A 500-card pilot in 2007, 2 million active cards today
PRESTO
Ontario's regional transit fare card started as a tiny 2007 pilot in Mississauga and grew into the single payment system linking the TTC, GO Transit and ten other agencies across the region.
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Our GO Transit guide mentions PRESTO in passing as the region's shared fare card. Here's how a small pilot project became the payment system tying together transit agencies that otherwise have almost nothing to do with each other.
A 500-card pilot (2007)
PRESTO started small: a 2007 pilot program with just 500 cards and reader devices installed at select spots in Mississauga and at Union Station, running on a trial basis through September 2008 before full implementation began in November 2009.
Spreading across the region, and beyond it
Adoption grew steadily through the 2010s — GO Transit, Oakville Transit and Brampton Transit were early adopters, and by mid-2014 roughly a million cards were in circulation. In 2013, PRESTO expanded outside the GTHA entirely, rolling out on Ottawa's OC Transpo. It's now used across 11 different transit systems.
The TTC's slow, final transition
The TTC agreed to adopt PRESTO in 2013, but full implementation took years: the system reached all subway stations and more than 2,000 surface vehicles only by the end of 2016, and the TTC didn't fully stop selling paper tickets, tokens and passes until years after that. As of the mid-2020s, more than 2 million PRESTO cards are active across the GTHA and Ottawa combined, run as a division of Metrolinx, the same provincial agency behind GO Transit.
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Sources
- Metrolinx — 2 Million Active PRESTO Cards in GTHA and Ottawa
- Wikipedia — Presto Card
- BlogTO — Here's What PRESTO Cards Have Looked Like in Toronto Over the Years