I was walking east on Bloor Street not too long ago expecting to come all the way over to Broadview. As I came to Sherbourne Street, what do I see? Open doors on the station and the sound of a train rushing through.
I walked downstairs, swiped my pass and then went down to the eastbound platform. After a short wait, along came a train and I rode over to my home station, Broadview. Upstairs, I found a King and Dundas car waiting to leave and a few buses roaming the streets. It felt very much like the start of service in the morning.
It’s good to see the system back up again and “showing the flag” before tomorrow’s commute.
As I’ve said before, I am deeply disappointed in the behaviour of Local 113′s leadership (assuming anyone can even figure out who that is), and reports that they have a shopping list of added items for arbitration shows just how badly things were out of whack with the original “agreement”.
I am going to close off comments on the previous, strike-related thread just to keep that from growing completely out of control. Please leave any new comments here.
What I would cringe at with a private operator in charge of the TTC is not only the calibre of the staff but the upkeep of the equipment.
Maybe now a mechanic looks at a bus on a hoist and says to himself – “that bulkhead should really be replaced now, it looks like it only has couple of more months before it may fail.” The work likely would get done. In a private outfit he may tell his supervisor who says, “just let it go, we’ll worry about it later.”
Of course the latter would almost always be a result of money talking. Multiply this effect across a system like the TTC, with not only vehicles but tunnels, substations, etc. and you are bound to see more preventable failures occur.
At times I feel annoyed by the amount of waste seen in government agencies, whether it’s the TTC or Public Works or Hydro One but at the end of the day that “slack” in the system may be necessary just to maintain a good level of safety and service. Based on the companies I have worked for I have little faith in management to do the right thing when it comes to looking after assets and building maintenance, at least until the right thing is the only choice left.
And you don’t have to look far to find a frustrated small business owner who has several teenagers or slightly older people on his staff and who is frustrated to no end by lack of commitment of these employees. People today simply don’t bother showing up if they aren’t in the mood for just $10/hour. Just because collective bargaining sees workers receive a lot more than they may without a union doesn’t mean those people should be faulted. The credit schemes we have may almost be stretched to the limit. How many here would expect to have to work 60 hours or more a week in the next generation just to make minimum payments on a mortgage? I bet it’s a real possibility.
re: absenteeism
Rob says:
“People today simply don’t bother showing up if they aren’t in the mood for just $10/hour.”
It seems that’s true with TTC workers at more that 2.5 time that – so this is not a wage issue.
Private companies have more incentive in many cases to keep equipment safe and operational – because there are real financial consequences if they are not. (Did anyone in the TTC lose money or their job over the Russell Hill crash?)
Steve: The people who should have lost their jobs were the senior management and politicians who kept cutting the maintenance budget year by year while happily reporting to the Commission that “the money in this budget is sufficient to keep the system in good order” or words to that effect.
The political imperative at the City and at Queen’s Park was to cut costs, and if that meant that systems were allowed to deteriorate, that’s the risk they took. The problem with situations like this is that at the operational level, all sorts of people make judgement calls in response to budget cuts.
The accident came about through a combination of poor maintenance (the malfunctioning trip stop arm and related problems), poor signal design (inability to tell the difference between a timing signal that would clear and one that would not), and an operational environment where the style was to run as close to red lights as possible. Of these, two speak to lax procedures (maintenance and training) and one to poor design. The most important part of this, the physical system, depended on maintenance to make up for shortcomings in other areas, and what should have been multiple possible points of failure all hinged on a single subsystem.