Time for the TTC to get smart cards

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Marcus Gee
28 November 2009
The Globe and Mail

Time for the TTC to get smart cards

To pay your fare on a Toronto subway is to step into a bygone era. You approach the grumpy guy in his little glass cubicle and drop some coins into a little glass box, just as your father or grandfather once did. Or you put a little metal token into a slot in a turnstile. The sole concession to the 21st century is a slide reader for the Metropass. The basic system has remained the same since the Beatles were playing Hamburg.

There has to be a better way - and there is. Cities from Shanghai to Atlanta use a microchipped miracle called the smart card that does everything from getting you on the subway to paying for your fried-chicken takeout. While Toronto ponders the idea, it is already old hat in many places.

Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway introduced its Octopus smart card in 1997. Riders simply wave it past an electronic reader at the turnstile. A computer deducts the cost of the ride from the monetary value in the card's microchip. Riders can recharge their cards at an easy-to-use machine. They can even use them to pay for groceries or movies.

In North America alone, at least 17 cities have smart-card systems in operation or in the works. Chicago discontinued tokens and took sales agents out of their booths a decade ago. Today riders can reload their Chicago Card Plus online. Seoul transit's T-money can be embedded in stuffed animals, key chains or cell phones. Four out of five riders on London transit use the blue Oyster card, allowing the system to redeploy many ticket takers to other jobs.

The TTC swears we are going to get smart cards too - in a few years, if it can find the money. But, like so many things in this city, the idea has been kicked around and around and nothing ever seems to happen. The TTC has shrugged off the Ontario government's PRESTO smart-card system, which is rolling out for GO Transit and other systems but will appear in the TTC only as a pilot project.

Why the hesitation? Cost is one answer. The estimated price tag has risen from about $140-million a decade back to $450-million today. That's a lot of money for a network that has just raised fares to help cover a $100-million budget shortfall. On the other hand, it pales beside the $10-billion budgeted for new light-transit lines to the suburbs.

The TTC also claims it already has a functioning fare-collection system that does not cry out for immediate replacement - the turnstiles turn, the tokens come out of the machines. Functioning, perhaps, but hardly consistent with a modern transit network. Look at the mess over token hoarding in advance of the fare increase. It wouldn't happen with a smart card.

Smart cards have many other advantages. Riders no longer have to line up for tickets or tokens. And they can board buses or streetcars through several exits, waving their card past a reader as they enter. Bus and streetcar drivers no longer have to check every rider, which reduces dangerous disputes with suspected fare dodgers. Transit systems can track how many people travel, where and when, allowing planners to add more buses to overcrowded routes and stop sending empty buses past deserted stops. They can also bring in new pricing systems, charging riders for how far they travel or when they travel. New York is looking at a smart-card system that would charge riders less in off-peak hours, easing the rush-hour crush.

The former head of the Chicago Transit Authority, Frank Kruesi, once said that to succeed, transit systems have to overcome defeatist attitudes that lead to stagnation and decay - just the sort of decay that has afflicted our own system in recent decades. The best way to do that, he said, is to embrace innovations that make the transit experience easier and more enjoyable, changing people from mere riders into valued customers. The smart card is the ideal way to kick start that change. Bring it on.