The Futility of Bus Schedules

From a complaint I sent to the TTC. Really ranty; not very well edited, but gets the point across I guess:

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Hi,

This incident isn't directly tied to the the above routes, but mainly all bus routes in general.

While traveling on the Dufferin Bus, the driver stopped at a stop for about five minutes, idling. I can only assume this is done because the bus was running ahead of the schedule.

I really don't understand the logic of keeping to the bus schedule, especially when the bus comes fairly frequently. I don't think too many people actually follow the bus schedules and plan their wait for a specific time. Mostly, people just go, and wait for the bus whenever they're ready to leave. It seems like following the schedule is fairly useless anyway; the bus never seems to follow it.

So why try? Why don't the buses just keep moving as much as they can? I can understand if the driver needs a break, but why slow down everyone else's trip because the bus is trying to keep schedule? If the buses just went, it would seem like there would be less need for a schedule. People would just go and wait, and more than likely, buses would come within a reasonable amount of time.

thanks,
Tom Robertson

Street Furniture Scandal Round-Up

My second favourite Toronto blog*, the Torontoist, has a great summary on the street furniture scandal right now, as well as a good prognosis for the future. Basically, they're saying, "We understand that advertising needs to support street furniture, but why do the ad agencies have to design it?"

If anyone's at all concerned by the uglification of Toronto, and thinks that public advertising should be held accountable, I'd encourage everyone to read up on it and complain to their local councillor or the mayor.

Don't know your councillor? Check out this ward map from Toronto City Hall. Find your ward, and it will tell you your councillor with contact information.

Further reading:
http://publicspace.ca/sidewalksale.htm
http://ilegalsigns.ca
http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/200903

* My first isn't this one, but Spacing Wire.

New House! Yeah! After four days of having bought it 'conditionally', me and MacGyver (Erin) finally closed on the house today. Yeah! We basically took a bunch of crazy pictures, and drove around going 'woo'! And "Fuck you, other houses!"

Anyway, my apologies to MPP Michael Bryant for being a nutcase. We take possession June 1, and move in on the 15th.

Homless Signs in TO

Apparently some art student made official looking signs advising people of homeless nearby, like "Please have change ready for homeless" and put them up on street posts.

Pretty interesting. Makes people think differently about a population that a lot of us are just desensitized to.

Home Buyers' Conditional Offer Law

This is a letter I sent to Michael Bryant, Ontario MPP today:

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Hello Mr. Bryant,

I’m a member of your riding, St. Paul’s.

For the past two months, my wife and I have been searching for our first home. We are very determined to stay within the city of Toronto for our home to avoid a lengthy commute and enjoy the benefits of the city.

That being said, competition for houses in Toronto is furious. We have already made three offers that have not been accepted. On all three offers, we had a minimum of a home inspection and financing conditions. All of the offers that were accepted over ours were ‘firm’ offers, i.e., with no conditions.

We feel that home inspection and financing conditions are very important to us, as they provide basic protections to the largest purchase we will ever make. But we are not at the point where we have to consider dropping all of our conditions in order to obtain a home.

I’m writing to you because I think there should be a law requiring that all home offers must contain a home inspection and financing condition. Market forces should not be forcing consumers to lose their basic protections, which I believe those two are.

There are many examples of laws which correct unwanted market forces, like the minimum wage law, price gouging laws, and anti-monopoly laws. I believe that this law should be one of them.

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

Thanks,

Tom Robertson

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I'm probably just burning from our last loss of a house, but we were really so close and our financing condition, which we were very reluctant to drop, was the only thing that lost us the house. Very frustrating. I still see this as a pretty good idea for a law though. It's a basic consumer protection law, isn't it?

Emergency Traffic Direction

Braving my way to work this morning after last night's blizzard I noticed that many of the traffic lights were not functioning. Surprisingly, Toronto's otherwise aggressive drivers were handling it quite well - treating it like a four way stop as per the traffic laws in these situations.

But it still reminded me of the power outage of 2002 when several volunteers stepped up to direct traffic. Keeping traffic moving and under control is really important in a crisis like that and I think it helped keep a sense of calm and order for those 24 hours.

Obviously, the police discouraged these traffic volunteers, as they had no real training or authority to do it and could be making things worse. It's a valid point, but there's obviously a need for those kinds of services that the police didn't fill, not to mention a general interest from some sections of the public to volunteer for it.

So that made me think, instead of discouraging people from directing traffic during crises, why not go the opposite route, and train volunteers before a crisis, and issue them a license? They could be given special vests or something to wear, and have the understanding that they'll only direct traffic when called upon the city to do so. They could then be assigned the most important or gridlocked streets to help out in. Sure, they're not being paid, but neither were they when they were volunteered before. I'm sure the kinds of people who volunteered would love being treated like heroes and given semi-official status.

Metropass Discount Plan... why not?

I'm always bewildered every month at Yonge and Bloor station when I see throngs of people lining up to buy the Metropass.

Now, I used to think the Metropass was totally unnecessary if you only use the TTC to go to work and back 5 days a week. 40 tickets a month at $21 is $84 a month - 16 bucks cheaper than the Metropass. I understand there's a convenience to having it (like skipping the collector booth lines or accessing collector-less stations where tickets won't work), but $16 seems a lot to pay for that.

That is, until I discovered the Metropass Discount Plan. If you make a commitment to buy the pass for 12 months, you'll get it at a guaranteed price of $91. This means it's only about $7 extra for the convenience of having the pass. To sweeten the deal, the federal government made transit passes tax-deductable, which has an estimated tax savings of about $130 a year if you buy the pass. 130 / 12 is about 10 bucks, which means it's now cheaper to buy the Metropass!

The other great thing is that each pass is mailed to you about a week before month end (the money is automatically deducted from your bank account at the start of the month). So it also means you never have to line up to buy a pass. It really boggles my mind why anybody bothers to wait in line to buy the expensive metropass. If you know you're going to be working at the same place for a year, which I assume most people are, and you know you buy a pass every month, why are you paying more to wait in line?

I think the lack of use of the Discount Plan is a question of bad marketing on the TTC's part. If people really understood the benefits, there's no way they'd wait in line every month. I'm very tempted to start a 'guerilla marketing' campaign at Yonge and Bloor next month, handing out flyers advertising the plan. Stay tuned.