Sixth in the Time’s Up, TTC series

In February and March, the interminable installation of streetcar tracks on St. Clair blocked the centre lane. Buses leaving St. Clair West station had to use the curb lane. To do that they had to leave the station via a tiny pocket exit that’s hard to aim for (and has a little jog to the left halfway up). The usual 512 streetcar had long since been replaced by an occasional 512 bus, usually packed to the walls. More than one driver agreed that 512 was a lousy route to drive.

OK. But where do you get the bus? It wasn’t the usual place, because the bus couldn’t leave the station from that spot without doing nearly a full 360° around the bus bay (functionally impossible with more buses than the place was ever designed for). The real stop was behind you and to your left (right behind the streetcar), more or less completely blocked by walls and columns.

What method did this billion-dollar corporation use to inform you of this change? Scrawling with a Sharpie on the back of some other sign, or scrawling on four or five multilingual signs, or putting up one handwritten and one typeset sign (with a handwritten arrow) that contradict each other.

This thing went on for a month and it never got fixed. In fact, the sign I have shown above sat there on its pylon, sometimes falling over a bit, for nearly the whole time. I took pictures of it every day for a while, often right under the nose of supervisors, until it became obvious it was there for the duration.

Today’s photo set

Where’s the 512?

At Dal we had a filthy-rich guy from Hong Kong. We had a lot of those. This one really liked to fit in. He used then-current vernacular, though with that distinctive Chinese–British HK accent: You ahh naaahlaay, dood! It was said he was rich because his father owned the factory that sewed the Izods onto shirts.

Fifth in the Time’s Up, TTC series

Those OneStop advertising information panels that won’t tell you when your subway station is on fire, or, less hyperbolically, won’t tell you half a block of Queen street is, now won’t tell you anything. For days and days and days, as the new panels at Greenwood consistently show. (Not the only location where this happens, by the way.)

(But I guess the weather tomorrow is sunny? For every tomorrow?)

This configuration strikes me as significantly worse than just turning the damned things off (or leaving them off until they’re connected to the network, as often happens). But when you’re the TTC and you outsource vital customer information to an advertising company, with a contract that doesn’t even guarantee minimum space for information vs. advertising, this is what happens.

I have also witnessed confused people standing there for ages trying..
to piece together the..
message communicated by the..
sign at the bottom during a..
disruption in 501 Queen…
streetcar service at..
Bathurst.

This was at 1:00 in the morning. It turned out the disruption was long since over, and had they given up on trying to read the sign when I did, they could have walked right onto the streetcar.

Did you know it’s almost child’s play to snap a picture of these things rebooting?

Today’s photo set

OneStop: Information not available. (I’ll just keep snapping these every day and uploading them until information becomes available.)

Fourth in the Time’s Up, TTC series

The strangest bus line in the system – I can back that up – is 31, the Greenwood bus. It’s the only bus that passes two TTC yards (Greenwood and Russell). Without it, your mail wouldn’t get delivered, because posties without cars are stuck taking it at ungodly hours like 12:30 in the morning. (Toronto’s postal plant is on desolate, antihuman Eastern Ave. below Queen.)

The main 31 branch has a one-way route length of ten minutes, a shortness that drives some “operators” crazy. (They transfer out. But others choose it because they like short routes. I have other lore about 31 drivers; ask me sometime.) It’s one of those routes that’s 90% regulars, and not many fights or fare disputes break out. (Though there was that one time when a completely overwhelmed mother allowed her unhappy son, who obviously hated her, to run straight to the front of the bus and tumble down the stairwell.)

And if you’re in the 10% that doesn’t use it every day, you don’t have a clue where to stand at its second-most-important point – the southern terminus, Queen St. (The most important point is up at the other end, at Greenwood station.)

The bus stops at Greenwood (and is invisible to the immediate east and west). It loops around Queen and two sidestreets, one of them amusingly named Dorothy, then hauls ass back up Greenwood. But the B branch, the one the posties take, drives along Queen and turns up Greenwood on the opposite side. You must simply know where to stand (most of the time, at the “wrong” place, the very end of the line) if you want to go north.

What do the schedules say? For the last two years, they’ve lied to you, or lied to you most of the time. Schedules on both sides of Greenwood at Queen pretend that only the B branch runs there (true only of the east side) and do not tell you where to stand. In fact, these skeds make you believe the bus doesn’t run every ten minutes all day, which it does, since the main 31 branch just isn’t listed.

So, after I saw people waiting on the wrong side of the street every two weeks, I took matters into my own hands and printed labels that I stick onto the schedules (PDF).

They don’t last long. I witnessed a teenage harlot pull one of the labels off with her bare nails, for example. But I just print more and stick them up again. And people still stand in the wrong spot; I yell for them to come over.

(For completists: The schedules are, in general, incorrect since last November’s service increase. TTC acts as though the stop on Dorothy St. is the terminus of the route, and its pole has a full schedule. The Red Rocket and iTTC iApps also show incorrect schedules.)

I’ve complained about this problem twice. I’m not the only one who’s noticed it. Actual TTC employees from Russell stand there all the time visibly reading the labels. The 501 schedule across the street on Queen at Greenwood got replaced last winter. But still… nothing.

Update

(2009.07.08) That guy on Twitter whose presence on Twitter you somehow think matters in some way states “This will be fixed to eliminate the confusion.”

Excuse my French, but two fucking years later?

Today’s photo set

How do I get on the Greenwood bus at Queen?

Douglas Coupland (q.v.) did not coin the term “Generation X,” nor has he really ever claimed to have done so. In fact, he attributes the term to Billy Idol. See for yourself in an early article “Doug” Coupland wrote for Vista, a defunct Vancouver business magazine, circa 1989. I’ve been carting this around for a decade and have now scanned and uploaded it (see photos or tagged-but-not-accessible PDF).

Third in the Time’s Up, TTC series

Of course we know that really the only problem with TTC signage is handwritten signs, particularly at collector booths. Fix those – as by sending a supervisor around to gather them up – and you’ve licked the problem, obviously.

But actually another problem remains: The sheer unrelenting boredom endured by collectors imprisoned in a glass box for eight hours at a stretch. This is one job I want automation to replace.

After a while you develop coping mechanisms. That is, you buy a portable DVD player and stock up on bootleg Chinese discs. Everybody does it. (Check for yourself. Loiter at a subway entrance pretending to fiddle with your cellphone. Observe how the collector is staring fixedly downward and off to an angle.) But you don’t want people looking over your shoulder. One of them might call 416-393-3444, the non-emergency number (emergency is 3555), right on the spot and turn you in.

So you cover up the windows.

Things are so much better since they got rid of those handwritten signs. Except, as we will see, they didn’t.

Today’s photo set

Collectors barricading themselves in booths

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 126:

Two days later, my test results came back from Symons’s office in an exclusively bound [sic] folder designed to assert the importance of their conclusions. Held up against the subtletly [again sic] of the psychological exchanges I had observed between Symons and Carol…, the report felt like it had been written by a computer: “The candidate displays average abilities which would render him well-suited to a range of middle-ranking administrative and commercial posts,” the document began, before it singled out a particular talent for marketing and a weakness with numbers. “His future may lie in one of the following fields: Medical diagnostics, oil and gas exploration, or the leisure industry.”

I recognized my desire to submit to the report’s conclusions in the hope of quelling my doubts about my future.

Botton is the acclaimed author of seven books and the son of a Swiss billionaire.

At the same time, the report failed to inspire any real degree of confidence, and indeed, the more I dwel[led] on it, the more it seemed to signal some of the limits of career counselling as as whole. I thought again about the smells of cabbage and swede in Symons’s office.

This immigrant to the United Kingdom uses “swede” in its British sense of “rutabaga.”

That ugly site about New York “media,” Mediabistro, is offering a course for graphic designers. They seem to offer it every two months. Learn how to code your own Web page! (And design it.)

What will you learn? You’ll have to download a PDF of a Microsoft Word document to find out. Isn’t that your first warning? (What’s the filename? _X_OIyjN8QoxAHTXviUs49syKz.pdf.)

Instructor David Tristman will bring you back to the future by teaching you about the following (excerpted):

• Working with text: Headers, paragraphs, linebreaks
• Divisions and Spans
• Opening linked pages in separate browser windows
• Using CSS (style sheets) to format link text
• Image attributes – width, height, “alt text” [I just love the quotes], align
• Creating a table and using tables to control page layout
• Pros and cons of using tables vs. CSS for layout
• Formatting tables – colo[u]rs, backgrounds, borders, size, spacing

I’m just wondering what the pros of table layouts are. But why be so suspicious, I ask myself? If they were good enough for our grampappies, surely they’re good enough for us. Only our grampappies were also using Letraset, X-Acto® knives, PMTs, and a waxer, so perhaps the olden days should just be left behind.

Tristman was born in ’68. He went to Bennington but managed to escape with his balls intact, since he can bench 185. All this and more can be gleaned from his personal site, written entirely in Flash and listed as “©2006.” If the course still interests you, that’ll be $425, please.

Michael Surtees, do not sign yourself up! It’ll only make matters worse.

UPDATE (2010.01.12): Aaand… he’s back!

Second in the Time’s Up, TTC series

With the tremendous crush of humanity filing past the collector’s booth at Christie station, who could pass up an opportunity to make a pressing political point about the – indeed merely a – Ukrainian genocide?

It happened a short 70 years ago and it is surely an issue of crushing and urgent importance to, say, a nearby Korean immigrant eager to buy a few tokens.

This professionally-printed, if not -designed, posterette sat in the vitrine during the graveyard shift for about a week and a half last December. One particular female collector seemed to be the prowd owner and mounter of this placard, though at least one clearly unrelated male collector just left it up no problem during his own shift.

Remember! Ten million died! And what you do is you just go five stations east to Yonge then take the northbound train to Eglinton.

Today’s photo set

Protesting the Holodomor genocide at Christie