If the TTC wants us to fall in love with it all over again - it better not have many more weeks like this one.
Wednesday night was bad enough, with the rush-hour closure of the Yonge subway at Bloor. By itself, Torontonians might be of a forgiving frame of mind - it was, after all, a contractor who perforated the subway tunnel with a badly-aimed saw-cut.
But the major fail on rush-hour transit comes just days after the commission voted to hike fares, by 25 cents, in the midst of a recession, with only the slimmest prospect of service improvements.
Now, even combined, those things would not cause Torontonians to renounce their love of public transit forever. After all, fares have to rise sometime, and the TTC did freeze them last year - and really, it's not the TTC's fault that operating subsidies from higher levels of government are so skimpy.
Where the prospect of domestic bliss starts to ride off the rails, really, is the implementation of that fare hike. Since the TTC first announced that a fare hike was on the table this year, those semi-committed riders who choose to use tokens to pay for their rides have been squeezed. Token sales were limited to 10 per rider, then five, and the machines that dispense eight at a time were limited to just one token. The reason is simple enough: the TTC has only so many of the little two-toned pseudo-coins on hand, and they're worried that if Torontonians start hoarding at 2009 prices, pretty much all of those tokens will be sitting in old film canisters and pockets and between seat-cushions.
This is not, of course, the first time the TTC has limited token purchases in advance of a fare hike. In the past, the commission would just stop token sales outright, and let casually-loyal riders purchase blocks of single-fare tickets instead, and at the same price.
But this time, it's different. The TTC no longer sells paper tickets - they being too easy to counterfeit in the age of scanners and laser printers. So now, it's tokens or nothing. And so for the first time, a routine fare hike has messed with the routines as well as the pocket-books of adult commuters across the system.
Boils down to this: there are a lot of things the TTC can't do anything about. Periodic fare increases are inevitable, and accidents by over-enthusiastic contractors are unavoidable. Riders understand that. Much harder, to understand how emergency-style rationing figures into a transition that should in itself be routine.