Transit-mageddon shows why a little repetition would go a long way

Some repetition in Toronto's transit system wouldn't hurt, especially when something goes wrong on the Yonge-University line.

Thestar.com
March 1, 2016
By Edward Keenan

Tuesday, the arrival of March brought a long overdue blast of winter with it - minus-17C windchill, blowing snow - just in time for fires to engulf some of the TTC’s power generators. Which knocked all of the University and Yonge subway lines and most downtown streetcar lines out of commission, just in time for morning rush hour.

It was terrible. It was horrible. It was no good. It was very bad. And if that series of sentences seems a bit superfluously repetitive, that’s probably appropriate, since the long waits in the blowing cold for shuttle buses gave us lots of time to contemplate the unappreciated virtues of redundancy. It is, as it once again became all too clear, a characteristic not in evidence in our transit system.

Not that it’s the most obvious transit shortcoming most days. I once interviewed the designer Bruce Mau about the difference in the customer service experience between the TTC and personal automobiles, and he said something to the effect of, “My minivan has 18 cup-holders, and that TTC bus shelter doesn’t even have a door on it.”

He could have gone further: not only are TTC bus shelters missing doors, most of them are also missing three walls, and have roofs that are angled to the sky as if to invite the foul weather in. They are not shelters at all; they are rather the taunting suggestion of shelter - a reminder to riders that the idea of providing shelter occurred to someone and was rejected in favour of a shelter-themed advertising display panel.

But the point today is revisiting the other half of Mau’s example: his minivan has 18 cup-holders. This is just one instance among many of the ways car manufacturers make driving an attractive and comfortable experience, but it is one that highlights the particular virtue of redundancy.

Eighteen cup-holders! Do you prefer to drink with your right or left hand? Are you buying coffee for the gang at work? Do you want access to both a hot and a cold drink at the same time? No problem. Your van manufacturer has provided way more options for storage than are reasonably needed. Redundancy.

Too often people think of that word as meaning merely “extraneous,” or “wasteful,” but when it comes to things like designing a transportation network, it also means “options.” And options are good things to have. A recent New Yorkmagazine feature about a cascade of transit delays in the New York City subway system was fascinating to read from Toronto, for a bunch of reasons.

One of them was perspective: Even in a city with 800 miles (nearly 1300 km) of subway track, one where at least six distinct lines run north-south downtown on an island you can cross on foot in about half an hour - even there, people will suffer terrible transit delays.

But another was reading how transit controllers run through options to minimize the problems from those delays when they arise, able to divert trains to express tracks or parallel routes. In Toronto, very few such options exist for transit controllers or for commuters themselves. If the “U” between Bloor-Yonge and St. George goes out, downtown transit - and too often virtually the entire network that feeds it - grinds to a halt.

For decades, this has been overlooked or minimized in our main transit planning debates. A certain number of wonks have always talked about the “Downtown Relief Line” as a priority, but it has been routinely brushed aside by the desire to build new subways and LRTs to new places - on Sheppard and Eglinton, and more recently to the Scarborough Town Centre, and along Finch, and so on.

This is fine; those new lines will be useful, but they also all feed into, as the Bloor-Danforth line does, a central system that’s vulnerable to a single point of failure: the Yonge-University line.

This means that in the very best of times, transit commuters are forced into an uncomfortable and often dangerous intimacy with their fellow passengers. And it means that in the worst of times, when there’s a power outage or passenger injury, the whole system and much of the city grinds to a halt in response. Like Tuesday morning, when 120,000 people shivered in the street trying to find another way to work.

It’s like the worst lottery ever, and the losing ticket does come up too often: exactly one week earlier, on Feb. 24, much of the Yonge-University line was shut for a chunk of the morning rush hour, and this was at least the third time in a month passengers have seen morning chaos.

Our newest transit plans, developed in part in the planning department and embraced by the mayor, show better thinking. Tory’s SmartTrack plan provides alternate routes into downtown from the east and west. The relief subway line along Queen St. up to Pape and Danforth provides another. The projected King streetcar right-of-way corridor would provide subway redundancy on most days, and the reduced-price UP Express and frequent electrified service on the Lakeshore GO line offer more alternatives (as they did Tuesday, when they accepted TTC fares while the subway was down).

And that’s what we need: more alternatives. The problem is we need all this now, as was all too vividly illustrated Tuesday, and we have no idea when - or if - most of that map will ever be built. My fear is that urgent parts of that proposed network will be written off as less urgent and thereby postponed into the perpetually distant future, because they look redundant on the map.

The new plans should provide hope. But shivering in the cold now, the proposed new map feels instead like one of those TTC bus shelters: a bitter reminder of what is not there.