A service delay hours before the third and final town hall hosted by the transit workers union kept some of the riders they work for from attending.
Around 9 a.m. on May 2 the TTC's Sunday subway schedule was bottlenecked due to a medical incident before the transit union commenced deploying a disarray of shuttle buses and short-turned streetcars to fix the daybreak hitch. Streetcar driver Eddie Braga from the town hall's union panel said the morning's chaos meant surrendering his day off. "I had to get people out of the subway and escort them onto the street," he said. "The worst part of it was nothing runs that early in the morning. People were yelling and screaming at us."With the hold-up causing a lower turnout than the previous town halls in Downsview and Scarborough, the crowd of roughly 150 transit riders barely filled Ryerson University's Library Theatre. As a result the locus of rider questions and concerns slightly differed from the other gatherings. North York resident Barry Minshull complained he hears an irksome high-pitched squealing noise every time a subway car pulls in. "I happen to know for a fact why that's happening," said Janet Weller, a subway operator who works the weekday morning rush hour shift on the Bloor-Danforth line. "It's the friction on the microfibres in the break-pads. I've been told the mechanics are trying to fix that. "I know how irritating it is. I have to wear earplugs."The breadth of the town hall's discussion was on the enforcement of fare collection. One rider said he wants the TTC to work on reducing prices, eventually making the service free."If you look at some of the subsidization models in Europe and the United States, we're nowhere near what they're doing," said transit union head Bob Kinnear. "In Los Angeles it's like $4 a ride. We recognize this is a concern, but the money's not there. We have less streetcars and more traffic now than we did 20 years ago. We're struggling to keep up."That segued into a demonstration by Braga who used cardboard model streetcars to illustrate why buses and streetcars short turn. He explained drivers get five minutes to make their stops but when they're late the others en route get log jammed and arrive at their destinations simultaneously. To ease volume, vehicles must briefly chart a different course. Prior to the meeting Dale, a midtown resident who didn't want his last name used, said he wants someone from TTC management to watch collectors so everyone pays their fares. He recalled an evening where he stood inside Bloor-Yonge station from 10:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. and about 75 per cent of people he saw sauntered in without paying.Moderator and former co-host of CBC's 'As it Happens', Barbara Budd asked the panel of frontline TTC workers if they felt comfortable being their own police force."This is the only service where you can get something even if you don't have the money," said bus driver Ron Ishmael. "It's not like when you walk into a store to buy a bag of chips and if you don't have enough money you're easily turned away."We can't stop because of one fare. The decision we have to make is whether to keep moving. People are counting on us to get them to school and work."Weller, who used to drive a bus, is lax because she's forgiving."The way I see it, if you don't have it, just put it in tomorrow," she said. "I would stop but I always think of the safety of myself and the passengers."Some riders in attendance said drivers don't always catch people hitching a ride for free.Sharron McLean, who lives around Queen St. E. and Sherbourne St., has been purchasing metropasses since April 1992. She wondered why she has to suffer for her customer loyalty when so many people are slipping onto streetcars using the rear doors."There used to be the Proof of Payment system where you'd have a TTC worker at the back to check transfers," said Braga. "But when funding was cut they had to do away with that. Now it's only on certain routes you'll have someone from time to time checking."Kinnear said video summaries and webcasts of all three town halls are available on the union's website at www.wemovetoronto.ca