TTC drivers have to call all stops

It's not like this is such a big hardship. Many TTC drivers do it anyhow. Some TTC drivers don't bother to call any stops, even major ones.

So it's about time they made it mandatory.

Being required to call all stops would present a hardship and potential safety risk when drivers are navigating busy routes, argued the TTC lawyer.

But the tribunal heard that drivers are already under orders to call all stops when their transit vehicle is extremely crowded or bad weather makes it difficult for everyone to see out the windows.

"By giving these instructions it is clear that the TTC is prepared to accommodate sighted people who have some difficulties" but not blind people with "severe difficulties," wrote Rosenberg.

The TTC will not appeal the decision, said commission chair Adam Giambrone, who put the legal costs to fight the second Lepofsky case at between $100,000 and $200,000.

And it's not even just about blind people. It's about the fact that we're crowded into buses and street cars like a bunch of sardines much of the time, and we can't see out the window to know where our stop is.

Many of the drivers on the Dufferin route are really good about calling out stops, but it's still hit and miss. Every bus driver on every route should be calling out every stop. I'm sorry if it's a hardship, but you know, that's just part of the job that they're being paid very well to do. Call the damn stops already.

Target cuts to wards who voted to defer tax increases

I phoned my councillor and the Mayor's office today with my suggestion for finding cost savings in the TTC budget as well as other services in the city: target the cuts to the wards of councillors who voted to defer the tax increases.

The message would be clear: if you're not in favour of raising taxes to pay for services, then clearly services are not a priority in your ward. Those wards where services are valued and people are willing to pay for them through their taxes will keep their services.

Here is a list of councillors who voted for and against the deferral. I'm sure we should be able to find some bus routes in their wards that really don't need such frequent service (or any weekend service at all). I'm sure they won't mind if their community centres are cut back, and library hours are reduced. Cancel their summer camps, change their waste pick-up to once every other week instead of weekly. Remove snow from their streets last (if at all) come winter. I'm sure they won't mind picking up a shovel if it means saving a few bucks in taxes.

Progressive councillors don't deserve to take flack for reduced services and overcrowded buses and streetcars from their constituents. Their constituents, having voted for progressive candidates, don't deserve the cutbacks.

Let the councillors who voted against funding our services listen to their constituents scream. It'll look good on them. And the people who voted for them.

"This is a horrible day" for Toronto transit

Unbelivable. Our fares are going up, a subway line is being shut down, and we're losing 21 bus routes. I'm so pissed off at those stupid frigging idiots on city council that I could just spit.

The Toronto Transit Commission is planning to close the Sheppard subway, drop 21 bus routes and raise fares because of city funding shortages, chairman Adam Giambrone said Thursday.

An emergency meeting of the commission board is scheduled for Friday to formalize the cuts, he told reporters.

Infuriating. I hope Torontonians give their councillors shit for this. And we should be giving our MPPs an earful, too. This is intolerable. The system is already overcrowded and can't meet the demand.

What NOT to do if you drop something on the subway track

Surprisingly enough, despite my qualification for a Murphy's Law award when it comes to always choosing the route with a delay, I wasn't on the Spadina line when this happened:

A TTC passenger who dropped his umbrella on the tracks at the Spadina subway station delayed thousands of riders on the Yonge-University-Spadina line.

After dropping his umbrella around 8:30 a.m., the unidentified man jumped down on the tracks to retrieve it, according to TTC spokesperson Marilyn Bolton.

Seeing the umbrella man on the tracks, another passenger pulled the emergency power switch, bringing trains to a halt.

It took 10 minutes for TTC officials to investigate and restore the power, Bolton said.

In the meantime, the TTC was forced to turn trains back from Union Station to service the Yonge line, said Bolton.

I find it interesting that they don't tell you in the article, as kind of a public service announcement, what you SHOULD do if you drop something like an umbrella on the subway tracks. I'd worry about it possibly doing some kind of damage to the train, or shorting something out when it got run over or something.

So, I thought I'd give the TTC a call and see what they had to say. According to the customer service rep I talked to, you should go to the ticket-taker right away and they'll send someone along to retrieve your stuff. I asked whether it was safe for the train for something like an umbrella to be on the track and she said that it likely wouldn't be a problem for the train - it would just crush it if it didn't fall between the tracks (where it wouldn't be touched by the train at all). And apparently it happens all the time, people dropping cell phones and stuff like that on the tracks.

Makes sense to me. I can't imagine jumping onto the tracks to retrieve something I dropped! Unless it was my kid or something. Anyhow, I guess all's well that ends well.

Unfortunately, across the city, things didn't end well at all at this bus shelter at Lawrence and Warden.

A woman was crushed to death while her toddler was pulled to safety from a stroller when an out-of-control semi-trailer smashed into a bus shelter during yesterday's rush hour.

The family of four was standing in the shelter when the rig lunged toward them at about 4 p.m. at Warden and Lawrence Aves.

The father yanked the toddler and the other child to safety but the woman was struck and dragged along with the stroller.

What a horror. I can't even imagine what that father and children must be feeling right now.

The Real News: Break the News Monopoly

This isn't about transit, but it's something I strongly support, so I'm posting it here. This is a new News network called The Real News, with correspondents all around the world. They will have no advertising - just memberships to fund them, with the same quality of video journalism you've come to expect from professional news media outlets. It looks just fantastic.

I dare you to watch this and not become a believer:

TTC commuter ferries, are you kidding me?

I haven't blogged about this until now because my knee-jerk reaction to this story when I first heard it was, "Oh for cripes sake, you have to be KIDDING me." So I thought I'd wait and see if I changed my mind (or at least calmed down enough to be coherent) so I wouldn't have to eat crow.

I'm so not sold on the idea of TTC ferries, but if anyone who is more "in the know" about environmental and traffic issues would like to try to convince me, I'd be happy to admit it if I'm wrong about this.

Wouldn't a ferry cause a lot more pollution than streetcars? And 250 people every 15 minutes during rush hour? Would that even make a dent?

I feel like there are 250 people squashed into every streetcar I take in the morning and afternoon rush hours. How about we concentrate on getting some more vehicles in between the streetcars that seem to come every 15 or 20 minutes on the heavy arteries in Toronto. Or maybe coming up with some sort of system so that you don't get five empty streetcars in a row and then nothing for half an hour. I'm sure there must be some way, in the 21st century, to solve that problem.

I'm thinking that's a higher priority than dreaming about ferries.

Transit user fees (fares) used to collect fares?

I had to post this fantastic Tyee article by Dave Olsen, because it addresses exactly what I was saying in an earlier entry – a huge amount of transit resources go to collecting the fares in the first place!

Better yet, it’s a five-part series completely devoted to free transit! I think I’m in love. Will you marry me, Tyee?

Okay, seriously. Check this out:

Of all the reasons to quit charging people to take the bus, one of the most important ones has to do with how inefficient and expensive it is to shake loonies loose from riders.

I tried to get the hard numbers in British Columbia by repeatedly contacting the eight largest transit systems in B.C., as well as the branch of B.C. Transit that supports the smaller transit systems. TransLink, with a transit-dedicated operating budget of $500 million in 2005, told me it spends an estimated $2.4 million each year on producing what are called "fare media" -- things like month and day passes, transfers, vending machine tickets and any of the range of other specialized transit products available to customers (U-Passes, FareCards, FareSavers, community passes and the like).

But that number leaves many other costs associated with fare collection completely out of the picture, including the expensive machines used; the collecting and counting of money; commissions to third-party vendors; lost productivity for bus trips due to having to explain prices and accept payment from riders; the staff time involved in figuring out when and how to raise fares; and so on.

And you know, user fees make even less sense in cities where a much smaller percentage of the cost is covered by the fare box. I was actually amazed to see, in this article, that the farebox only funds about a third of Vancouver’s transit costs – in Toronto, it’s a huge amount, about 80%. (Most sources estimate 80%, one I found says 82%.)

So in Toronto, I think it might be politically difficult to give up 80% of the budget (although I think we should, not for cost savings, but because it would be the right thing to do in order to encourage less cars and less pollution), but I just don’t get why cities who subsidize most of their transit costs don’t just go the rest of the way, get rid of their fare infrastructure and make transit free for their customers.

When I lived in Kingston, Ontario, they moved to a swipe card monthly pass system. They must have paid through the nose to change all the fare boxes in all the buses, and to get the card system to print the cards, etc. And then, it didn’t work out and they went back to card passes you flash at the driver. Can you imagine? What a waste of money!

Just get rid of the farebox completely! No more stressful arguing with the passengers for the drivers. No more struggle for poorer people to come up with money for monthly passes or tickets.

Good News Bad News

For a few days I've been meaning to write about the "good news/bad news" stories I've been reading, about how the good news about increased ridership in Toronto is actually bad news because we are overcrowded and the city doesn't have the budget for the extra buses and drivers we need to address it.

It makes me crazy. At this point, it doesn't matter where you try to catch the bus or streetcar in the morning or the afternoon rush, there's a decent chance that a full vehicle is going to pass you by (or, the one you're lucky enough to catch will pass others by at subsequent stops). I realize that the money just isn't there because we didn't budget for such an increase in ridership, but we're in a climate crisis right now, and that calls for some crisis response. We've got people lining up to take public transit. Anything we can do - ANYTHING - to accommodate and encourage them that they've made the right choice is what we MUST do. It should be a budget priority. And not just for cities. For provincial and federal governments too. Hold their feet to the fire!

Free transit, and transit rage

In response to my post about the new Presto payment system, socialscientist wonders when we're finally going to make the transition to free transit. Good question! I'd like to know that too.

I've often wondered just how much of the money generated by transit fares goes into the bureaucracy and systems that are put into place to collect and police transit fares. Certainly not all of it, I know. But it must cost a huge hunk of change to have all those collection booths, and all the bureaucracy for handling the metropass system, all the printing and minting of coins and tickets and plastic cards for metropasses, etc.

And you know what? I don't even care about saving money. Let's have free transit to get people out of their cars, and all of the employees in the fare-collecting bureaucracy moved to other areas of the TTC - Lord knows, it's not like we couldn't use more buses and streetcars on the routes. Or people to maintain the infrastructure. It's stupid to make us pay user fees for choosing a way to get around town that causes less pollution and less traffic congestion.

Whoops, I missed my segue into my next rant in the middle of the last paragraph, which is about more buses and streetcars on routes. Yesterday and today, I was filled with transit rage. Yes, brothers and sisters, I will admit, I was filled with the rage. The rage that comes when you're standing at a streetcar stop for half an hour during morning rush hour, with no streetcar showing up, despite the fact that traffic is not all that heavy. Both yesterday morning and this morning, we loyal transit users were left stranded at Dufferin and College for 25 minutes, waiting for a streetcar, muttering under our breath about taking The Better Way.

Yesterday I gave in at 10 minutes to 9 and grabbed a cab to work since no streetcar was in sight even after such a long wait, and I didn't want to be late. (I arrived at work at 9:03 a.m.) Today, I stuck it out and waited, and arrived 20 minutes late to work.

All I have to say is this: Smarten up, TTC! Yes, many of us are a captive audience. But many others aren't, and they're going to start driving to work. Hell, even I was wishing I had a car this morning, and believe me, that's not like me at all. You're going to have to stop sucking so badly service-wise if you want people to think positively about taking public transit. I'm convinced that a lot of the "transit rage" incidents that happen (such as pissing matches between drivers and passengers, or spats between passengers) is because people are irritable over having waited 20 minutes during rush hour on a main route, only to be squashed like sardines onto the vehicle, and tossed about like cargo by drivers who make unnecessarily sudden stops and starts.

And nothing pisses people off more than waiting for half an hour and then seeing four or five vehicles in a row. You know, we now live in the 21st century. Buses and streetcars are equipped with GPS and transit control knows where everyone is at all times. We have the freakin' technology, folks. It must be possible to not have five vehicles bunched up and nothing in between for 20 minutes. Figure out a way. You know, a Better Way.