Transit madness

I read this article in the local community newspaper over the weekend about changes taking place to the transit system. Normally, I wouldn't care. However, my boss has been talking about sending me out to a new project, which would be located right in the downtown core of Toronto. This is just about my least favorite place to drive, not to mention the extortion charge for parking.

So I've been looking in to the transit system. From Burlington where I live, the best option is Go Transit, a regional rail system. Unfortunately, the Toronto Transit system doesn't have any sort of combination pass with Go Transit. Every other transit system in the area integrates with Go Transit, but apparently this would make far too much sense for the TTC. This is typical of the 800lb gorilla mentality that the City of Toronto has... "we're the biggest, so you have to do whatever we say, and we don't have to do anything to help you out."

Enter the Presto card. This aims to fix this problem by offering one monthly pass that can be used for transit anywhere in the Greater Toronto Area. Brilliant plan. Years overdue. From the Presto website, they're planning on additional areas (including Burlington) some time in "late 2008," which probably means about May of 2009. Unfortunately, this is too late to help me.

In light of this new card being announced, what do the geniuses at Burlington Transit decide to do? That's right, cancel their own pass system in anticipation of the fact that it's going to be replaced in at least a year from now, probably more. Which means that anyone living in Burlington and depending on public transit has now officially been left without a monthly pass system, and they'll have to go back to the old-fashioned system of buying tickets. If you ride it every day, the tickets are significantly more expensive.

We're from the government, and we're here to help.
Ourselves.
To your money.