I QUIT

Just in the last month:

  • A bus driver threatened me. (“Are you a supervisor?” “What’s it to you?” Later: “You looking for a fight?” “Do you understand this is being recorded?”) I forced a reluctant pair of ticket collectors to call a supervisor. The driver and those collectors bonded in the booth while we waited, though one of the collectors did take time out of his busy day to pick a fight with a female passenger before my very eyes. (The driver was a big, strong young Italian male. Is that ethnic stereotyping or simple psychographics? I say the latter. He struck me as the kind of guy who’s built like a brick shithouse because it might come in handy sometime.)

  • A streetcar driver refused my first three hollered requests that he press yellow and call down the constables after another passenger threatened me and blocked my way up to the driver to complain. (That’s the second time this same passenger has done that.) Then he tried to lay the standard TTC guilt trip on me: Are you sure you want me to call it in? Because then all these passengers would be terribly inconvenienced. (Even supervisors will float this one.) The other passenger left the vehicle, which gave the driver a chance to try out a variation of the same line.

The lesson is the TTC really does not want to be bothered by threats among passengers. (Knock yourselves out!) Nor is the TTC observably interested in policing the volatility and anger of hotheaded operators. (Not only do they have a union, they conspire while waiting for a supervisor to show up.)

Meanwhile, if you so much as toss half a paper transfer at the feet of a bus driver, Bob Kinnear labels that an “assault” and uses it in a propaganda campaign about how TTC operators are the sole victims of misdeed.

You may be thinking: The fact it happened to me proves it’s my fault. Do you want a safe transit system or not? Safe for whom, exactly?

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2010.10.26 14:37. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2010/10/26/not-operator-assaults/

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