A young boy was recently denied access to public transit because his Presto card was empty.

His mother had arranged for that Presto card to reload $20.00 every time it came close to zero.

Nevertheless the Presto card was empty and the driver refused the child (13 I think) entry, leaving him alone in the cold without money or transit.

The ‘explanation’ is the part that enrages me as a citizen and one-time architect of business software solutions.

Apparently a clerical systems person ‘accidentally hit the wrong key’ and voided thousands of Presto cards.

I worked in the Bank of Montreal mechanization project. I wrote some of the Configuration Management transactions for that system. Those transactions could open and close individual terminals, complete loops of terminals, all concentrators. One could crash an entire bank or banking region
AND
those transactions were designed with a ‘mother may-I’ interface with the following characteristics:

• No single keystroke error could create a situation that was difficult, expensive, or impossible, to recover from, and
• The confirming keystroke had to be a different key from the original. (So if you ‘tremble’ over a killer key, you haven’t confirmed your first keypress.)

I knew this s..t in 1972. That’s 45 years ago. How come our Presto system does not have such basic protections built-in?

I might remind all of us that Presto is late, demands we pay for their card, and is only used by 16% of all TTC passengers (recent Toronto Star article.)

For me and my spouse, seniors, not being able to pass each other tickets will be a pain in the ass. You can’t move a Presto credit from one senior card to another.

This sucks.

This is my first post under my new category, Activism. Now for the dumb question:

Comments?