Toronto Star Referrer

UNEASY RIDERS

Toronto needs the TTC to be safer and more reliable. It will be a long and complicated task

Keenan

On a Queen streetcar Wednesday, a man boarded near Bay Street at the centre doors. He had a long scraggly beard and wore a grubby army surplus coat, a bulging plastic garbage bag slung over his shoulder.

He was giggling, loudly, for no apparent reason. For longer than a minute.

“Heeeheeeheeheeeheee!” His voice echoed off the windows and walls, and many passengers let their eyes dart in his direction, then exchanged glances with each other.

Was this something to be concerned about? Or just another day on the TTC? Or are those now the same thing?

The man quieted down for a minute. Then, suddenly, fitfully, began babbling.

“Blagdabad! Thangamagamad! Shabankaflag!” Nothing coherent. But it caused a rush of passengers to move away from the man, crowding to the front and to the back. The car stopped at Church Street and the doors opened. The man got off.

So: nothing happened of any significance. No one was hurt. There was no conflict. Just another vulnerable city resident in a moment of confusion. But in the middle of this particular week, it may have felt to the other riders on that streetcar like part of something. Something scary.

TTC statistics show an apparent rise in violent incidents on the transit system over the past year, many of them apparently random attacks on strangers. That rise seemed to spike this week, with every day bringing new horrific headlines: a woman stabbed in the face on a streetcar, bus drivers swarmed and beaten by a group of adolescents, someone attempting to shove a person onto the subway tracks, employees chased with a syringe, a teenager stabbed at Old Mill station.

Struggling to regain riders

At the very time when the city is trying to get people back into the habit of transit commuting after the pandemic choked off ridership — and ironically just as the TTC launched an ad campaign based on how “relaxing” its vehicles are — many feel they have reason to be afraid of Toronto public transit.

This week, over the course of two days, as more incidents made headlines, I rode the system for hours in the mornings, afternoons and evening rush hours. Back and forth and up and down across the subway lines, and along much of the length of the 501 Queen streetcar line. I hopped on and off to sample many vehicles or different subway cars along the way, wandered up to bus platforms or to visit public washrooms.

And in that time, I didn’t witness any scenes of conflict or violence — nothing more high-tension than that a bearded babbler briefly alarming nearby passengers.

Maybe that’s a relief, and maybe it’s also what I might have expected. There are well over a million trips taken every day on the TTC. Even with one or two high-profile — sometimes genuinely horrifying — incidents of violence making the news every day, any given rider is statistically unlikely to witness one. Maybe there’s some needed perspective there. For anyone under the impression the TTC has become a non-stop frenzy of brawling and mayhem, maybe that’s somewhat reassuring.

Which doesn’t mean the experience of riding the TTC for hours this week felt like good news.

The first subway car I boarded Wednesday late morning was mostly empty — something those who haven’t been riding regularly since before the pandemic will notice is a somewhat eerie trend. At one end of the car, a man in jeans and a dark parka was slumped over a giant backpack and sleeping bag, his hood pulled down tight over his face, his legs sprawling out into the aisle.

He wasn’t doing anything alarming, except that many of us will find it alarming that people are taking shelter on TTC vehicles. And they are, en masse.

I’d say roughly half of the trains I rode on had people sprawled out sleeping on the seats, sometimes with mounds of plastic bags full of possessions alongside them. At Finch station, a man was slumped over sleeping in a hallway leading to the bus platform, and another with a giant blanket laid out on the ground next to a bench in an outdoor bus bay was having a long conversation with two police officers.

And I saw plenty of teenagers being teenagers — doing chin-ups on the handrails, dancing around with their pants hanging below their crotches and making noise, shouting at each other from one side of a subway car to another. Nothing new there, though possibly made to feel threatening to fellow passengers by recent reports of teenage swarmings, and by many of the young men appearing camouflaged by COVID masks on their faces and sweatshirt hoods pulled up over their heads.

On one westbound subway car near Spadina, an older man pushing a bundle buggy joked about the recent reports of violence with a group of rowdy young men seated near him. “I got nothing in here worth stealing,” he said, with a big smile on his face as they laughed.

One Line 1 subway car had multiple advertisements ripped down and shredded on the ground. Many subways and streetcars had litter on the seats (though I didn’t personally witness anything like the needle my colleague Shawn Micallef encountered on a streetcar Thursday).

There were a few short service delays announced while I was riding, and one long one, when an “injury at track level,” as they say, led to masses of people walking in a snowstorm between Ossington and Keele.

I also, toward the end of the week, noticed an increased presence of orange-vested TTC staff and supervisors on platforms — at one point there were six in my line of sight at Bloor-Yonge, along with two special constables.

Riding, I observed a system suffering signs of neglect. And one that has troublingly become a key source of shelter from the elements for those without a lot of other options — a trend that took hold during the pandemic and has continued.

These things are likely parts of the problem we’re experiencing now: fewer riders in rundown cars and the presence of vulnerable people lead a lot of riders to feel like they’re in a less safe environment, for one. And vulnerable people spending a lot of time in a tense environment with stressed out crowds seems like a recipe for ramping up the potential for conflicts.

But looking at the spike in violence recently, and especially this week, part of what makes it so difficult to get a handle on is that it’s not one thing: some youth are suddenly acting out violently more, some deeply troubled people are suddenly launching unprovoked attacks on strangers, drug addicts are leaving needles where others might sit on them, less full trains create an environment more likely to lead to thefts … and on and on. If the wave of incidents seem random and unrelated to each other, with different apparent causes, how do you begin to find a solution?

Part of the difficulty for those in positions of authority is that few things that might be effective in a lot of these different cases will work quickly. Better mental health supports might head off some violent outbursts. Better community programs might divert youth from becoming involved in violent incidents. Providing shelter to those who are homeless — a place to live, ideally — would keep people from sleeping on the subway. But none of those things will have much impact in a matter of days, or weeks. Tackling root causes effectively can take years to pay off, and when it does you almost don’t notice it’s worked because what happens is that incidents don’t occur.

But you can be sure that in the mayor’s office, and in the TTC executive suites, they are feeling a need to do something now — and to be seen doing something. Which is why we saw the announcement Thursday of 80 police officers who’ll put in paid overtime shifts patrolling the TTC.

Statistically, it seems unlikely to be a recipe for large-scale success: what are the odds that in a system with thousands of vehicles, a cop will happen to be in a place where a random stranger attack is about to happen, and spot it in time, and be able to successfully intervene?

There may be some marginal deterrence value to the presence of uniformed police at a subway station — a teenager with a BB gun may be less likely to pull it out there. And the presence of police, in itself, will make some riders feel more safe. That’s not nothing. If it makes enough people more likely to ride, and lets them feel more relaxed while doing so, their presence is accomplishing something.

The trick will be whether those police can make those people feel safer without becoming a source of more conflict. It’s easy to envision a situation in which those officers try to make themselves useful enforcing fare payment, or harassing boisterous youth, or trying to remove sleeping homeless people from vehicles, and in the process create new conflicts out of mere annoyances.

The quick and visible stuff — more police, more TTC supervisors — may be necessary to reassure the public, but authorities should be on guard against creating new problems. The real work will take time, but it’s important to do it. (A start might be for city council to approve the 24/7 opening of warming centres for homeless people, as the Board of Health has recommended.)

And maybe, in this moment of heightened alarm, we can all take a deep breath. Riding the subway for days on end showed real problems that need addressing, but it also showed me it’s possible to do so without ever encountering any episodes of violence or conflict. Among the worst outcomes of the recent trouble would be for people to stop riding the TTC — a system empty of riders is a less safe system, and ultimately one with fewer resources to tackle its issues.

A long, complicated road

The people of Toronto need the TTC to be safer and more reliable, and the work of making it so is long and probably complicated. Which is why riders need to be there, demanding better, even if this week’s headline shocks pass, so that we don’t see similar headlines far into our future. Or worse, become so inured to these incidents that they don’t make headlines anymore.

At one point late in the afternoon on Thursday, just as the rush hour crowds were gathering at Yonge and Bloor, there was a visible presence of uniformed staff on the northbound subway platform. A woman came walking down the stairs to the platform, holding up what appeared to be a picket sign as she waited for the train. “JESUS SAVES” it said in bright primary coloured letters. Those around her looked at the sign and smiled at each other.

A few metres away two buskers played country blues on guitars, one of them working a drum pedal that caused cymbals to sound, but also caused wooden figures in a tiny ring to box each other. As the music played, a woman paused in front of them, then began to dance.

One further reminder: in addition to the hassles and frustrations and fear, riding the subway can also be interesting. In moments, it even looks like fun. In a week like this, riders needed all the moments like that they could get.

Riding the TTC this week, I observed a system suffering signs of neglect. And one that has troublingly become a key source of shelter from the elements for those without a lot of other options

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2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://thestarepaper.pressreader.com/article/281535115125919

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