The Bathurst–Vaughan Triangle

More treacherous than the Bermuda Triangle and with almost as high a body count, the preposterously triangular corner of St. Clair, Vaughan, and Bathurst – every combination exists – has now been made worse. By the TTC, of course. Only they could manage it.

The Vaughan bus is now rebadged as 90C. (Except that the rules for adding letters to route names changed a decade ago. But we’re no longer abiding by those rules.) It hauls ass southbound through St. Clair and directly down the angled stretch of Vaughan all the way to Bathurst station.

Oh, but what if you need to get off at St. Clair? Welcome to the “temporary stop” where the you will experience a “drop off.”

(Whoops. They fixed that one after a week.)

Going northbound? TTC opted for the less-bad option in that the bus hangs a left at the traffic light at St. Clair. (Trying to turn left onto the angled stretch of Vaughan brings to mind Russian dashcam videos. I’ve been nearly taken out by motorists umpteen times.) But now there are two Vaughan stops, one of them “temporary.”

“Temporary” stops have no chance of lasting a full year. Such stops should be real poles bolted into the sidewalk. These bullshit paper panels Scotch-taped to perforated aluminum posts won’t last through the first snowstorm.

Are you on the 512 replacement bus and do you want Vaughan Rd.? Your driver may stop at either or both of those poles. Of course the stop-announcement system will not tell you that.

Do you believe the handwritten “90” on this “temporary” sign? Does this mean we can file complaints against 512 and 126 drivers who dare to stop there?

(Or did you want Bathurst? Some drivers just blow past the corner of Bathurst and St. Clair. Now, maybe that should be formalized, because back dans la journée when the Christie bus was forced to ride in the curb lane [there’s a story], we would sit in traffic and miss up to six green lights. The same fate will befall this 512 manqué.)

Day 1: Bunching

This whole boondoggle started on the Sunday of Labour Day weekend (September 3, 2023). Everybody who could afford to GTFO piled into their midrange electric luxury vehicles and bugged out to the cottage.

That left everybody else.

Here we have the eastbound stop at St. Clair West station after nine o’clock at night on a hot and muggy holiday Sunday. Yipper: The diversion is barely half a day old and they’re running buses in convoys.

And guess what? The driverette of the trailing bus is a young female. She’s surely still on probation. (That lasts ten months.) Being a young female probie gives us three reasons right then and there why it would never occur to her in a million years to park herself for eight minutes (or whatever the headway is – this will come up later) and space herself out from the leading bus.

“Initiative” is not a characteristic for which we diversity-hire.

While I didn’t trail her across town, nor did I get on her shitty old bus (but that could be worse – this too will come up), I fairly presume she tailgated the lead bus all the way to Yonge St.

At a certain point, incompetence becomes contempt

We’re well past that point. Incompetence has become cruelty.

We start with the fact, incomprehensible to middle managers and anyone who uses Windows, that design is not the icing on the cake. It is the cake. If you don’t put enough effort into solving a problem up front, if you don’t test your proposed solutions to prove they work, if you’re just too damned autistic to remotely comprehend how normal people think, behave, and react, you will produce antihuman “designs.”

Like the Orion VII – by a wide margin worse than the classic bus from the 1970s, the GM Fishbowl, despite the latter’s lacking wheelchair access and air conditioning. (And power steering. Yes, of course old TV shows and movies passingly depict Fishbowls with AC units tacked onto the rear. We didn’t have those.)

Any transit agency that foists this abomination onto a captive public should be tried for war crimes. Or, better yet, every transit commissioner and senior manager needs to be forced to ride through Scarborough in the penalty box behind the rear wheel well in a 1000-series Orion VII.

You do realize these jalopies are 16 years old? In its environmental propaganda, the TTC actually boasts of a “13”-year lifespan of a typical bus. This is batshit insane by itself. U.S. transit agencies, with immensely more funding available, rightly treat buses as disposable and homologate new buses every three years or so. Not quintuple that length of time.

We need not even examine the failed ergonomics of the entire Orion VII model line. Try getting two old ladies in walkers into and out of such a vehicle. (What happens when a less-old lady shows up with her grocery cart? Oh, you think that never occurs?)

These shitboxes aren’t even pleasant to drive. A brake function known as the retarder (no relation; talking about this is like getting an N‑word pass) pulses the brakes on when lifting off the accelerator in certain circumstances. A too-grabby retarder (“N‑word!”) shudders the bus to a half-stop over and over again.

Should I mention there isn’t a climate-control system? An Hyundai has one of those. (And did 16 years ago – cf. the Entourage.) Your options are heat on/off and AC on/off. Oh, but we’ll come back to air conditioning.

The intentionally cruel Toronto Transit Commission runs 1000-series Orion VIIs in pairs down St. Clair.

(That’s two 1000-series 512s behind the 33. By implication, neither of the 512s can leave until the 33 does.)

They do all this despite the fact that the TTC as a whole has a 20% spare ratio – insanely, one-fifth of all buses are set aside for usage in case something else comes up.

St. Clair is a rebuild that has been transformed, with malice aforethought, into a midtown punishment. There are umpteen other “diversions” underway, but I don’t care about those. I care about this one.

And I demand nothing but brand-new buses, of which the TTC has more than enough. (Quite the story there, too!)

The St. Clair diversion is going to result in a fatality

First of all, I offer this entire Web site as an intention for the reposal of the soul of Alex Gillespie (1993–2010). Alex died at age 17 after a Victoria Day weekend celebration in the Beaches. According to published reports, Alex ran across the street against a red light, and the 91 Woodbine South bus collided with him and pinned him. Grisly at best.

I wasn’t there and I did not observe what happened. (I did observe a subway jumper once. In fact, I heard the train driver’s call to Transit Control.) But I will tell you the exact sequence of errors that led to this fatality.

• I’ve taken the Woodbine bus and it is infrequent on a good day. The TTC runs holiday service, which in nearly all cases reduces the number of available vehicles. There’s a whole flowchart of exceptions. But even if the 91 had the same complement that night as on any comparable night that wasn’t a holiday, there wouldn’t be enough buses.
• Now let’s understand that thousands of people congregate down by the waterfront near Ashbridges Bay for fireworks during the May 2‑4 long weekend. Suddenly the south end of the Woodbine bus route goes from lightly attended to overwhelmed by a throng.
• Let us further understand how the jumped-up motormen and autistic lifers at the TTC think. It’s akin to the way a slow child might think, but with added bile and entitlement. “Victoria Day is a holiday! We run holiday service on holidays! Yes, that means less service – are you stupid? I’ve been here 25 years. Why are we having this conversation‽” So the TTC runs barely any buses en route down to a gathering akin to miniature Woodstock. Buses might arrive every 20 minutes (I haven’t looked that up), so people run to catch whatever vehicle deigns to appear.
• This means the Queen streetcar and the Coxwell and even the Greenwood buses are packed to the walls, as I know from direct observation. But it also means that people will unwisely run across the street to catch the bus. There is indeed a rule that drivers are not supposed to open their doors for anyone who crosses against a light, but I don’t know if that came about after this fatal accident, and in any event people will literally stand there a foot and a half from the curb and pound on the door. (Again: Direct observation.)
• Alex Gillespie died accidentally. Stipulated. But this accident happened because some autistic and/or lifer at headquarters decided to run holiday service on a holiday, ignoring the fact that, at some places and times on a holiday, you’ll find more people, not fewer.

Comparable errors will take place on St. Clair, with the same result. There is going to be a fatality during this so-called diversion. It’ll probably happen in wintertime, when the TTC has a habit of running people over, not least by crushing their heads under the tires of a bus.

Some lives are worth more than others

I’m going to make a prediction that will surely please death-obsessed leftists who earn good money on the diversity racket, predicated as it is on designating client groups as perpetual victims. (Like blacks and aboriginals. Or transgenders.)

Here’s how the Toronto Star described Alex’s death (“Killed by bus, teen identified,” Wendy Gillis, 2010.08.24): “The teenager struck and killed by a TTC bus Friday night has been identified as Alex Gillespie, son of CBC radio reporter Bill Gillespie.”

The person whom the TTC will kill off during its already-disastrous St. Clair debacle will surely not be a scion of the protected media class (or his son), as the Gillespies were and are. It’ll probably be a vizmin, and quite likely one of the Central and South Americans who have moved into the west end of the St. Clair streetcar line en masse. (And quite possibly an illegal.)

In other words, the fatality will be someone whom leftists claim to defend, but whose family will have no ability to launch a $2 million lawsuit against the TTC and others. A bunch of commies might hold a rally (fat black girls with their fists in the air, everyone in a mask, lots of bearded guys with boobs), but they will have done nothing for the deceased when he or she was alive, nor will they offer aid and succour to the family of the deceased.

This is going to happen, and it will happen the way I have described it here. It already has happened, and the TTC has learned nothing, because it is incapable of learning. This too shall be covered in due course.