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.


The dispute between the woman and the driver became a little heated. We were all able to hear him say to her "This is *my* transfer - see the markings on it? - it shows you got it going the other way and I *remember* driving you!" We'll call this Problem 2.

Problem 2:
The TTC does not use a time-based fare. You cannot make unlimited rides until your transfer expires. You must use it in one direction only, with no stop-overs. It says this all over the back of it. And from the driver's comments now we do know where she got the transfer, but it still simply not valid.

The driver announced to the rest of us that we were going to wait until she paid a fare or left the bus. This caused groans among the crowd. After a few minutes of arguing, she took the stroller and got off. At this very moment, a woman walked up to the front, spoke to the driver and then put one of her own tokens into the fare box and invited the woman back on. You may not agree with me on this, but I'm calling this Problem 3.

Problem 3:
To me, this gesture is counterproductive. It gave the woman the satisfaction of getting on the bus at someone else's expense, which is what she'd been trying to do all along. When people evade fares across the city, it adds up in lost revenues that could be offsetting billion-dollar costs of running the system. Ultimately it means the rest of us have to cover the difference.

I don't think she learned anything from this at all, which she might have had she walked the remaining 2 blocks to the subway and been forced to pay by the fare attendant there (people seem far more reluctant to try invalid fares and transfers when there's no bus full of people pressuring the driver to overlook it).

So far this story is not unique. It probably happens a thousand times a day in the city. It's the final element that really dismayed me: When the bus reached the subway and everyone got off, several passengers went to the driver and told him off for standing his ground. They felt the child plus the rain amounted to grounds for giving her a free ride anywhere in the system (because once he lets her on his bus, she can go into the subway and get almost anywhere in the city without a transfer).

I can believe that this woman tried to avoid the fare. I'm gobsmacked that others would not only fault the driver for doing his job in trying to stop her, but also to actually take the time to do it to his face. I waited for them to give it up and then I went over and told him I thought he was right. I can only imagine how a confrontation like that is upsetting for a driver, squeezed between policies he's required to follow and passengers who crap all over him for it.

I'm not saying this has any bearing on what happened in any way, but I think it's worth mentioning that all of this happened within hours of a TTC worker dying on the job.

In the hopes of ending on a high note, I think you might enjoy this ad for a local transit service in Denmark.