God save the King streetcar: My letter to my city councillor Gord Perks and the TTC chair Adam Giambrone
Hi Gord and Adam,
I live on Springhurst, just east of Spencer, and every morning, between 8:30 and 9:45, I try to take the King streetcar to my work at a magazine's editorial offices downtown. When it's early, the service is sometimes okay, but even in the AM peak between 8:00 and 9:00 it is deeply painful. As it gets later in the morning, the service becomes truly abominable, and tears of frustration are my new morning coffee. I usually have had to wait over ten minutes for a car ('frequent service' appears to be an Orwellian label designed to infuriate further), as well as 15, 20, 25 even 30 minutes. Astoundingly, the longer delays almost always coincide with the coldest days. If you can believe it, when the temperature is minus 10 or below, I can expect to wait at least 15 minutes. One morning, when it was minus 20, I waited for 30 minutes, and then only because I walked form Spencer to Dufferin and chanced on a short-turning car. Probably 35 or 40 minutes for those who stayed at Spencer. I wonder on those mornings why the TTC doesn't just send an operator by with axe to chop off people's toes. It's not only a sign of incredible -- even humiliating -- disrespect to strand transit users in the biting cold like this, but an outrageous health hazard. The looks on the frozen faces around me drive daggers of ice into my heart. It only adds insult to injury that all the while, going West is an unending string of empty cars that vanish over the hill never to be seen again. I can't tell you how many people I've seen flag down cabs out of desperation, because I lost count.
People take this streetcar -- which is uniformly packed to the gills on the rare occasions it saunters by, be it at 8:30 or 10:15 -- because they have absolutely no choice. I plan to bike now, to avoid buying a $100 metropass (is there anything more scandalous than the fact it costs more to buy a metropass than to take the TTC twice a day on business days?), and people with more money than me would be idiots not to drive. For other reasons, I often take the Dufferin bus, which is not the model being pursued on a grand scale because it's less efficient, but my god is it a better line, one that actually comes, actually moves fast, and doesn't make me balder.
The TTC's biggest supporters should be its users. Yet I'm pretty confident that the people who ride the King car with the eyes of an underpaid funeral photographer every day -- and let's not even get into what it's like to ride home, squished in like cattle, after 8 hours or more of work, in something resembling an acid flashback only a thousand times more grim -- are the TTC's biggest victims. I cannot tell you how demoralizing it is to start the day staring west, begging every flash of white coming over the horizon to be the top of a streetcar, only for it to be a truck. And then, fifteen minutes later, when the cars arrive, as they often do, in clumps, and you have to let one or two go by, it is so frustrating you want to stab someone, or rather yourself, in the eyes, with crochet needles. And when you have to let a stuffed car go by, and there isn't even another one in sight, well, better not to use the words that spring to mind. Finally, when you are riding at the pace of a clinically depressed snail into the downtown, you're so consumed by rage that the day before is drained of every possibility of joy. Good morning to you, TTC.
I read Steve Munro's blog, and I was touched at Gord and Steve flattering each other on getting the Transit City project up and running. And yet the majority of streetcar users, those who don't live on Spadina, aren't going to make very good shock troops for your publicity campaigns. Service on each of College, Dundas, Queen and King is dismal, each in its own special way. I do of course 'support' the Transit City plan, which I think is a wonderful idea, just as I continue to 'support' the TTC. But as the King streetcar obliterates the emotional link between what I believe to be right and what I can bear to lift my finger to support, because in fact I loathe its everyday existence with every cell in my body, I find myself -- someone who is committed to social justice and sustainability, who has knocked on doors for progressive candidates -- a pretty pathetic champion of public transit. Put the faces of the King streetcar on your publicity materials, and Torontonians will fill the ballot box with tears.
Your plan to restrict parking on King in the summer of 2008 is literally 12 months too late. Dramatic steps need to be taken right away, before your momentum, dreams and daring evaporate. Of course, I'm not the specialist in rouse public support to implement public policy. I'm just a voter and a transit user who wants to kill himself every day on his way to work.
Regards,
Daniel
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