Wednesday, February 22, 2017

The terrible, no-good transit day

Transit really let me down yesterday, coming and going.  I didn't see the northbound bus, but then I was able to hustle across the street and catch the southbound bus.  This one was going all the way to Union Station.  (They've recently reintroduced the 72C which just runs down Commissioners, so it is only every third bus that goes to Union Station!)  Anyway, things were quite crowded, but it finally started to open up around Queen St., and I think I got a seat one block south of Queen.  Then after that, we just crawled and crawled and crawled.  It turned out that the traffic light at Carlaw and Lake Shore Blvd. was completely out of commission.  You really can't have traffic treating a 6 lane road crossed by a 4 lane road as a 4 way stop, but that's what was happening.  I think it took 15 minutes to get through the intersection.  I have no idea how long it was like that, but I am quite disappointed that they couldn't send a police officer to direct traffic, since that was a huge mess.  I just barely made my meeting in the morning, though I had left in plenty of time.

Going home there were no major issues until we got to Broadview.  At that point, an announcement came on that they were completely bypassing Pape due to a fire investigation or something.  No real options given.  I had to decide whether to get out at Chester and walk the whole way or go past Pape to Donlands and hope that the Jones bus turned up before too long.  (It runs far less often than the Pape bus.)  I ultimately decided to get out at Chester and walk, but I wasn't happy about it.  (I got even grumpier when I checked on the TTC Twitter feed and they didn't even bother to mention it, so I guess had I come through 10 minutes sooner or later, the emergency would have blown over.  Call me crazy, but anytime they disrupt service to the extent of completely skipping a subway stop, it merits being mentioned in their Twitter service alerts.)

This morning I just missed the northbound bus and crossed over the bridge to catch the streetcar.  It was so crowded, and due to the way I was squeezed in (and the fact that the person I was standing over was pushing into my space) I couldn't even read my book.  I was not happy.  Almost no one got off the streetcar until Yonge, and I was only going a single stop past that.  On the other hand, I have to admit that it ran fairly well, and I was actually early for my meeting.  But it was an uncomfortable ride and I'm a few pages off my mark for the day (and ultimately I stayed up late trying to get caught up and finally finished On Tangled Paths).

At least going home today was fine.  (It does help that I usually work a bit late.)  I noticed that they just opened up quite a few doors into Union Station (construction is finally over in some parts of the station) and that should help a fair bit with pedestrian flow.  So 1 trip out of the last 4 was pretty good.  Certainly, not a batting average to write home about...  Well, only another couple of weeks and I think I'll see about riding my bike more (and becoming another transit rider lost to other modes).

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