Take the TTC....please!

Friday June 1, 11:22 p.m.

courtesy of magnetboy1
from Flickr

We got piled on with torrents of rain and the high only got up to 13 degrees C in the GTA.. But that wasn't the disaster. First off, for some bizarro reason, my Vic Park bus suddenly got ordered NOT to enter the bus bay area at the station, so there were a few minutes of uncertainty, very loudly voiced by the commuters on board, as the driver ignored all questions (probably because even he couldn't answer them) and made a roundabout turn to get us to the main entrance. Then, when we got to the subway platform, the first subway completely bypassed us though it was in full operation. And by the time we did catch the next one, I saw TTC personnel and the cops having a discussion on the platform. I was wondering if that psychopath Luka Magnotta had ended up hiding out in the station somewhere.

And then of course, there was the flood. I got out of my training session at about 3:30 and dove into St. Patrick Station to hear the announcement that an entire swath of line ranging from Bloor to Osgoode Stations was now cut off due to a major flood down at Union Station. Unfortunately, some of the flood included raw sewage so the station ended up masquerading as the world's largest toilet. So there were tons of commuters waiting to go up north, although I was lucky to have walked further down the platform where there were not as many folks hogging the platform. Then I took the Bloor Line over two stations and got on the Yonge Line which was now turning back up from that station. The rest of the commute was pretty sweet. As I overheard one lady say back at St. Patrick at 3:30, "It's really bad now. Can you imagine what it will be like at 5 p.m.?"

And sure enough, when I turned on CP24 when I got home, I just saw one heck of a lineup on Bloor & Yonge waiting for shuttle buses. It was a major mess for rush hour.

But my title there is perhaps a tad harsh on the TTC. After all, last Thursday's kerfuffle was due to a suicidal student, and today's was a force of nature. If anything, current and past administrations at City Hall are really to blame for today's commuting horror. Years of deteriorating infrastructure downtown finally showed what can happen if not taken care of.

However, I now have to ask myself, considering that I will be teaching everyday next week, what the odds are of getting into another TTC tumult.