“Initiative”

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.

Alejandra Bravo (“she/her; rights, equity & economic power for people; anti-fascist”) does half a thing right

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.

Except only at two corners, Dufferin and Bathurst/Vaughan.

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.

Shocker: Streetcar tracks make lousy bike lanes

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?

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.)

Question about vagrant

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.?

He’s still there.

(TTC: “If he’s anything he’s a ‘person experiencing homelessness,’ you racist.”)