On August 28th, Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig was a guest columnist in the Toronto Sun

He wrote an Opinion piece that reads like a Manifesto.

I have respect for the guy but he works for the Province of Ontario and we've all learned from past mishaps and mishandling of large projects that this province's government is as efficient and transparent as a snail in mud.

In fact, after reading through his chest thumping, I couldn't help but feel insulted both as a Presto customer and a GO Transit passenger.

He claims everyone deserves to be consulted and Metrolinx has followed through on this transparency by holding focus groups to collect feedback from passengers about changes and improvements to GO Transit and its website. One of those focus groups was to discuss the online schedule changes page which GO was in the process of redesigning and improving.

One person in the group wrote to tell me he was paid $75 for his time and input only to learn when the new schedule page was officially launched, none of the recommendations, changes or suggested improvements made by the group had been implemented. The schedule application was launched looking exactly the way it did when the group was first introduced to it.

Adding further insult to injury, on July 24th, just mere days after the new schedule application was launched, it failed to work. I was emailed by half a dozen passengers expressing frustration with the Schedule Finder. I was sent screenshots with detailed explanations that routes weren't appearing, train times were blank and after several minutes of waiting, no results would appear. By the following Monday, the application appeared to have been fixed. So much for stress testing before a launch!

But it's still not perfect. Last week, Twitter exploded with tweeted frustrations from university and college students new to the system who find the schedule finder application confusing and not user-friendly. One person joked he hitched his way to Humber College because he gave up trying to understand what train and bus connection he needed to make to get to school. Even I have trouble with the bus schedules.

McCuaig writes there are more than 750,000 Presto cards in use on the system. He admits the numbers involved in the Presto project are "huge" resulting in 122 million "taps" and $479 million in fares and yet, yet ... Presto still holds GO Transit passengers' money hostage. Presto takes our money but often leaves us holding an empty bag in return. McCuaig seems to have forgotten about 2011's autoload malfuction where passengers' credit cards were charged repeatedly in a 48-hour timeframe but the money failed to show up anywhere where Presto could find it. Presto is far from a success and nothing to brag about.

He also doesn't mention that GO Transit forced its five times weekly ridership into using Presto and for many of us, we played along very unwillingly. One only has to spend an hour or two on Twitter to read about all the Presto pains, muddled information and nonsense customers have had to put up with. No need to pay a focus group for that "valuable" feedback.

As of right now, there was a widespread system glitch affecting the Presto website on September 8th that resulted in passengers who used the online load feature to put money into their Presto e-wallets to have no updated balance.  Once debited from passengers' bank accounts, this money failed to make its way into e-wallets. Passengers have been out these funds since Sunday and have had to go into stations to deposit more money into their e-wallets so they could have funds available to get to work. Worse, Presto can't even commit to a timeframe as to when these passengers will see the funds they transferred on Sunday in their Presto accounts. This is wrong. It should be illegal for any corporation to withhold funds from customers who made these transactions in good faith. For some passengers, these screw-ups cause financial hardship and inconvenience. Equally unimpressive is when GO Transit CSRs remind passengers to deposit funds at the counter at stations in order to avoid these delays. For months GO Transit promoted Presto as an ALTERNATIVE to lining up at the station and touted the fact that we could all use an online system to load the card. In fact, this was marketed as one of the benefits of Presto. And when it does work, we have to wait up to 24 hours for the funds to be deposited into our Presto accounts. Yet, I can get a coffee card from Starbucks, load it online right now with $25 and use those funds immediately.

There are claims in emails from GO Transit that Metrolinx listens to its passengers and in July, GO Transit rolled out the Quiet Zone "pilot" project across the system to respond to requests for "quiet cars". This is a project that involves no real effort on behalf of GO, other than having printed up some signs and brochures.

CSAs are instructed to give announcements during rush hour about the Quiet Zone, but provide no verbal instructions about what is expected of passengers and give no information about what it is. And for some reason, GO decided to launch this project during the summer months when the Exhibition is in full swing and tourists and families are on board. What transpired was a complete and total shit show. It got so bad that accounts were created on Twitter to mock the project and passengers were left to enforce the rules, resulting in one fist fight on August 23rd where Transit Security had to escort two passengers off the platform at Union Station from a rush hour LSE train, according to Twitter user @GregCrone.

On the Richmond Hill line, the CSAs have stopped making announcements entirely. On my line, the Lakeshore East, only one announcement was made shortly after we left Oshawa at 7:15 am this morning, and nothing after that. On the ride home last night, on the 5:10 pm train, no announcements were made.

GO Transit passengers still deserve better.

Sorry Bruce, but you've got a lot more work to do. I know your hands are tied with bureaucratic red tape on a lot of this stuff, but you really need to address the Presto problems and the GO Transit website's lack of ease of use.

If you truly want us to believe Metrolinx listens to customers, please review the recommendations that were made by the focus groups and actually put them into practice. Then you'll have me on-board in believing you when you say you are willing to use every tool available to provide effective communication, but not just about projects, but the GO system itself. Email alerts about system interruptions, delays and buses that disappear from routes due to "operational errors" should be immediate, not an hour after the delay happened or long after it's been cleared. Sometimes we don't get any information at all about why a train was late or why a bus never showed up.

Metrolinx can do better.