First Experiences using PrestoCard

Our PRESTOcards.ca arrived in the mail on Monday. Hard to blame prestocard for taking 10 days to get them to us, more likely it’s Canada Post’s Dark Delivery regime… we are still getting Xmas cards. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Mail+delivery+dark+might+brightest+forward+Canada+Post/7673752/story.html

So Meaghan went to work with the Prestocard on Tuesday. It worked fine in the morning. Normal route is 16 or 151-westboro-95 to Bayview, O-train to Greenboro, and if the number 43 driver decides he is picking up passengers, she can avoid a dangerous walk along a usually snow covered non-existant sidewalk north on Bank Street, one stop.

Things went okay on the way. The presto card site noticed what stop she got on. She didn’t swipe on the O-train. Should she? She got on the 43, and it saw that too. Curiously, it doesn’t say what actual bus route she was on…

The trip home wasn’t as good. It saw at location “15”, which was the bus back to the O-Train, and then, 27 minutes later, it charged her another half fare (one ticket), at Bayview to come home. No idea why, we asked.

She had noticed this situation on the scanner, and so we checked that night, and everything looked okay last night, but when we looked today, the system had caught up to the extra fare.

We were checking because I tried to yesterday to see if my prestocard had been loaded correctly with my Feb. Bus pass. On Tuesday it gave me a red and told me to see customer service. Oh no, I think… will it work on Friday morning? Today, on my way home, using my paper January pass, I swiped my prestocard again… the machine happily announced that I had been charged a $2.60 fare.

Huh I think? Does it mean… I’m good for a $2.60 fare, or does it mean, that it’s gonna try to deduct from me? So far, it hasn’t done anything yet. I’ll see tomorrow.

My opinion is that it should have simply said: “Your february bus pass will be valid 2013-02-01. See driver if you need to pay a fare”

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