As it is summertime and the living is ostensibly easy, I thought it would be a nice diversion from this TTC malarkey to go on a TTC photo shoot. Contradictory? Quite. It would be nice if I had any idea at all how to relax.

On Monday, after my subway signage tour with Ed Keenan, I went absolutely crazy and used the hideous vending machine at Yonge & Bloor to buy a TTC weekly pass (expensive at $30). Suddenly I’ve got a fuzzbox and I’m gonna use it. I planned to enter and exit every station on the Sheppard line, but only after stopping off dans le Rosedale for a coffee and after visiting the North York Central Library to raid further back issues of Eye.

After a good double espresso served long without Leslieville-style argument, I found myself on the subway with a TTC supervisor nearby (identity withheld).

I had already been having a highly deterministic week, so I figured I really was seeing what I was seeing. Excuse me, I eventually asked them, are those a pile of signs for collector booths? And you are…? you are with…? was the neutrally delivered response. I’m Joe Clark, I said. I’m the one who’s been making the fuss about the signs. The supervisor knew me by name immediately. [continue with: In & out of Sheppard →]

I am supposed to be doing other things this summer, like replacing the lost (also nonexistent) income from Web accessibility, now that I am retired from that field. Another book is in progress, and I am now a full 1½ months behind in writing it.

What have I been doing instead? TTC fucking signs. [continue with: ‘Except, of course’ →]

Today I attended a press conference at a blustery and loud Pape station – right on the bus platform between the 72 stop and the unique and underused waiting room – for TTC’s planned subway-station “modernizations.” I have posted TTC’s renderings of these modernizations.

The TTC itself was barely able to transport me from Leslieville to Pape station in time. I noted all the usual suspects – the only two people who think current TTC signage is any good, Gary Webster and tarnished wunderkind Adam Giambrone; Rahul Bhardwaj from the Toronto Community Foundation, the shysters who are inducing the TTC to spend $5 million on “cost-shared” renovations to stations that will turn them into children’s confectionery; the TTC’s media rep, who claimed, absurdly, not to speak for Giambrone; John Sepulis of operations; and a supervisor I will talk about in a later posting. David Lawson, billed as a “designer,” was also there and would later helpfully answer every one of my questions.

You’d be surprised how many of the others completely avoided my gaze or pretended I wasn’t there. However, I in turn specifically did not go up and talk to them. I was there to report. I shot photographs.

Giambrone CrackBerrying under the signs he approves of

I took more notes than anybody. Here they are. [continue with: Subway ‘modernization’ →]

I tried “fixing” a range of “mistakes” in this photograph, then decided I liked it as is.

This subway collector (not quite the most boring job in the TTC – that’s the subway collector at Bessarion) would from time to time give me a dirty look while I shot photos. We had a direct line of sight.

Today I relaunched my pages on TTC signage. They are no longer merely the largest repository of information on signage in the Toronto transit system; now the whole subsite has become a call to arms to prevent the TTC from removing and destroying old signs.

Yes, they really plan to do that, and they’re going about it under cover of night. The Commissioners of the TTC have not authorized the removal and destruction of signage at St. George (Paul Arthur’s irreplaceable old sign prototypes, not found anywhere else) and at the stations set for renovation, namely Pape, Eglinton, Victoria Park, and Kipling/Islington. At best, there was a presentation from the late Don Léger to the TTC in April describing plans to clean up filthy, corroded St. George station, with an offhand reference to “old” signs that were to be “removed.”

I heard that and my eyebrows hit the ceiling. Later I filed a single-page letter complaining that Paul Arthur’s signs have to be retained, not removed and destroyed.

It seemed that Commissioners were taking me seriously. They moved the topic to the next meeting so they could receive “deputations.” I dutifully came back from England in time to show up at the meeting and made not one but two deputations, in which I made the fatal mistake of failing to reiterate what Commissioners had had two months to read. Not only was there no motion passed to preserve old signs, Adam Giambrone suddenly and before my very eyes grew concerned about handwritten signs, which are now the priority for TTC signage. Here, “priority” means the TTC has six months to produce a report on the topic. That means six more months to begin putting a dent in a minor problem, and no dent at all put in major problems.

At the same meeting, acting general manager Gary Webster (he has since gotten the job full-time) then had the gall, under questioning from a Commissioner, to claim the current sign “standard” is just fine. That makes him the only person in the city, and the only employee of the TTC, who believes that. Gary Webster: I liked the Flat Earth Society so much I bought the company.

And there are a few other interesting details. I had a meeting with TTC about signage in April, and later sent them a solicited proposal to do a numerical inventory of signage forms in the subway. That would get us away from a design discussion. (We now know that any such discussion will be taken over by Gary Webster, who will contradict his own staff and everyone else.) TTC has been acting as though I never submitted that solicited proposal.

And they’ve been sending around my original TTC presentation from January to other people who write in about signage. This is merely the latest in TTC’s sign-related copyright infringements (they also send out their fake-Helvetica font files to printers). I shouldn’t be surprised at this, because no one at the TTC ever figured out that I had a printable tagged PDF up on my site the day I made the presentation; if they want to send anything out, it should be a simple hyperlink.

As I have explained repeatedly, including in my deputation last month, station refurbishments at Pape and elsewhere give us the chance to use the stations as testbeds for new sign designs. This is not a question of who likes what font or what somebody somewhere happens to think is pretty; it’s a question of function, which can be assessed only through testing. (Paul Arthur’s designs tested better for all groups than the old signs, but TTC Commissioners of the day were too chickenshit to put $8 million together to implement the system.)

So here’s where we stand.

• Officially, the only urgent issue facing TTC signage is handwritten signs.
• Everyone admits there’s a signage problem. On the topic of the current sign “standard,” the only person who thinks there isn’t a problem is now running the TTC.
• TTC Commissioners have not authorized the permanent removal and destruction of irreplaceable signage, but TTC staff are acting as though they have that authorization – and they may just barrel ahead and do it.

Stop them before it’s too late. I am running a write-in campaign to pressure Commissioners to order TTC staff to retain old signage rather than running it through an industrial shredder and having a good laugh.

I would not be surprised if barely anyone wrote in. And I certainly don’t expect a link from the only transit blog the TTC reads, Steve Munro’s.

Buried in the user’s manual (PDF) for the iPhone is the following:

Using iPhone with a Teletype (TTY) Machine

Teletype (TTY) machines are used by the hearing impaired to communicate by typing and reading text. If you have the iPhone TTY Adapter cable, available at www.apple.com/store, you can use iPhone with a TTY machine.

Connect iPhone to a TTY machine

From the Home screen choose Settings → Phone, then turn TTY on. Then connect iPhone to your TTY machine using the adapter cable.

For information about using the TTY machine, see the documentation that came with the machine.

Yes, you can plug in an external TTY and it will work. You need an adapter, typically overpriced for Apple at $19. (I bet it’s a standard jack converter you could get somewhere else.)

I suppose this is halfway decent, but if the iPhone has a TTY mode and a keyboard, why doesn’t it work as a self-contained TTY? (Presumably it uses only the so-called ASCII telecommunications protocol, not the ancient Baudot.) We’ve already got complaints from deaf people about the lack of iChat and captioning.

UPDATE, 2007.07.03: On second thought, I suspect TTY mode at present merely allows passthrough of signals from your external TTY. For the iPhone to transmit TTY tones would require either a software encoder of some kind or a chip that supports the ostensibly standard but actually obscure V.18 specification. I wouldn’t expect either of those before iPhone 2.0, if ever.

A curious way to lay vinyl across a board.

Don’t you just want to pop it like bubble wrap?