A suburbanite I may be, but I also am a regular public transit user. Quick and easy access to Toronto, by bus and subway was a vital condition when we chose our Markham home (albeit, only a 10 minute walk outside the Toronto boundary). I want to use the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) service as often as possible and I desperately want to like the service. Unfortunately, The TTC has no apparent ability to sweat the little things that would make it a popular choice, as opposed to something to be used when there is no alternative.
Like most North American cities, Toronto wants to wean residents from their automobiles to make getting around the city faster and more efficient, to reduce pollution and, ultimately, make the city a better place to live, study and work. Wholly city-owned, the TTC could be contributing to achieving that objective. Alas, reality is as if no one at the TTC or the city has a clue or a care.
This isn’t about overcrowded buses, filthy subway stations or surly operators and ticket sellers. Those have been covered before by me and others, This is about what I encountered in one day, heading to several popular tourist attractions and destinations that should be primary targets for getting us out of our cars or helping the much sought-after tourists navigate the city.
Our first destination was the National Home Show at the Direct Energy Centre on the grounds of the city-owned Exhibition Place. Not having taken transit there in many years but being vaguely aware that there is a new street-car line to Exhibition Place, I went on-line to try to find out the best routing to take on a Sunday morning. Alas, despite promises made at least a year ago, there have been no improvements to the TTC’s website. Recognising that the website was terrible, the TTC chairman acknowledged the problem and sought the help of users in a redesign. Nothing has changed. You cannot go to the website, enter a popular tourist destination and find out which route(s) take you there. [York Region transit, through its website, allows you to enter any address and get information on the transit route and stop to use and the schedule.] If you know where you are going, you can open a map of the entire TTC system and squint your way through a variety of coded lines to decipher what appears to be two street car routes to Exhibition Place. Then, if you are very adept, you can look up timetable information for those routes. What you won’t get is confirmation that the routes actually do have a stop for Exhibition Place or anywhere near the Direct Energy Centre (city-owned), one of Toronto’s two major convention/exhibition venues. According to the timetable, the last stop on the new Harbourfront streetcar route is at least a 15-20 minute walk from the Centre. So we took the Bathurst streetcar route that I knew from experience. It meant changing trains (unnecessary, I now know, if one uses the Harbourfront streetcar) but at least I knew somewhat where I would arrive. The Centre is huge so it’s not difficult to find from the streetcar stop, but one does have to dart across several lanes of traffic - no pedestrian crosswalks or signal lights, but it’s Sunday morning and not a problem.
OK. After the show, we exit the Direct Energy Centre and want to make our way back to the streetcar stop and, we hope, take another route to Harbourfront. Typically, there are no signs directing pedestrians to the transit stop, although there are many showing automobile drivers the way to the highways. Fortunately, a red streetcar passes in the distance so one can guess approximately the direction to head and find one’s way back across the several lanes of traffic. The transit stop at this major tourist destination is marked by a single metal post with the striped TTC markings. There is nothing to indicate which routes stop there or the hours and frequency of service. A Bathurst streetcar pulls up but most of the waiting riders do not board, so I guess the Harbourfront car does stop here, but the city and the TTC do not seem to think providing this kind of information is either necessary or helpful. A few minutes later a Harbourfront streetcar arrives marked with the Union Station destination so I now know there is a one-transfer connection to Exhibition Place, information that should have been available on the website. After boarding, it’s obvious why TTC operators can get a bit surly. Half the people at the stop now want to go to Bathurst Street but they have no way of knowing if another streetcar will come to take them there. The operator has to function as an information service and struggles (not his fault) in a multilingual environment. A simple sign, maybe $100 even at the TTC’s inflated cost would solve the problem and reassure riders that ‘they can get there from here’. Apparently, it’s too much effort for the TTC or the city-owned Exhibition Place.
Later in the day, and having some spare time and an all-day pass, we decide to check out the renovated Museum stop on the University subway line. It’s been publicised in the media as worth the detour. The station needed some repair work and private donors came forward to support renovations themed after the adjacent Royal Ontario Museum’s collections. Well the comparisons to the Paris Metro’s Louvre station are so inappropriate as to be a sad joke.
But that’s not the point I want to make either. It’s 2008. Ontario has announced that incandescent light bulbs will be phased out and then banned because they waste electricity and contribute to green houses gases. These are officially bad things in the City of Toronto. So what have the renovators done to illuminate each of the decorative columns in the refurbished Museum station? Who would guess; two 150 or 200 watt incandescent spotlights on each column. Maybe how archaic the lighting is would not have been so obvious if, a few hours earlier, we had not been looking at LED lighting at the home show. Lighting that would do the same job using less than 1% of power consumed by the TTC’s choice. Not only is it wasteful of electricity and the TTC’s limited resources but it sends the entirely wrong message about conservation. A few LED lights could have a evoked a “wow - that’s cool” (literally) response from thousands of subway users. Is it too cynical to think that maybe using bulbs that will last decades is anathema to the maintenance unions whose members will be kept busy replacing the incandescent bulbs every few weeks? One wonders if union electricians will be called-in to install new light fixtures in year or if the columns will go dark. If it is too cynical it may only be because it’s naive to think the TTC will even replace the bulbs anymore than the floors will be cleaned or any other basic maintenance completed.
Toronto and the TTC - your words and objectives are admirable but your actions are pathetic. There are no excuses. If you want citizens to join you in the big campaigns its’ time to start sweating the details.
