Broken OC Transpo fare readers costs city up to $960,000 in lost revenue

OC Transpo bus in downtown Ottawa in a file photo. Broken fare readers cost the city as much as $960,000 in revenue, staff said. Photo by Tony Caldwell /Postmedia

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Malfunctioning fare readers on OC Transpo buses have cost between $690,000 and $960,000 in lost fare revenue over an 18-month period, according to staff estimates.

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OC Transpo staff said a software upgrade related to Metrolinx, which provides the Presto fare system, and a smart card reader “bug” were to blame for most of the technical difficulties.

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Alta Vista Coun. Marty Carr had lodged an inquiry with the city’s transit services department asking for the number of impacted fare readers and an estimate of the revenue lost between January 2025 and June 2026.

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In a response to be tabled at the Sept. 10 transit committee, staff first pointed to the Presto software upgrade, which began in early February and was completed in late March, when “a series of technical problems caused an unprecedented number of fare devices to go out of service.”

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There are about 1,600 electronic fare readers across the fleet of OC Transpo and Para Transpo buses, and staff said 300 of those were reviewed by technicians and had software reinstalled to restore them to full service.

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“As of April 2026 all active Presto cards had been migrated to the new account-based Presto system, and the legacy Presto system was decommissioned by Metrolinx,” staff said.

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According to the report, staff have begun discussions with Metrolinx and are “pursuing means of recouping lost revenues.”

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The city’s vendor identified a separate software bug that temporarily disabled the smart card readers on buses.

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Identifying a root cause was challenging, staff said, as the issue was “intermittent.”

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The vendor eventually determined the defect was triggered by “repeated rapid taps” of U-Pass cards and the issue was resolved with a firmware update that was deployed in July.

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Pat Scrimgeour, director of transit customer systems and planning, told councillors on Tuesday that the issues have been resolved and the fare readers are now operating normally.

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He said the reliability issues were limited to a specific period during the Merolinx Presto upgrade between February and April, when the reliability of the machines dipped to 93.5 per cent. The average reliability for the 18-month period was 98.1 per cent, and was at 98.9 per cent in the 15 months excluding the upgrade period.

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“Those fare devices have all been repaired (and) reliability of those devices is quite high right now,” Scrimgeour told the finance and corporate services committee on Tuesday.

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Staff have been conducting field testing of the fare readers and found a 4.7 per cent failure rate before the software deployment, which has since improved to 2.6 per cent.

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Staff pointed to several other factors that could impact the reliability of the readers, including the device hardware and cabling that runs through the bus to provide power and network connectivity, along with the 4G cellular connectivity that enables the readers to communicate with back-office systems.