing to tell the truth. No matter how you pick your lowest denominator, it smells like corporate failure.
Last I read was that the TTC was blaming the bus reader probs (and street car readers) on power supply problems. Oh man....all they have to do if that's the case is have an interruptible supply, or if the raw supply feed is so spiky or filthy, you filter and condition it, but somehow the bog obvious escapes them. (Anyone hazard a guess as to what powers the emergency interior lights when the main supply fails? Duh...)(Could you imagine the car manufacturers being this dim?) In fact, of course buses and streetcars have battery circuits, and that's the circuit you'd wire something like fare readers and essential intelligent devices to...in a normal world.
Paper tickets anyone? Accenture and their hardware suppliers would print them backwards, and then blame the public for having them upside-down as the cause of the problem.
