TTC reputation takes ‘big hit’ after rush hour shutdown

It was a catastrophic failure that exposed an outlandish weakness at the Toronto Transit Commission. It mucked up mornings and stranded thousands, leaving the frustrated and confused to wander in the rain, shaking their fists at whatever transit god has so cursed this gridlocked town.

And yet, for all that, the massive shutdown of the Toronto subway system early Monday — a closure of all four lines from 6 a.m. until just after 7:30 a.m., a full 95 minutes — didn’t come as much of a surprise.

The details were a little odd, sure. But the result — a chaos-inducing, commute-extending crush in the middle of a hammering rainstorm — was just par for the Toronto course.

That is the remarkable thing about public transit in this city in 2015. Delays, overcrowding, even disaster are not just expected, they’re almost taken as the norm. The news is never so much that they occur, in other words, as it is in the novel reasons why.

There was the great mystery sludge debacle of March, when an unknown ooze seeped into the Yonge-University line, forcing a morning-long shutdown.

There are the ever-present signal problems, the fire investigations and, every once in a while, a flood.

But Monday’s closure may have them all beat. According to an initial investigation, what happened was this. A power surge hit the TTC’s Hillcrest complex overnight. The backup power generators kicked in, did their job, and eventually power was restored.

But once it was, things went quietly haywire. A circuit board in a transfer switch that communicates between the TTC’s two uninterrupted power systems, the backup, basically, malfunctioned. It forced a repeating communication error between the two nodes that completely drained their batteries, shutting off all power to TTC’s communications.

When train service started in the morning, operators realized they had no radio power and no means to quickly get it. Faced with the prospect of trains whizzing blind through underground tunnels, the TTC did the only reasonable thing: it shut the whole system down.

What it was not able to do, though, was tell riders about the problem.

The TTC’s entire Internet, email and phone system is also run out of Hillcrest. So when the power drained there, it effectively put administrators into a communication blackout, the scope of which they did not immediately realize.

“We were sending messages,” said Andy Byford, the TTC chief executive officer. “They weren’t getting there.”

They couldn’t send tweets, e-alerts, or emails. They couldn’t use the phones. Even Byford’s efforts to contact Mayor John Tory failed.

The TTC chief was asked if it was prudent to have the entire communications infrastructure of a mass transit system run from a single, apparently vulnerable, node. He acknowledged that no, with hindsight, it probably wasn’t.

“Certainly, we should not lose the means to update customers just when they need to be updated,” he said.

On the streets, commuters were left to fend largely for themselves. The shutdown was so huge, the TTC couldn’t even send shuttle buses.

The TTC has a massive list of unfunded repairs. The current tally sits at about $2.7 billion. Basic maintenance is, in many cases, two decades behind. But Monday’s problems appear to have been more one off than systemic.

In fact, over the last two months, things have actually been getting better, Byford said. There are more trains at rush hour and fewer delays.

“But I know that all counts for nothing when you have a failure like today,” he said. “Our reputation took a big hit this morning.”

The sad thing is, that for many Torontonians, it didn’t.

“I’m late for work, I had to reschedule my events,” said Shreena Malaviya outside Broadview Station Monday morning. “You kind of expect that from the TTC.”

Anne Pull was an hour late because of the shutdown. She’s not surprised the TTC screwed up, she said. On a nicer day, she might have called in sick.