The customer is not always right

Ride the Rocket in the rain.
(Photo from msvg on Flickr)

Growing up in Ottawa, I took an incredibly useful and efficient service for granted. Despite being run entirely with buses (while I was living there; they have since added a form of LRT), the city's transit system was actually really good at getting me where I needed to go. When you don't have streetcars or subways, the bus isn't a poor cousin to anything.And while it had its share of surly drivers, I never considered the experience of using the system there to be unpleasant. I don't remember the city being particularly down on OC Transpo on a regular basis. (That may have changed in the last couple of years - I noticed quite a few stories in the Ottawa Citizen in the last year or two on the subject of poor customer service.)

The people of Toronto, however, seem to be in a constant state of war with the TTC. Despite having a really good transit system in their city, the residents are constantly dumping on the TTC as a failure of customer service, price, convenience, cleanliness, unions being uniony, and so on and so on. The grievances are endless. The battle goes in ebbs and flows, depending on whether a booth attendant has recently been caught sleeping on the job lately, but it is never far from anyone's mind (or Twitter stream).

Chief among the complaints is the idea that drivers are jerks, an especially unsupportable state of affairs in light of how saintly the passengers see themselves. I have been riding the TTC for almost 12 years now, and I can say with certainty that riders are pushing the old adage that 'the customer is always right' far beyond its intended limits.

Today offered a prime example.

There is a bus route that runs past the end of my block to the nearest subway station, only a few blocks away. I usually get on the bus if there's one nearby or if the weather is bad, otherwise I'm happy to walk. Paying on the bus means not paying when we get to the subway, so it really makes no difference except exposure to the elements. It was raining today, and there was a bus a block away, so I hopped on. At the same stop, a woman with a small child in a stroller got on. She tried to show the driver a paper transfer. We'll call this Problem 1.

Problem 1:
There are no intersecting routes on my street. You cannot be transfering from anywhere at my stop. A transfer cannot be used this way. Lord knows where she got the transfer, but it was simply not valid.