March to the gallows

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.

(You may also experience this march to the gallows cinéma-vérité style.)

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.)

The TTC’s worst entrance

As stated, people are really dumb and getting dumber. They rather lack initiative. Back dans la journée, everybody would get off the Greenwood bus and slowly file through the single open door… not bothering to check if the adjoining door were openable. (It was. I would open it and holler “Use all the doors, people.”)

Two identically-badged buses can show up at once and everyone will crowd onto the first one. Before the full rollout of low-floor streetcars, on a hot day people would climb onto a CLRV without air conditioning even though a brand-new Flexity was sitting there nose-to-tail behind it. (One time I pointed that out only to watch a guy run onto the shitty old streetcar.)

So then. I’m not dumb and I will usually look for a Plan B. Other people are and won’t. But everyone who needs St. Clair West station and who has the misfortune of travelling eastbound during this diversion will have to deal with this entrance. (And that includes the Christie bus, which terminates here before magically transforming [“interlining”] into the Forest Hill. Oh, but will that bus actually have destination signage, and will people get on it by mistake? Take a wild guess.)

You’ll zoom past the graffiti-strewn bike rack and the overflowing garbage can, both of them unrepaired and the latter owned by Bell –

– and end up at the Soviet-style station entrance, which appears to be boarded up. Some doors are blocked off by a fence. (It isn’t always there, technically.)

Note bullshit signage. I’ll get to that. (And that bike rack can become this station’s sole outdoor shelter. I’ll get to that, too.)

Try to yank the door open – assuming stack effect has not created a strong vacuum, making that basically impossible. (There’s no automatic opener. The CIBC at Vaughan Rd. has one of those even though their door is up a couple of steps. I am aware of the issue of air pressure – I just mentioned it. There’s still no excuse.)

You’re confronted with an expanse of drywall, with even-more-bullshit signage. And your march to the gallows begins with the endless staircase.

Endless staircase

No, you won’t have enough presence of mind not to take these stairs. To do that you’d have to cross the street, at a crosswalk that is behind the bus you just got off of and which is incomprehensibly explained in a sign you will not believe once I showcase it for you.

Are you in a walker, or old, or half-blind, or carrying something heavy, or in some way not a TTC jumped-up motorman or diversity hire? Sucks to be you.

My favourite name for a transit hub is found on the London Underground: Angel. (Providential!) And I’ve been up and down its escalators, ostensibly the longest in Europe, several times. Every countermeasure short of a cat-o’-nine-tails is in place to keep dudes from sliding or skateboarding down the escalator, but they manage it anyway. The staircase at this south-side entrance is worse.

Fun fact: These stairs are not wide enough for one person to pass another in opposite directions. Do you hope that people at the bottom of the stairs will wisely wait for the huge flow of people comin’ right at ’em before starting their trudge? That isn’t doable here. It takes so long to hike up these stairs that up to three buses may arrive while you’re still partway up.

Indeed, how do you get upstairs? You’re gonna love this.

Not exactly Jacob’s ladder

Let’s say you somehow unaccountably know you need to emerge at this exit to take a bus eastbound (or eastbound then northbound in the case of the Forest Hill). You basically won’t know that unless you’re a transit fan or have been burned before. You also won’t do the smart thing and just exit at the north side and cross the street – for all the usual reasons (dumbness, lack of initiative), plus the fear of watching the bus you want drive away while you wait for the crossing light to change. (That 33 runs maybe twice an hour. Quite the sunk cost.)

If you indeed know this is the exit you need, you will need to know how to get there. The path is convoluted and requires you to change direction mid-stream at concourse level. (What is a “concourse”? The TTC keeps labelling elevator buttons with that term, which I guarantee you 90% of people could not define, let alone locate in situ.)

Assuming you don’t veer right (misleading door), you’re greeted with a homemade sign.

Nice misuse of the so-called TTC font:

You walk for miles along a drywalled-off partition that’s been there for years and are presented with… this.

While I was there, workmen were chatting in the little cubbyhole they’d created out of drywall. They weren’t repairing the escalator.

Do you want to know what it looked like a couple of months ago? Arguably better!

(Fun fact redux: The exit straight ahead here – it opens onto parkland – is permanently closed, but was not always thus, and was a favourite hangout of rubbies charging their phones and chugging a beer. I’m one to talk, since I sat there for quite a while using subway wifi during the endless Rogers outage.)

Oh, and they’ve rather sneakily changed the completion date of the escalator rebuild.

In other words, they were able to swap out this signage, but remediated nothing at all otherwise. I did say they lied. (Another fun fact: Moments after I took the latter picture, a workman opened one of those doors, ostensibly to “check” the undisturbed, fenced-off ground but actually to intimidate me. As if.)

“Lemme draw you a map to tell you to cross the street”

TTC Design (sic) is so autistic it can’t even tell you “The main entrance is directly behind you across the street. Be sure to cross at the light.”

One more fun fact while we’re here: You can indeed pay by cash at this entrance. (“St Clair West ‑ St. Clair Avenue, southside” [sic].)