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.

This is why we can't have nice things

Diana, if you're reading this, we need to talk.

The Globe has an interactive feature on its website about traffic in Toronto. One of the neat aspects of it is offering readers the chance to submit their own anecdotes about heavy traffic areas in the city. But as anyone with a passing familiarity with anecdotes knows, they are rarely based in reality.

"Diana" writes about the stretch of Eglinton Avenue from Leslie to Yonge, and noting that she "can't wait for an LRT to make this worse." What's puzzling aggravating about this comment is that one block west of Leslie is the point at which the LRT is planned (and was always planned, with or without Mayor Ford's dumb bury-the-whole-thing plan) to go underground and stay underground all the way to Yonge. In other words, over almost the entire distance she's talking about, the LRT will be underground and in no way interfering with road traffic.

Now, it's possible (with a little bit of mental gymnastics) to believe that she might have meant the construction of the LRT - including its station entrances at surface level - will worsen congestion along this stretch. But this is more of the same old "St Clair Disaster" talk. You know, the one where construction of a new dedicated right-of-way for streetcars ran way behind schedule and cost the city more than it expected. People usually forget that one of the biggest reasons (but not the only one) the project was behind schedule was opponents kept dragging the project before the courts to get injunctions halting work and that the TTC portion of the project was not, in fact, over budget. Some of the city's cost overruns (but not all) were caused by having to pay lawyers to defend the project in court. Mistakes were made, but was the end result a disaster? Hardly. But that didn't stop people from using the Globe traffic interactive map to do nothing more than post vague, unsubstantiated complaints about it.

Both Diana's comment and the people who insist on using the opposite-of-reality results of the St Clair project as grounds to object to LRT -- despite them being two completely different modes of public transit --  are pretty good indications of the kind of public planning discourse we witness in Toronto on a daily basis. For those who wonder how Rob Ford ever got elected mayor, this is the reason.

The fairness fallacy (a transit story)

Scarborough Councillor
Michelle Berardinetti, we must fight.
(Photo from her website)

It's taken me more than a decade of living in Toronto to feel a real vested interest in local politics. Watching the city elect a guy like Rob Ford as mayor will do that to you. I've not really kept my feelings for the mayor's policies a secret, and since I'm in the middle of trying out a dozen different directions for this blog, I might as well lob an angry rant about politics. I didn't want to write a "hey, I dislike Rob Ford" blog post. Not only has it been done, it's been done by people who have way more practice than I do.


Recently one of the city's suburban councillors by the name of Michelle Berardinetti took to Twitter to pontificate on recent attempts to reopen debate on a major rapid transit initiative known as Transit City. It consisted of a network of light rapid transit (LRT) rail-based lines, starting with Phase 1's Finch, Eglinton, Sheppard and Scarborough lines (the latter a one-for-one replacement for an existing RT rail line).

The four pieces of pre-Fordian Transit City.
Source: TTC.ca

Rob Ford declared on his first day in office that Transit City was dead. People did not want glorified streetcars, he said, so he asked the province to rip up its plans for the first phase of Transit City and use the money to complete the Scarborough LRT line and, significantly, bury the Eglinton line from end to end. Transit City had already called for the line to be buried through the centre of the city, emerging as a surface route on the east end at Laird Drive (which you'll find marked on the orange line above) and continuing through to Kennedy. What was so puzzling about this decision was that there was no reason to do it. What was so infuriating about this decision was that it would come at the expense of the Finch and Sheppard lines.

That didn't sit well with many folks, but it didn't seem like there was much anyone could do about it in a Ford-controlled city council until that same council shot down some fairly significant service cuts to the relative surprise of many. All of a sudden, the door was open to taking another look at the dismissal of Transit City.

This is where Michelle Berardinetti - and my indignation - comes in. She made some eye-opening comments on Twitter this week on why we should just accept the mayor's unilateral cancellation of the plan in favour of paying to bury the Eglinton line through the suburbs.

Heard LRT will stop every 300m between streets forcing Scarborough residents to walk to bus stops. Also exposed to elements.
@CouncillorMB on Twitter

Let me just start by saying that I think it behooves a city councillor to make major (read: multibillion-dollar) policy decisions based on reliable sources, not just what you "heard" somewhere. What really caught my eye, though, was the point about being exposed to the elements. Is she really suggesting that we should spend an extra $2-billion to bury the full length of the line just so people don't have to stand outside to catch the LRT? Apparently yes.