Traveling through this city is a pain. Cyclist say there’s too many cars, TTC passengers say the same and drivers say there are too many of both, so the solution seems obvious. If we get more people to take transit we have less cars on the road, if we have less cars on the road then we have less traffic, less chance of a cyclist getting hit. If a street car is 5 times the length of an average SUV but can hold more than 25 times the amount of people, then why aren’t people taking them?
For some people public transit just isn’t an option. They travel from outside the TTC network, they might need a vehicle for their job, they feel it’s too slow and, increasingly, people are scared to take it. Even though assaults and acts of drug use are on their way down since covid lockdown, perception of that is the opposite. People afraid to take the TTC and part of that is that there is no perception of security.
The TTC doesn’t have public figures of how many fares are inspected every day but what I can tell you from my own experience is that in the 15 years I’ve lived and worked in Toronto I’ve never been asked to prove I’ve paid. That’s literally thousands if trips and not once have I been asked. The odds of that are astronomical, impossible some might say, if the fare inspectors were doing their job and that’s tens of thousands of dollars every day not being ticketed from fare evaders.
I’ll fight for fair inspectors to have quotas, on inspections not on how many fines they give out, to prove they’re doing their job as well as an increase of inspectors to help curb the amount of people on the TTC that shouldn’t be there. Simply having an authority figure seen will be enough to stop some people; the homeless, the drug addicts and the violent from entering the subways, busses and streetcars to begin with.