A Toronto mother is fuming after her 13-year-old son was left stranded at an Aurora GO Transit station when his Presto fare card malfunctioned. Tonya Richardson said her son Jude attempted to board the GO bus stop at Wellington St. East and Highway 404 at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday.He was on his way to school in Toronto after staying overnight at his grandfather’s in Aurora, which he does several times a week after taking dance classes in the town north of Toronto.Richardson said Jude’s grandfather dropped him at the station and waited until he got on the bus to drive away, but when Jude tapped his Presto card to pay the fare, it was rejected. Despite the fact he was an unaccompanied minor, the driver told him unless he could pay the fare he had to get off the bus. “I get a call on my cell from Jude’s phone and he’s in absolute tears, he can barely catch his breath,” said Richardson, who charged that GO had “abandoned” her child. She said Jude’s cellphone died and he had to walk down a busy roadway to get to a pay phone to call her back. He spent the next hour outside the station, until she was able to arrange for his grandfather to come back and pick him up. “This is in the middle of nowhere. There’s no warmth, there’s no closed off environment. So he was sitting in the elements for over an hour,” Richardson said, adding that her son was hurt and embarrassed by being kicked off the bus. She said the card shouldn’t have been rejected, because she subscribes to Presto’s autoload function that automatically puts money on it if the balance falls below $20. But when she checked her account online after the incident, the website said the Presto card had been cancelled, despite the fact she had never asked to close her account.Anne Marie Aikins, a spokesperson for Metrolinx, the provincial arms-length agency that operates GO and the Presto system, said the problem was likely related to a ...
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