It will take tax dollars to build big, beautiful TTC
The TTC needs money and plenty of it.
But what is the TTC to do? What is to be done about the TTC? And if not, why not?
The arguments roll along. Can we all agree on the basic answer, which is that the Toronto transit system cannot afford to do the beautiful things we ask of it because we regularly vote for the wrong politicians. And lately, “negative rider behaviour” affects finances, as a TTC report points out.
Spit it out. It’s “stealing.” Riders lie and sneak onto transit. It cost up to $73.5 million last year.
All competently run cities love transit. It keeps citizens on a grid and out of trouble rather than having them rumble down streets in huge polluting SUVs aiming to maim the slow and the innocent in their irresponsibly dark winter garments. Maybe they’re playing that old movie game, “Death Race 2000,” where drivers win points per pedestrian.
That’s why I sometimes join groups of people at dodgy crosswalks, on the grounds that cars will be less likely to mow down entire families or kindergarten classes (or more likely, if they’re playing “Death Race 2000”).
Apart from death, nothing drives home our devouring need for public transit more than using it, with its majestic array of every possible filth, dubious passenger and bewildering delay. It’s like that rule of never being late for a date because it gives the waiting person more time to consider your shortcomings.
When the subway is stopped, all passengers silently make bets — suicide, heart attack, big fight after big game, derailment, hissy fit — and all the other things that gum the gears of getting where you want to go cheaply and fast.
You arrive at Yonge and Bloor fresh and ready for it.
After waiting on the platform on the hottest, dampest summer day of the global heating era and stumbling onto a replacement bus, you appear at your destination covered in alluvial deposits, some of them carcinogenic. You don’t forget that.
Back to cash: The TTC can’t build new underground lines without a great deal of public money we seem unwilling to pay in fresh taxes.
Without that money — and it sorrows me to say this — there is not enough capacity to admit tens of thousands of new riders who’d appear if transit became free, which it should.
It makes sense. I use shabby Line 2 throughout the day, partly to get somewhere and partly to be in my favourite place. I like being surrounded by strangers, like darkness, like seeing bits of suburban Metroland flashing past overground, am entirely at home.
When I look my fellow riders, especially in the morning when people are returning home from the night shift, I often wonder how they can afford a $3.10 fare.
They can’t, but they do it. They sleep in their seats, ashy with exhaustion, vulnerable.
Then there are the riders who can afford to pay the fare but don’t. Adults use child Presto cards to ride for free, imagine that. Others slip onto all-door boarding streetcars without using Presto. At stations, the report says, riders “push open the fare gates, hop over the fare line barrier, walk behind someone (tailgating), or hold fare gates open.”
They are not the tired people slumped on seats. They are not poor. They are petty thieves.
The TTC tried to save money by automating station exits — some hardened former ticket agents now wander around stations helpfully, but they’re hardly “people persons” — but that’s where the gate-jumping takes place.
So they’re hiring constables and inspectors to check for nonpayment, which brings its own form of grief, as a recent case on the always contentious 501 Queen streetcar proves. Leave the obviously unwell passenger alone; he may think he’s still sitting on a park bench and not notice the jolting. Help the confused. Have mercy. And so on. But remember this when you vote or pay property tax. There’s no problem the TTC can’t solve with lashings of money well-spent. Toronto could have speed, promptness, no more yellow bathroom tile. We could have glorious anything.
Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @HeatherMallick