13-point program to fix the St. Clair disaster

On this page:

1. Lanes, signals, parking
2. New buses only – but no newbie drivers
3. Enforce timed stops – and use short-turns
4. Close the south entrance at St. Clair West
5. Improvements every week, not every six
6. Supervisors, “hubs,” “community outreach”
7. The real problem at the TTC is CIS
8. Fix the streetcar islands, and provide shelter
9. Separate stops for different routes
10. Tear down, rethink, and replace every sign
11. Learn to take no for an answer

Why exactly am I the one who had to put weeks of thought and effort into redressing the failures of a billion-dollar transit monopoly?

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Lanes, signals, parking

Install a bus-only lane from Vaughan to Tweedsmuir

After the Scarborough RT was decommissioned, the city suddenly became able to paint bus-only lanes from Kennedy to Scarborough Town Centre stations in a matter of weeks. (The pigmentation used is not actually “paint.”) That means the city can do it again, this time in a matter of days.

There is no greater traffic bottleneck along St. Clair than around the Bathurst–Vaughan Triangle. Buses easily miss four green lights heading westbound just due to traffic. The intersection at Vaughan Rd. is a mess of bus stops (three on the north side) and conflicting signal lights.

This bus-only lane needs to extend to Tweedsmuir to leave motorists enough space to get out of that lane. The kicker here is that we need this lane on but one side of the street – the north side, for westbound vehicles. If the city cannot “paint” one lane of roadway for a distance of three blocks, why are we paying taxes?

Turn off so-called transit-priority signals

…starting with the cat’s-eyes lights westbound at Vaughan Rd. (Those are the advance-go lights that newbie drivers are afraid to obey.) All transit-priority signals have to be turned off because they relate only to vehicles on the streetcar tracks. (There may be an exception just in from Gunns Loop.)

This should have been straightforwardly apparent well before the streetcar diversion began. It is a question of reprogramming software and firmware, a job that might take a couple of days tops, and that should have been completed no later than September 4.

Ban parking during and after storms

The TTC has belatedly learned that winter occurs every year. It now has actual protocols for projected heavy snowfall. The Severe Weather Plan has to be updated to ban parking along the entirety of St. Clair from Yonge St. to Gunns Loop before, during, and after major snowfalls.

Yes, we’ll tow your car out of the curbside parking spot you chose even though you knew full well a storm was coming.

(I don’t think banning parking at all times during this diversion will materially improve bus transit. Unlike Steve Munro, I actually believe small-business owners along the strip when they observe a loss of business when on-street parking is banned. Further, yes, these small businesses have suffered enough.)

New buses only – but no newbie drivers

Replacing brand-new 104-foot-long electric trams with 16-year-old 40-foot diesel buses (of which only the front two-thirds are ergonomically usable at the best of times) is the clearest evidence since the avoidable death of Alex Gillespie that TTC’s fundamental problem is being dumb and undiscerning.

We already replaced 30-year-old streetcars with new streetcars. So now we’ll swap in buses half that age. How dumb can you get? (TTC: “Just watch me.”)

Some jumped-up lifer views every bus as interchangeable. (“It’s a bus! They all work the same. I’ve been here 25 years. Why are we having this conversation‽”)

If buses really were interchangeable, then with the TTC’s habit of constantly maintaining them as if they were prized 747s, there would be no need to buy a new bus. Those buses sitting unpurchased would not, moreover, run any kind of alternative fuel – not compressed natural gas, not electric/diesel, and certainly not full electric.

There just isn’t a number big enough to measure the TTC’s contempt in inflicting the 1000-series Orion VII on civilians. I assure you that “second black TTC chair” Jamaal Meyers has never been inside one, least of all seated at the window behind the wheel well. (That’s a close paraphrase of his self-identification.)

The entire Orion VII fleet, starting with the 1000s and 1100s, is overdue for the woodchipper. Or they should get shipped off to Peru like the Gloucester subway cars were. Whoops: Those were cut up for scrap right here in Toronto. This fate must await the Orion VII.

Meanwhile, no driver (“operator”) on the 512 route may have a badge number below 80000. Absolutely no newbie kids on probation. No new drivers on this route. The St. Clair disaster requires experience and an ability to make decisions even if CIS (see below) might yell at you. New drivers – especially females – are in no position to make any kind of decision, least of all the obvious one not to tail the preceding bus along the length of St. Clair on the first evening of the diversion.

Now, “experienced” bus drivers have their own character flaws, like thinking they can get away with murder and basically succeeding most of the time. Why, just two Sundays ago an older driver cunningly positioned his smartphone on the inside of the lower driver barrier, almost equally cunningly looking at and fingering it at red lights. We’ll see how long he lasts. Still, if there’s a driver who can handle the decision-making that will now be required of running the 512, some greenhorn isn’t it.

So. One more time. New buses only, but no new drivers.

Now we have new buses

Starting with the second board period (see below again), all of a sudden the buses on weekday runs were entirely 40-foot Novas. Not an Orion to be seen. That wouldn’t have happened had I not complained.

Oh, but we’ll run those in pairs, too:

And we’ll put a few electric buses on the route – in this case, the few BYD vehicles not up on a hoist at the garage. Here it was possible to ride in a BYD electric bus and take a picture of two more of them running in a convoy across the street:

The issue here is that all buses on this diversion must be new, and additionally may not be any kind of Orion VII, least of all a 1000-series. That means three other routes – the Vaughan, the Christie, and the Forest Hill – need nothing but new buses. Yes, I quite insist.

Enforce timed stops – and use short-turns

Few remember the timed stop, a feature on bus lines (I know of none on streetcars) in which a vehicle was expected to arrive at or depart a certain stop, generally a major intersection, at a specified time on its route. Stops between timed stops were more flexible.

Of course this was more honoured in the breach, but I have been on buses that sat and waited at timed stops. We can bring them back for the 512 to iron out irregularities.

The fundamental issue has been discussed by Steve Munro (for it is he) over lo these many years. A built-in variation of ±3 minutes makes many schedules actually useless and causes convoys of vehicles to be recorded as running on time. In the St. Clair case, with buses running “every 4–6 minutes” by spec, this means 1–9 minutes, which indeed means that a pair of 512s can show up together, with another bus arriving nine painful minutes later. Yet all three vehicles are deemed to be on time.

This, of course, is a farce. But it’s fixable.

First, set the actual headway – not the schedule – to be 5 minutes at all times from 07:00 to midnight. (We can have a separate discussion about overnight service. The absolute priority there is not blowing past intersecting night buses.) Explicitly order drivers to stick to that schedule. Empower them to adjust their own vehicle headways by establishing timed stops, the candidates for which are not always obvious.

• Avenue Rd. is the first major stop east of Yonge.
• St. Clair West must be a timed stop because it is a subway station.
• The next timed stop west may require fine-tuning. I nominate Christie because the Bathurst–Vaughan Triangle is so hard to get through. Almost every bus will be late reaching Christie, but the goal here is uniform headways.
• Remaining timed stops are easy: Oakwood, Dufferin, Caledonia.

Why not Lansdowne? Because we will also institute planned short turns. Yes, usually a nightmare, but not here.

TTC already turns buses around and stages them at Christie and Benson on Saturday afternoons. (This impinges on the topic of on-street management.) A convoy of buses approaching Oakwood can offload the first or even second one, then whip around the convenient streetcar turning circle (well used by buses) and continue in the opposite direction. The same applies at the Lansdowne circle, already used by the 47.

I also suggest running a 512C from Gunns Loop to St. Clair West station, following the same diversion the Christie bus has used in the past – up Bathurst, across Tichester/Heath, down Tweedsmuir or Spadina, and westbound to the station. That adds eight minutes on a good day. But some passengers will be willing to get off at Bathurst, where the 7’s stop is well situated. Further, the bus can stop in front of the almost unknown Heath St. entrance to St. Clair West, which (bafflingly) has an elevator but is not an accessible entrance. (The typography is also a mess – yes, that’s Arial.)

Close the south entrance at St. Clair West

The broken escalator at St. Clair West – the repair date of which has been sneakily changed since the diversion began – renders the entire St. Clair streetcar diversion moot. The project should never have begun, no matter what, until this escalator got fixed. And that repair should have taken absolute priority over every other escalator repair.

TTC, being dumb and undiscerning, did none of the above. Now, on top of that, I’m sure they’re also waiting for parts. So be it: Wait.

This entrance is manifestly unsafe. The fatality I warned of may turn out to be fatalities as a senior citizen carrying a cart tumbles down these 150 steps. The south entrance is all but completely unusable and is an urgent safety hazard. It needs to be shut down and blocked off until the day the escalators start working again.

The entrance already looks abandoned anyway, and the TTC does not hesitate to close entire subway stations, with no alternatives, during weekend repairs. (The Web pages for such closures will actively lie to you about what is and is not open. For example, during the weekend of October 6, Museum and Queen’s Park stations were closed, a fact the Web site refuses to mention.)

An entrance at St. Clair station (which one?) was closed for nearly a year during the period of installation of Presto fare gates.

Hence yes, this lethally dangerous south entrance to St. Clair West station can be and must be closed until it’s usable again.

Improvements every week, not every six

TTC operates on so-called board periods. Except around Christmas, they’re six weeks long and begin on Sundays. “Crews” with different levels of “selection” seniority essentially bid in advance on the routes they wish to drive.

I have literally had a TTC lifer tell me the following about some atrocity or another: “It’ll be over soon.” He meant after the then-current board ended.

The dumb and undiscerning TTC pushes toy boats out onto a pond. Where they end up they don’t give two shits about until six weeks have elapsed. Then they just launch another toy boat, denying the previous one never existed.

Of course this is untenable.

Even if the 512 is literally the only route that gets this especial treatment (it won’t: 126, 33, and 90 also will receive it en passant), improvements have to be implemented every single week. Sunday might be the day to issue the orders, with Monday the implementation date.

This, in turn, requires actual supervision.

Use on-street supervisors, run a community hub – and fire the community-outreach girl

Here we address the primary cancer eating the TTC from inside. No, it isn’t the fat commie negresses illegally discriminating against males, Whites, and White males in the name of diversity. They’re the secondary cancer. (They’re also lesbians with – inevitably – high-femme White girlfriends. Hardly a principled stand against white supremacy.) Nope…

The real problem at the TTC is CIS

It probably stands for Central Information System, but, like “JPEG,” “ABS” brakes, and “GPS,” the expansion of the acronym is now irrelevant. CIS runs all manner of minute-to-minute operations. “CIS” can also refer to the displays visible to operators in buses and streetcars, but now those have been supplanted by the failed, and curiously named, Vision system. (And there are other “transit controls” beyond the one we aren’t supposed to know is located at Bathurst and Davenport – like Bloor–Danforth wayside, which I have personally telephoned on occasion.)

So then. CIS oversees every vehicle in the system. And look how well they manage that!

A corporation running Windows – Adam Giambrone’s MacBook was the first and last Macintosh ever to function on the TTC’s local-area network – breeds the Windows tinkerer-geek mentality. This kind of guy loves, just adores, talking computers, and has done so since his first viewing of Star Trek, which date he remembers while forgetting his first communion. That explains why we have automated announcements everywhere, not least in the subway. The Windows tinkerer-geek also loves never getting out of his seat, yet feeling like he’s pulling the levers that cause the world to turn.

In reality, he’s staring at horrendous Windows visualizations of hundreds of routes with a thousand or more vehicles moving all at once. Of course your buses are running in packs. TTC hires for lack of initiative, and even if some dude at CIS felt like breaking up bus (or, worse, streetcar) convoys, there are so many of those happening at once that even there he’d be dealing with a backlog.

Note that CIS is populated not by jumped-up motormen but by supervisors so reprehensible that the TTC cannot figure out how to fire them. I’ve yelled at them on the phone, and I am the only person – the only person – who has filed a complaint against CIS.

So then. Some years ago, this so-called divisional CIS was shitcanned in favour of highly localized on-street supervisors. This led to chaos, as a certain degree of central control is absolutely necessary. Divisional supervisors were themselves shitcanned and brought back to CIS.

We will indeed put supervisors on St. Clair, at certain corners and at certain times, and order them to use their authority to even out the line – now quite possible with real-time vehicle tracking in a way not true in years before.

In particular, we’ll post supervisors west of St. Clair West station on Saturday afternoons – by a wide margin the period of worst traffic. Here, for example, are five buses in a convoy followed by two in a miniature convoy:

They’ll also be out during snowstorms. Quite unpleasant, but they can always quit.

Meanwhile, back at CIS, I want one or two managers who supervise either nothing but the 512 or the 512 plus precisely one other line. (I am willing to accept this degree of divided attention but no more.) They have to be in charge of operations from 07:00 to midnight, as mentioned above. If other diversions (e.g., Queen St.) require similar scrutiny, let someone else advocate for similar treatment.

Community hub

I was going to suggest that the 512 diversion needs its own community office, the way the Leslie Barns construction project did. Those kids were just great, and they really knew the neighbourhood and all its issues.

But the TTC already has community offices. They’re called station hubs. You’ll be reassured to learn that, according to the TTC’s official video, everybody who works in those hubs is “Black.”

(“Now you have two problems.”)

In any event, I’ve seen any kind of humanoid inside the station hub inside St. Clair West about five times. It sits unused, and is a huge boondoggle – one among many at St. Clair West.

Station managers might be another option here, except for the fact that not one but two of them basically told me to go to hell after I yelled at them for not informing senior citizens struggling with carts where the (intentionally hidden) elevator was. These station managers are also so incompetent as to be unfireable, though they all in fact need to be fired.

Or they could make themselves useful by manning (sic) the St. Clair West station hub, and getting out of it to go up to street level and help people out. This will require extensive, and tested, signage informing people the station hub even exists.

Fire – or, shall we say, reassign – Gurjeet Kaur

The community-relations person for this debacle is Gurjeet Kaur. A young female Sikh has no ability to relate to the community along St. Clair.

• How will she deal with the High Anglican empty-nest ladies living in condos and pristine retirement villas between Deer Park and Tweedsmuir?
• How – indeed – would a young female Sikh deal with the fact there is but one gurdwara on or adjoining St. Clair? The avenue is dotted with four Catholic churches; no fewer than three Protestant churches (including arguably the Nº 2 Anglican church in Canada, Timothy Eaton); and three Baptist or evangelical churches. How’s she going to deal with the Jews on St. Clair? (Where are they, and to they have another outpost nearby?)
• How can Gurjeet Kaur deal with the residual nonnas and paisanos on Corso Italia? And the few remaining blacks on what used to be known as the strip “where pasta meets Rasta”?
• How will she deal with the three library branches along St. Clair? (How does one bring an entire bag of overdue books back to the library on the 512 replacement bus?)
• St. Clair has five major supermarkets, including one frequented by poors, the No Frills. How exactly does one schlep a week’s worth of groceries on the bus? How does one schlep anything back from “Toronto’s worst neighbourhood,” the Stockyards?
• Where is the methadone clinic, and where does Narcotics Anonymous meet?
• What – perhaps most importantly – could a young female Sikh’s plan possibly be to address the hundreds of Central and South American immigrants and refugees (many of them flatly illegal) who have moved en masse into the westernmost end? They do not speak a word of English, and do not have what it takes even to learn two such words, viz Eastbound and Westbound. (I saw two Hispanics run from the eastbound platform onto a westbound streetcar. “You realize we’re going westbound?” I said. “No inglés,” the girl replied. Of course not!)

Human beings are not interchangeable widgets. If that were true, it wouldn’t be necessary to discriminate against us. It is preposterous to suggest that a young female Sikh has anything resembling what it takes to “liaise” with the “community” along St. Clair.

Of course the TTC cannot and will not fire a vizmin female for any reason. Maybe promote her to CIS? I don’t care – just get her off this file.

Single point of contact

We don’t need community relations. We need a single point of contact. E‑mail will suffice – StClair@TTC.CA. It has to be possible to get a problem solved almost immediately by mailing in a complaint, ideally with photos or videos attached.

If we have to have community-relations staff, there need to be several of them. Yes, among them they have to speak Spanish and Italian, and no, we will not tolerate a scenario where zero percent of them are Christian. (They have to be able to enter a church without bursting into flame. They also have to know when to genuflect and under what conditions they must wear a head covering.) TTC can overlap these community flaks with the station hub, as above.

Fix the streetcar islands, and provide shelter

Streetcar islands across the city are falling apart

Every single one of them along St. Clair has something wrong with it, starting with busted garbage cans that Bell will never, ever fix. (I have filed dozens of repair tickets.)

Metal pipes acting as a rather ugly form of retaining wall are bent at most stops. Polycarbonate windows are missing or hazy due to blast erosion from snow and rain. Community notices inside those windows are years old.

Indeed, missing windows, as at Bathurst, will lead to destroyed signage for name of stop, which in turn will never be replaced because nobody can find the CorelDraw files, nor is there an existing contract with a manufacturer, nor were spares fabricated and retained for just such a rainy day.

Shelters

We’ve gone from running a streetcar line where some kind of shelter exists at every stop (the apotheosis of which are two indoor subway stations), to a bus line with one point of shelter – the easternmost. I’m not even the first to notice this intentional cruelty. Yes, the TTC is dumb and undiscerning, but even a retard knows it’s gonna rain and snow. Even TTC diversity hires get hot in the sun (or maybe they don’t).

Some kind of shelter absolutely has to be built in front of St. Clair West station on the north side. (One thinks back to the decades-long saga of a shelter outside Bay station on the west side.)

But whaddya know: The south side already has a structure that can be used as a shelter – the high-design, graffitied-over mile-long bike rack. Half the time half its rackspace is unused. Rope off those racks, and install the same perforated-aluminum benches seen in the subway (I would bolt them to the pavement), and boom, we’ve got shelter.

(Yes, the graffiti has to be removed, too.)

Honourable mention goes to this darling shelterette, located at Tweedsmuir 15 feet from the actual stop, which stop is never actually served by the Forest Hill bus in typical operation. And in present day you can’t really see the bus coming (let alone stopping, then driving away without you) due to tree branches.

This shelter’s purpose is unfathomable (though note the twin ad caissons dwarfing the tiny bench). It looks more like a Juliet balcony installed in a ticky-tacky condo on an ugly street like Dupont.

Separate stops for different routes

I had a fat supervisor lecture me on the bus one time that, especially at the westbound stop on St. Clair past Bathurst, we the barely begrudged passengers had to run up to whatever vehicle we hoped to enter. No, in fact no bus driver has to inch up to the actual stop pole to pick us up.

In practice this means the 126 can blow right past us while one or to Vaughan buses sit there, or if the 126 shows up right behind a streetcar. And lo this has actually happened. (I tracked down that newbie driver on his return trip and yelled at him not to be quite so stupid.)

This fat supervisor was flummoxed when I asked her “What if I’m blind?” – then told me to sit down and stop bothering her. “I’m behind the white line and this is my stop,” I told her.

More than one route sharing a stop is a recipe for disaster, not least when the entire subway is down and articulated shuttle buses have to share limited space.

Plus the severely dumbass “Wayfinding team” (sic), for whom I once did a pittance of paid work, will tell you that the aforesaid subway replacement bus is the most important vehicle to arrive at a stop.

At St. Clair West if nowhere else, the 512 stop has to be located most conveniently, with the 126/33 stop behind or in front of it. No, you the driver of the Christie or Forest Hill may not just blow past the station because somebody is standing in “the wrong” place.

For planned subway diversions, now is the time to use temporary signage. I do not agree that unplanned subway failures backstopped by replacement buses require permanent signage.

Tear down, rethink, and replace every sign

As one of approximately two experts on TTC signage, every sign on this route is a disaster, and some of them actively lie to you.

What used to be the dumbest sign in the system (why?) –

– has been usurped by another one, equally visible many times over at St. Clair West:

It would take a thousand words to explain what’s wrong with this sign. I’ll get there at some point. But this sign also lies to you. It too was pushed out onto the pond like a toy boat.

Nope: Every sign has to be torn down, rethought, and replaced. And, when they become outdated or too beaten up, they have to be swapped out. (As an example, we’re a month and a half into this year-long diversion, hence not a single sign has to begin with “Effective September 3, 2023.”)

Learn to take no for an answer

Last but not least, the most important lesson for the TTC is the single word no. When we say no, that’s final. No, you won’t run 16-year-old buses. No, you won’t run even nice new buses in packs. No, you won’t pretend a bus has the same capacity as a streetcar. No, you won’t put us in lethal danger.

No, you won’t dismiss us for bad attitude or even worse language. No, you won’t dismiss us. (“Us” includes me.)

No. No, you won’t.

But it goes both ways. TTC drivers, staff, and managers have to learn to say no. No, you the newbie driveress will not tail the bus in front of you all the way to Yonge St. (You don’t need permission – just refuse to do it.) No, you will not put up sign after sign that don’t even make sense, then leave them in situ for months. No, you will not – well, you get the picture.

What I am advocating for here is something TTC has never had at any time ever: Initiative.

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Fun fact

Of course there aren’t “13” points here. (Except, with subheds included, there are 20.) I’m leaving room for future expansion. I’m gonna need it.

Version history

2023.10.18 Posted.

2023.10.19 Shelters; grocery stores; some added photos.