First, 512 replacement buses are now split between two divisions. That gave a new set of incompetents the chance to prove they are, in fact, Little Shits™. They did so by sticking to the letter of my no-1000-series–Orion VII policy, giving us instead 8000-series buses with the same penalty-box seating above the back wheels.
Klassy.
In what might be a good decision in cold light of day (but which took 2½ months to arrive at), the ghetto Vaughan bus now hangs a left and books it up the Bathurst–Vaughan Triangle.
Initially I thought turning left on St. Clair was a better option. Given the disaster of stop placement there, and the endless traffic, no, it wasn’t.
Only a month and a half after I demanded the graffiti get cleaned offa the south-side bike shelter, which should indeed be a shelter for passengers, voilà: It’s getting done.
Shall we talk about the disaster that is the Christie bus? (Or, as it is sometimes errantly badged, the 33 Forest Hill?) To do that, we’d have to discuss the driverette who abandoned the bus at the rear of this picture long enough that the other bus showed up and rescued us:
The upstairs hoardings, and blocked-off door, and frequently-dishonest signage concerning this escalator reconstruction, are all in place. Hoardings downstairs are – pleasingly – cleanly removed. What’s curiously missing now at both locations is this pair of signs –
– which I typeset, printed, walked over, and taped up in plain view of everyone on a Sunday evening. The upside is at least I used real Helvetica, instead of the bullshit Bitstream clone the Windoids at the TTC defend to the death. (They’re the world’s only Helvetica truthers, insisting some typeface called “Swiss 721” came first.) The downside is I ran out of tape.
Thereafter, I observed precisely one person even noticing these signs existed. My handiwork did nothing to dissuade people from trudging down a punishing 150-step staircase. Still, my samizdat intervention here is way better than anything the dumb and undiscerning dweebs at the Commission could ever have come up with.
How dumb and undiscerning?
They can’t even render the name of the street right
St Clair West Avenue
Guess frigging what, Sherlock: This is St. Clair Ave. West.
(Unrepaired a month later. Also, why precisely is there a route map on this sign? Apart from filling up space?)
For Helvetica truthers, these guys sure seem fond of Arial
TTC’s construction notices (I have other examples) are all banged out in Arial in Word for Windows, with the expected type and copy.
No Windows user will have any ability at all to find fault with what is presented here.
Oh, but station signage is also banged out in Arial.
This one’s a fave:
Note the redundant panels (cut out with scissors) pointing upward, with cutesy bus icons. Route numbers are Sharpied onto the solid line that is helpfully provided. Except you can’t get the ghetto Vaughan bus from St. Clair West station.
You can’t even get it from “Bathurst + St. Clair,” as somebody later scrawled on that same sign. No driver of the 90 will pick you up, or drop you off, at that corner.
This is the best the TTC can come up with to counter the epic bad press of the St. Clair disaster
This blandishment is more turkey than Christmas, and additionally betrays the Windows contempt for typography. The headline as set –
Improving infrastructure on St Clair Avenue West and at St Clair and St Clair West stations
– puts errant linebreaks inside proper nouns. Set correctly so it can actually be understood on first reading:
Improving infrastructure on St. Clair Ave. West and at St Clair & St Clair West stations
Or:
Improving infrastructure on St. Clair Ave. West and at St Clair & St Clair West stations
(Punctuation duplicates expected usage in running copy and as rendered on station walls. No, they aren’t the same, and there is no such place as “St Clair Avenue West” [any more than there exists a “St Clair West Avenue”].)
Are we done yet? Nope.
Again: How dumb and undiscerning?
Ripped-down signage is just ignored or papered over.
As only I am willing to state, Saturday afternoons are the busiest periods on St. Clair. Good time to run 40-foot Novas in convoys of three, then.
Of course the Average People waiting at this stop – having, on average, below-average intelligence and zero initiative – crowded onto the first bus. I got on the second one.
After mentioning that I guess we’re running buses in threes now, I said to the young female driverette that she could push to –3 (that means leave three minutes late; +3 would mean three minutes early) to put some space between her and the bus in front of her. She said nothing… but off we went right away.
So your plan is to follow that bus all the way to Gunns Loop, then follow it all the way back, I asked? Basically, she replied. Well, you could take some initiative and push to –3. I’m –10, she replied. Then –13, I said.
The last time I “showed some initiative,” she told me, I got called into the supervisor’s office and got written up. So don’t tell me I need to be taking “initiative,” she continued. Then she told me she was not about to put herself in a position to actually get fired.
This is the second-order reason your ride on the TTC is total shit
Because even the rare young female driver who has initiative is actively penalized for demonstrating it, and is, further, told, if not explicitly, that if she dares think for herself even once more she’ll get herself shitcanned.
(The first-order reason your trip on the TTC sucks is CIS, as previously stated.)
What’s gonna happen now
TTC minions will pore through vehicle numbers and match them up with guesses as to date and time in order to locate this driverette and punish her.
So does Josh Matlow, who’s basically no less of a “she/her” than Bravo is. (Surely Brava, Alexandra‽) Both of them got motions passed at City Council to ban parking and stopping on St. Clair.
Certainly the latter makes sense. But that took a mere two months. And not coïncidentally, both motions were backed by “second black chair” of the TTC Jamaal Myers (no relation).
“Traffic during construction has been frustrating,” Bravo wrote, with rather less of an imperative than her attacks on fascism. (So much work to do there!) These motions were deemed urgent because signage work has to begin immediately.
But that isn’t what’s happening at Bathurst today. It’s something to do with sewer maintenance, and has made the Sisyphean ordeal of getting through that red light much worse for two days.
Indeed the only measure of success or failure of these motions is how many fewer red lights the 512 will have to sit through. Nobody will be keeping count.
This streetcar diversion was known for months in advance, yet it has fallen to me and a few other civilians to list all the remediations that should have been set up well before Day 1. None of them have been.
As stated, the dumbest sign in the system used to be this one –
– because it hides the most important words, Westbound and Eastbound, inside some kind of failed Christmas cracker.
But we’ve got a new contender. And it’s also at St. Clair West. (Everywhere there, in fact.)
Adding a border violates the fundamental rule of graphic design, which can be articulated as “1+1=3.” (Draw a vertical line on a blank page. How many objects do you have? One. Draw another line close by. Now how many objects do you have? Three – two lines and the space between them.)
Multiple copies located all over the place, including at or near ends of stairs and escalators, giving you noplace to stand and read the damn things.
Arrows imply that all destinations are possible by going in one and the same direction. (As such there should be one and only one arrow.) Well, you can get yourself to Australia by flying over the North Pole if you really put your mind to it. Everyone understands an arrow to mean “through the door the arrow points to.” This error alone sends people in the wrong direction.
The sign expects us to keep constant ongoing front-of-mind track of which side is north versus south. I assure you most people will not be able to tell you which is which, not least the most disadvantaged groups, like seniors without smartphones. (Nor is anyone aware that a smartphone can generally tell you which direction is which.)
Absurd bureaucratese in the sentence beginning “Accessible.” Just tell us where the frigging crosswalk is.
Just like the previous record-holder, obscures eastbound and westbound notations within borders within capsules within keystones within cartouches.
TTC: Still dumb and undiscerning
In the classic manner, they aren’t even smart enough to get upset when you point out who dumb they are. “Undiscerning” is a concept you can’t explain to them.
I rode my bike through 14 winters. I even did a properly signalled left-hand turn over grand-union intersecting tracks during freezing rain.
So then: Could skinnyfat guys in masks, and could childless gals with master’s degrees and “pronouns in bio,” please quit pretending that the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way would make a great bike lane?
First of all, workmen are set up in those lanes most weekdays. Your plan to ride around them – while, I remind you, hemmed in by tracks?
Next, what’s your plan to get yourselves through St. Clair West station?
Do you have any kind of plan for the intersections at Vaughan, Oakwood, and Lansdowne, with their forests of overlapping tracks?
Can you quit irrationally hating every form of transportation other than your cute little bicyclettes and maybe think things through for half a minute?
I remember a documentary about an old British prison that operated its own gallows. (Don’t go looking it up. I made that mistake the other day.) We were shown how the condemned would be walked through one open-air quad after another, passing through ever-narrower and ‑shorter doors. The intent, confirmed by the tour guides, was to humiliate and amplify dread.
The TTC would run better if everyone working there had origins in the British Isles (especially Scotland), but instead of a gallows the Commission contents itself with the south-side entrance of St. Clair West station.
Yes (further), the TTC started a streetcar diversion when they knew the mile-long escalators at that entrance have been out of service, and completely boarded up, for nearly half a year. It was also known that the escalators would not be reopened in time for the diversion. (They would proceed to lie about date of reopening.)
Now, arguing with these people (also “you people”) is an exercise in futility, but there’s something wrong with you if you cannot comprehend that the entire diversion had to be delayed wholesale until these escalators were back in service. Again: If you cannot understand that, you are too dumb and dishonest even to be reading this site, let alone having a conversation. (And you’re probably a middle manager at the TTC, though not ethnically Scottish.)
What does the TTC plan to do about the homeless guy who has spent most of the past year panhandling down the middle of St. Clair (yea unto the streetcar tracks) at Christie St.?
St. Clair Worst 