New TTC washrooms may have riders feeling more tolerant about other problems

The TTC may be reaping an unexpected windfall from its washroom renovation campaign.

TTC problems have long been bread and butter for The Fixer, with no end of beefs about its service. The complaints provided us with good material for columns and reflected a deep dissatisfaction among its riders.

A lot of them focused on problems at its 59 stations – litter, broken doors and escalators, water leaks and overall griminess – but the washrooms often provoked the most vivid complaints.

And with good reason. Most were decades old and dank, stinking pits that nobody used without a shiver of dread when crossing the threshold.

The TTC finally got off the pot this year and did something about it; a top-to-bottom renovation of privies in the 10 stations that have them, and a new housekeeping regimen that calls for more frequent cleaning.

The washroom re-do coincided with the hiring of the TTC’s first chief customer service officer, Chris Upfold, and improvements that include ongoing renovations at stations and fast cleanups of subway cars during rush hour.

We’ve fielded far fewer complaints about the TTC in general over the last six months, and believe it may have something to do with the shiny new washrooms.

When riders have to do their business in a can that is filthy and stinks, it quite likely colours their perception of the service in general and magnifies all other problems.

If those same washrooms are transformed into facilities that people don’t mind using, chances are they’ll depart them in a more genial frame of mind and better tolerate the shortcomings.

The combination of cleaner subway cars and new washrooms may be the two most important steps the TTC has taken to improve its relationship with riders, and a plausible explanation for the drop in complaints to us.

Call it the Clean Washroom Dividend.

 

Online speed trap survey missed the biggest fishing hole of all - Toronto

You’ll get no argument from The Fixer on the results of online voting that found Ontario is the worst place for speed traps in North America.

The only surprising thing is that Toronto isn’t at the top of the list.

A story in The Star says the U.S.-based National Motorists Association has a website that allows drivers to post locations and descriptions of speed traps. States, provinces and cities were then ranked by the number of people who clicked in agreement with user-posted hot spots for speed traps.

Mississauga, Windsor and Hamilton finished in the top five of cities larger than 50,000, but Toronto was not in it, an egregious error, in our opinion.

We’ve had several notes lately from readers complaining of police trolling for speeders in spots where they land a fish with every cast, usually driving just a bit higher than 10 k/ph over the speed limit, just fast enough to lay a charge.

“Why cop is sitting there and give innocent people a speeding ticket?” asked Mike Liz. “This area has all immigrants, mostly hardworking poor people. It is not fair due to their insurance going up.”

Previous stories in The Star and other local media have said Toronto has more speed traps than anywhere else on Earth, and we have a bulging file of tickets to prove it.

For 14 years before The Star gave us a company car to do Fixer business, we drove used BMWs with five-speed stick shifts. They were zippy cars and we had a much heavier foot back then, but we only got a couple tickets in all that time.

In 2006, about two years after we started driving a sedate Chev Malibu, our troubles began. In a 30-month period, we were busted six times by cops fishing with a radar gun, and charged five times with doing 10 k/ph over the limit. Only one of them was a two-point demerit ticket.

“I’ll do you a favour and write it down from 65 to 60,” in a 50 k/ph zone, the cop would say.

Gee, thanks.

One ticket came from a cop who standing in the centre median of Lake Shore Blvd., just east of Coxwell Ave., where the speed limit drops from 60 to 50 k/ph, with a radar gun at midnight.

She ran into the darkened road as we crossed Coxwell, with not so much as another car in sight, gesturing frantically. We pulled over.

“Do you know why I stopped you?” she yelled, out of breath.

“Uh, for doing 60 in a 50?”

“No, for doing 65 in 50,” she thundered, as though we were guilty of terrorism.

Another time, we left a poker club at 2.30 a.m. and saw a cop with a radar gun hiding behind a utility pole at the bottom of a hill on Dufferin St., south of Finch Ave, waiting on an empty road for a hapless driver going just a bit more than 10 k/ph over the limit.

Didn’t he have anything better to do, or was it an exercise in generating revenue and meeting a quota, at a time when drivers might be inclined to go a bit quicker because there was hardly any traffic?

The insurance cost of our tickets was ruinous. One quote for a 10-year-old Plymouth on our household insurance was $14,000.

It is clear to us and many other drivers that Toronto police really ramped up the radar enforcement about half a dozen years ago, and are still at it, as a way of generating ticket revenue for the city.

By clocking drivers for a $60 speeding ticket, they are handing insurers a gift in the form of huge increases in premiums, even though so many tickets are written down to 10 k/ph over the limit.

We’d rather pay more property tax than be fleeced by insurers over a ticket that was written not to as a matter of public safety, but to generate revenue.

              

  

 

      

 

        

 

                                                                                                      

The proof is in the trees that bag tax works

Anyone who thinks the five cent tax on shopping bags wasn’t worth the money need only look at the trees beside Dufferin Mall for evidence of its value.

As of July 1, the nickel per shopping bag fee was killed by city council at the urging of Mayor Rob Ford, who got more than he bargained for when it also passed a bylaw prohibiting plastic shopping bags as of 2013.

But retailers are still charging a nickel for a bag, insisting they’re doing it for the environment, when we all know it’s a nose stretching lie, driven by parsimony.

Before the bag tax kicked in, we wrote a Fixer column about a sickening amount of shopping bags that were caught in the branches of a line of trees next to the Dufferin Mall, on Dufferin St., south of Bloor St.

So many bags were blown by the wind into the trees from the mall’s elevated parking deck that they fluttered like leaves in the bare branches, and added up to an excellent reason for measures to cut down on their use.

We walked along the retaining wall between the top level of the parking deck and the trees while at the mall Tuesday and were delighted to see only a few bags caught in the branches, a dramatic improvement from a couple years earlier.

While shredded bags also fluttered from trees in many other places prior to the tax, we’ve noticed a lot fewer of them lately, which squares with the large overall reduction in the number of bags shoppers are using since the tax kicked in.

While most of us resent having to pay for them, when we know the money is offsetting retailers’ costs to provide bags, there is no arguing that it is has had the desired effect of keeping them out of trees and landfills.

The 2013 bag ban imposed by city council will likely be far more irritating to many people than the nickel tax, but is likely to be an even better measure to keep them out of the wrong places, and that can’t be a bad thing.

 

When parking signs are hard to understand, the city rakes it in

Is it too much to ask that parking restriction signs be easy to understand, or does the city have a vested interest in making them confusing?

It has us wondering, after readers provided us with examples of parking signs that are hard to figure out, following our Aug. 7 column on contradictory signs that resulted in many improperly issued tickets.

On Aug. 21 we reported on signs on Carlaw Ave. that a reader who wanted to park on a Saturday night found confusing. He ended up with a parking ticket and sent us a photo of the signs, asking us for our opinion on whether the signs indicated Saturday night parking was prohibited.

We examined his photo and found it easy enough to conclude that parking was indeed prohibited on Saturday nights, but we knew ahead of time to look for the restriction, since he’d already told us about his ticket.

Drivers who looked at the signs after dark, perhaps while distracted and in a hurry, might not interpret it the same way and end up paying the price.

Perhaps we were too kind in our interpretation, but a lot of readers weren’t. Of the 79 comments from readers posted to our online column, many said we were an idiot for not seeing what was so obvious to them.

“Learn to read,” said David Sullivan. “It’s pretty obvious what it means. Literacy is obviously not a requirement to be a Star journalist.”

Denis Toronto said it was a “stupid article. The signs are pretty clear,” while another reader said “Duh! Why is this a story?”

The geniuses who quickly spotted the restrictions began the exercise the same way we did when we examined the reader’s photo: Knowing that a ticket was issued on the basis of something on one of the signs.

But it might not be so easy if they were looking up at the sign after dark, while distracted and 10 minutes late for a meeting, trying to figure it out.

The point is that the city could and should put a lot more effort into making parking signs that are simple and easy to understand. Not everyone is blessed with the intelligence of the readers who weighed in our lack of same.

We suggested alterations to the signs to the city official we dealt with, but he replied that it would be too much information.

That doesn’t seem to have been a consideration when the signs were created.

The final word goes to Ivan Nano, who believes many parking signs are intended to be confusing, an opinion shared by a lot of readers: “Why would they change it? At $40 per ticket, the city has no incentive to change it. Plus, has a government ever admitted it is wrong? This is the parking equivalent of a speed trap.”