TTC staff are moving outside the booth

As Presto replaces tokens, agency’s collectors will become roving customer service agents

The TTC is putting a friendlier face on its subway system next year.

As early as July, the dingy collector booths at stations will be emptied and TTC collectors will be allowed to roam free in their new role as “customer service agents,” or CSAs.

Gone will be the days of passengers attempting to ask directions by shouting through a pane of Plexiglas at a TTC worker. Instead, when customers enter the station they will be greeted at the gates by what the agency describes as “multi-functional, highly skilled and customer focused” agents.

Each CSA will be armed with a tablet computer loaded with tourist information and apps such as Google Translate, ready to attend to riders’ needs. When not helping customers, they will be tasked with inspecting stations, light cleaning work, and first-line maintenance.

TTC spokesman Brad Ross said the change represents “a whole new approach to customer service” for the 95-year-old transit agency. “This is all about modernization,” he said. “It’s about the customer being at the core of all that we do.”

Converting the fare collector job into a free-ranging position has been in the works for years and will coincide with the adoption of the Presto fare card system. The cards are scheduled to replace all tokens, transfers and passes sometime next year and will be sold via automatic vending machines, rendering human fare collection obsolete.

Last Wednesday, the public got more details on how the transition will work, when the TTC board approved a stations transformation plan. According to a board report, the plan will “fully transform station service by overhauling both job roles and station design” and create “an empowered workforce to obsess about the details of a transit system that makes Toronto proud.”

The transformation will take more than 10 years and cost $51 million, a sum that includes the cost of new passenger assistance intercoms, enough security cameras to cover all areas of the stations and the construction of “zone hubs,” communication centres that will be placed at seven locations throughout the subway network.

The TTC is going ahead with plans to eliminate guards on its subway trains despite claims from the transit agency’s union that the decision will compromise passenger safety.

Since the TTC’s first underground line opened in 1954, the transit agency has operated all of its trains with two-person crews: an operator who drives the vehicle and a guard who’s responsible for opening and closing the doors and ensuring passengers are clear of the train when it departs.

But starting Sunday, trains on Line 4 (Sheppard), the TTC’s least-used line, will be converted to one-person train operation (OPTO).

The transit commission plans to convert trains on its busiest subway, Line 1 (Yonge-University-Spadina), by around 2019.

One-person operation is used by transit agencies around the world and on the TTC’s Scarborough RT, but Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 claims it’s unsafe and opposed by the public.

In a Sept. 28 press release, union president Bob Kinnear went so far as to raise the spectre of terrorist attacks against trains without guards.

“(TTC CEO) Andy Byford holds up London and Madrid as examples of cities with one-person operation but obviously forgot that hundreds of people were killed and thousands injured by terrorist attacks on those two cities’ transit systems,” he said.

“TTC management tells employees: ‘If you see something, say something,’ then cuts the people who could see that something. It makes no sense.”

The union also cited a poll it commissioned that found 66 per cent of respondents opposed removing the guards.

However, a plurality of respondents (33 per cent) to the Mainstreet Research poll said they believed the primary reason for having a guard on the train was to respond to medical emergencies or fights, which the TTC says is not the guards’ responsibility.

TTC spokesman Brad Ross called Kinnear’s comments about terrorist attacks “alarmist and uninformed” and said that having single operators wouldn’t endanger TTC customers.

Ross said the number of “eyes and ears” on the subway system will be increased under the TTC’s new staffing model, which will deploy more employees to common areas of subway stations.

He added that switching to OPTO will make subways safer by reducing the number of incidents in which inattentive guards open doors before the train has fully pulled into the station.

Making the subway operator responsible for both stopping the train and opening the doors makes such mistakes less likely, Ross said.

“We know that this is a safer way of operating and a more efficient way of operating. Transit systems around the world have been doing this for a long time,” he stated.

“It is a proven, safe technology that the TTC, as a modern transit organization, must begin to adopt.”

The TTC plans to spend $62.3 million on modifications to platforms and trains that will allow drivers to operate the doors and monitor them via CCTV cameras.

But the investment will pay off quickly, because cutting the number of subway workers on Line 4 from 30 to19, and on Line1from 359 to190, will save the transit commission about $18.6 million annually.

The guards make an average of $103,400 a year, including fringe benefits.

Ross said that there will be no job losses because the guard positions will be eliminated through attrition.

The TTC eventually plans to convert Line 2 (Bloor-Danforth) to single-person operation.

However, the T1 trains that run on that line are much older than the Toronto Rocket models operating on Lines 1 and 4.

The T1models will reach the end of their service life within the next 10 years and Ross said it wouldn’t be cost-effective to retrofit them with OPTO systems now.