Our friends at the TTC are fresh off a month of Soviet-style namecalling (the system’s best customers are “hoarders”) and flatly lying about how much money those hoarders are “costing” the system.
Well, guess what: There is no foreseeable day on which you will be able to buy a Metropass electronically. And that next-vehicle-arrival system the online elite insists is necessary because the entire city needs to be reconfigured so it works on their iPhones? That’s not coming either.
The reason is simple: Those projects, and many more, were deferred from next year’s budget. Such deferral took place at the TTC meeting of 2009.10.29. The full list is on p. 19 of the TTC Capital Budget PDF and includes these gems:
- Debit-/credit-card capability at collectors’ booths ($1.7 million): You’d better have $121 cash on you when you line up interminably for your Metropass
- University Subway Stations Renaissance ($0.1M) and Station Modernization Program ($74.9M): Existing stations will not be ransacked to suit the tax-shelter needs of private foundation donors or the whims of noted art experts Sandra Bussin and Adam Giambrone
- Easier Access Phase III ($60.2M): It’s gonna take longer to make subway stations accessible, though this is a tad awkward as the TTC is staring down a legal deadline of the year 2020
- Subway station public washroom improvements ($4.5M): They will remain unsafe pigsties (and will not be upgraded to the sole hand-dryer technology that works, the Dyson Airblade)
- Downtown Relief Line study ($3.0M): Despite the mayor’s name-dropping this long-dreamed-of subway line last week, it’s going nowhere
- Transit signal priorities ($22.0M): Asshole motorists, not atypically in low-end German sedans, will continue to make left turns directly in front of jam-packed ALRVs
- Next-vehicle arrival (zero)
- And finally: E-commerce ($0.8M)
So to recap: The largest transit system in Canada will remain functionally indistinguishable in 2010 from the day it opened in 1954. You will line up to give a little man in a booth cash money for perforated paper tickets or metal tokens, or, in a daringly modern twist, a magnetized passcard.