Transit’s Peggo headaches persist

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This article was published 06/01/2023 (1169 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg Transit’s Peggo card was supposed to be a modern way to pay bus fare, but some say it’s not all it’s pegged to be.

The reloadable smart card, which has a microchip, lets riders load financial amounts, thereby eliminating the need to carry cash; it can also be cheaper than using coins. But there is a snag: it can take as long as 48 hours for a Peggo card to register a financial amount that’s been loaded onto it.

That came as a surprise to Marcie Wilson, who has work experience setting up online stores for businesses. She compared it to the experience of using a Starbucks card in which a customer can load a financial amount onto the card while in waiting the drive-thru and it could be used by the time the customer had to pay.

“I get that the City of Winnipeg and the transit department do not have the budget that Starbucks has, but I’ve implemented e-stores and that sort of thing, I know there has to be something better out there than this,” said Wilson, who buys Peggo cards for her daughter.

Renata Pona, said helping her 16-year-old daughter purchase a replacement Peggo card and transfer fees after losing hers was an eye-opening ordeal. There was no way to move the $75 monthly pass she had just purchased from the lost card to the new one unless she went to one of the four Transit customer service centres in Winnipeg. Pona works from Monday to Friday, and all four centres close at 4:30 p.m. on weekdays and are closed weekends.

Eventually, she had to find time during the work week to make the fix. Not everyone in Winnipeg would have been able to leave work to make a change that could be easily made online through a different system, she said.

“If my daughter or myself had been a low-income person, or we had not had support or alternative transportation or whatnot, we would’ve been stuck,” she said.

Common complaints include inconvenient hours, a lack of online resources and app, and delays to get Peggo cards loaded.

Its benefits and failings reflect the wider issues with Winnipeg Transit, said Kyle Owens, the president of Functional Transit Winnipeg, a non-profit organization that lobbies for better public transit in Winnipeg.

“If you don’t have access to the internet, if you don’t have good fine motor skills, if you have processing issues, visual issues, auditory issues, speaking issues, then Peggo isn’t just difficult to use, it is an additional barrier,” he said.

The fact some services are only available in person is a common complaint.

Transit fare cards that have more in-person access points and allow customers to load funds online and use them instantly exist in other Canadian cities. Presto cards, which are used across Ontario, can be purchased from vending machines in multiple cities. Transferring funds from a cancelled card to a new one can be done online, and funds loaded onto the card can be used instantly.

In Edmonton, funds loaded to the new smart fare system Arc, which launched in November, will be usable immediately. The card has daily and monthly fare limits built in, meaning if a person attempts to pay fare beyond $10.25 in a day or $100 in a month, the card will allow the user to ride for free for the rest of that time period.

“There are different systems used all across North America for payment,” he said. One of the concerns we have is that the access to paying for Transit, if anything, seems to be getting more difficult.”

More than 218,000 Peggo cards are in rotation, a city spokesperson. Last year, users made 1,962 Peggo-related service calls to 311.

It’s an issue, Owen said, of underfunding a service essential to Winnipeggers.

“Winnipeg Transit has, too many times and for so long, been underfunded. When there is chronic underfunding for decades… the system is always scrambling to adapt based on too-little resources,” he said.

“Peggo, I think, is a prime example of a system (Transit and users) are doing their best with. The question is: why do we have such a limited system in the first place?”

The Peggo system launched with a $17.4-million budget in 2016, after years of delays.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca