Photo: A Light at the End of the Tunnel

In today's photograph, it becomes strikingly evident that I do not know how to tell time, as I believed I had last posted something on Friday. Also, it demonstrates the relatively arrow-straight construction used on parts of the Bloor-Danforth subway line in Toronto. From the eastbound platform at Chester Station, when looking east you can see the lights of another station in the distance; with a 16x optical zoom lens, these lights resolve into the platform of Pape Station, the next stop along the line. Not close enough resolution to recognize anything other than lights and blobs, really, but even so--throughout much of the city, geology and prior construction means that the tunnel curves this way and that, bumps up, digs down. In this case, it's a bit strange to be able to see where you're going before you've even left for it yet.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Planning and the Scarborough Subway

The idea of an extended Scarborough subway is sort of like the phoenix: it never dies. Alternatively, it's a hydra; every time the debate seems to settle and an agreement appears to be reached, it comes back and starts biting just when you've started to relax. First it was Hizzoner Rob Ford's refrain of subways subways subways during the last mayoral election and the first year or so of his term, when a build-out of the Sheppard line to Scarborough Centre was decreed to be Toronto's #1 transit priority. Last year saw the OneCity proposal by TTC chair Karen Stintz and Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaker, which would have extended the Bloor-Danforth line east and north from its Kennedy terminus to a link-up with the planned Sheppard East LRT--which, I will remind you, was originally planned to have been completed last year--only for the plan to collapse in a council vote less than a month after being introduced.

Yet it seems that you can't keep a thing like the Scarborough subway down. It's come back in the news again in the past week or two, with Stintz pushing what appears to be pretty much the same thing she pushed with OneCity. The main point of contention is, as always, money: the planned replacement of the Scarborough RT with an LRT line already has committed funding from the province, while a subway extension has... maps with longer green lines on them.

I'm not really interested in going over the pros and cons of a Scarborough subway extension here. I've probably done so at some point in the past, and there are plenty of other places you can go for that kind of analysis. What I'm more concerned about is what got us into this situation in the first place--the planning in Scarborough, or rather, the lack of such. From my new digs in southern East York, I can see Scarborough from my balcony. When I go for a walk, it's still clearly evident where the old Bloor streetcar stopped running, even fifty years after it was replaced by the subway.

Pictured: Scarborough. Not pictured: allowances for the installation of rapid transit.

Until the postwar suburbanization boom, Scarborough was essentially farmland with isolated pockets of development here and there; I like to think that it resembled eastern Lulu Island or the undeveloped parts of Surrey's Agricultural Land Reserve today. With no constraints save those imposed politically, Scarborough's reeves and mayors oversaw the plowing under and paving over of more than a hundred square kilometers of land with new developments designed and built in accordance with the prevailing wisdom of the time: namely, that the car was king and everyone would be driving everywhere. What there wasn't any planning for--what there wasn't even any thought spared for, apparently--was how to integrate transit with the city once it reached the size to warrant it.

Even in the wake of the general streetcar abandonment of the 1950s and the rush to cars across much of the West, it's not as if cities didn't plan for the future. In Calgary, separated rights-of-way were reserved for transit usage decades before the city's C-Train system started rolling. In Los Angeles, Pacific Electric's rights-of-way were maintained even after the streetcars were removed, and today the modern Expo Line runs along one of them. In Coquitlam, where the in-progress Evergreen Line extension will finally bring SkyTrain service, development has been oriented around the expectation of rapid transit service since the 1990s. In Scarborough... in Scarborough, looking on Google Maps, the only empty corridors I can find are two hydro corridors, one paralleling McNicoll Avenue and another reaching from Victoria Park to Meadowvale.

To put it bluntly, Scarborough was not built for transit. Scarborough was built for the car, and we're now in the position of trying to find some way to haphazardly cram it in there. It's not an easy task; just as you can't unring a bell, you can't unbuild a city. We're stuck with the built forms bequested to us by past generations. It's up to us to find a way for them to keep working, despite it all.

What Happens At Track Level...

One of the things that was new to me when I returned to Toronto was the way announcements are now done in the subway. When I left, it would always be someone from Transit Control coming over the microphone, more often than not sounding like one of Charlie Brown's teachers--and that was on the rare occasion when I was in the position to hear one of their announcements, as it's only since I came back that I've been relying on the subway for day-to-day travel.

If you use the subway even occasionally, though, you'll run into one eventually. In a city where the passenger assistance alarm is pressed at least three times a day, given enough days the odds are unity.

"ATTENTION SUBWAY CUSTOMERS ON THE YONGE-UNIVERSITY-SPADINA LINE... WE ARE CURRENTLY EXPERIENCING A DELAY BOTH WAYS AT UNION STATION DUE TO A PERSONAL INJURY AT TRACK LEVEL..."

It's not something that anyone likes to hear, is it? Plenty of us leave their schedules down to the wire as it is, and a few minutes here or there can break them. That emotionless, monotone synthetic voice comes over the speakers and your heart sinks--what's it going to be this time? Waiting in the tunnel for five minutes? Ten minutes? Half an hour? At least they even deigned to announce the delay at all; who hasn't been stuck on a train that's come to a stop in the tunnel, or just been loitering at the platform for five minutes with its doors open, with nary a word of explanation?

The problem is when people feed that sense of being inconvenienced too much. When it makes people lose perspective.

A few months ago, I was riding in to work as normal, aboard one of the sleek new Toronto Rocket trains. When it pulled into the Union platform, there was another train already there on the other side. Hardly unusual--what was unusual was that when my train stopped, it was more like it had been put on pause. None of the doors opened, and for a minute or so us passengers could only goggle out at the platform, wondering what the hold-up was this time. Eventually, a door opened: the one at the very front of the train, up where the operator sits. We started filing toward it, pushed on by a request to leave the train, as it had been taken out of service.

It was the same Union platform that I stepped onto then that it's been before and since, but the atmosphere was vastly different from anything I'd experienced. People were streaming up the stairways and escalators, but no one was coming down. Uniformed police officers were there, urging people to clear the area. There, crouched against one of the walls, was a woman in tears: a woman wearing the sort of frozen grimace that tells you everything you need to know.

Suicide is more common on the Toronto subway than we'd like to think. You won't see them reported on in the news, if only to keep from encouraging any potentials who might be wavering... but it happens, nonetheless. Those announcements of "a personal injury at track level" don't mean that someone slipped on the yellow dots. It means someone made a 218-ton subway the instrument by which they would catch a ride away from the world.

When I next checked up Twitter, what did I see in #TTC? Message after message of complaints. Of grousing. Of bitching. People moaning that they would be delayed in getting where they were going. People fulminating against the TTC for lousing things up again. People gnawing and whining that the wire had snapped.

Lost in it all, of course, was this simple fact: a person had died. Presumably, at least; I can only draw inferences about what I saw. But who cares about that? No, the truly important factor is how the fact that a person is dead impacts one's timetable. Don't consider, say, the operator of the subway--the person in control of those two hundred tons of steel, who got to watch while a person who'd reached the end dropped in front of the train, too close and too quick to do anything but let physics solve that harsh equation. Don't consider the people around--say, the commuter who watched someone step off the platform right next to them. Don't consider the people that the person left behind.

Because it's only your schedule that's really important. What's one life, more or less, if it means you're late to work today? Empathy is totally for suckers.

A World-Class Hole in the Ground

The recent ups and downs of Toronto politics put me in the mind of an adventure serial from the early 20th century, like Flash Gordon and its precursors; a series of cliffhanger episodes, each one leaving the hero in some kind of dire peril, each time trying to top what happened last time and each time leaving the audience asking how the hero's going to get out of this one. In this particular political adventure, the hero is the city of Toronto and Rob Ford is the peril that keeps outdoing itself when you think things can't get any more ridiculous than they already have. First hizzoner acts like he thinks he's an absolute ruler, calling the will of Council irrelevant; then he gets his snivelling bootlickers on the TTC board to fire chief general manager Gary Webster without cause for having the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to not be a cowardly yes-man and meekly agree with what the mayor wants to do.

Yesterday, Ford took it directly to the people with an article in the Globe and Mail, in which he (or, more likely, someone in his office - I never got the impression that Ford was much of a lit'rary man) spends a few hundred words trying to conjure up a dream world where subways clatter hither and yon. It's something I never considered the possibility of encountering; this is literal subway propaganda.

Even if he didn't actually string these words together, Ford's fingerprint is all over it - the article is suffused with the casual assumptions of someone for whom public transit is not at all a part of their daily life. He leads off bemoaning that the average Toronto commute is twenty-four minutes longer than that in Los Angeles, but somehow I get the impression that that's focusing on vehicular commutes; I doubt it takes into account riders reliant on the 36 Finch West bus, the people who would have been beneficiaries of the Finch West LRT but are again caught in a storm of uncertainty now that Giorgio Mammoliti's insane, delusional Finch subway concept wasn't immediately forgotten. Also very Ford-like is the casual dismissal of the TTC before construction began on the Yonge subway in the 1940s, as if everything that had happened before then was irrelevant. Considering that the TTC and the patchwork of privately-run transit companies it replaced were streetcar operators until then, it's not much of a surprise that Ford wouldn't want to even risk acknowledging a history of surface-running transit.

What do you think you're doing, subway? The surface is for cars! Get back underground!

"The TTC must become a sustainable, world-class transit system... I passionately believe a world-class city builds world-class rapid transit," Ford says, because obviously cities like San Francisco, Vienna, Brussels, Frankfurt, Rome, London, and Los Angeles are on the same level as Indianapolis. "A hundred years from now, Toronto will have more subway lines providing reliable high-speed transportation for millions more people. The only real question is whether we will start building those subways now, or wait another 20 years and build them at 10 times the cost."

First off, Rob Ford is pretty much the last person who I feel is qualified to be expounding on the transportation patterns of the twenty-second century; we can make even fewer hard plans for it than the leadership of 1912 could plan for today, and would the leadership of 1912 have anticipated suburbanization, telecommuting, the ubiquitousness of the automobile, or the new cities that emerged in Scarborough and North York - places which, back in the early twentieth century, were as rural as Garafraxa. Ford's actions as mayor have demonstrated that he doesn't much care about the potential problems of the next decade, let alone the next century.

Nor is he much qualified to talk about cost, either. He claims that a "modest parking levy" could bring in $90 million or more per year, to be used as seed money for a public-private partnership to build the Sheppard subway extension. Now, granted, PPPs aren't unheard of in public transit - Vancouver's Canada Line was built that way, but there is a key difference in the situation. The Canada Line connects downtown Vancouver to Western Canada's busiest airport and a city of 200,000 people; Ford's dream Sheppard Line would connect a mall to North York's Potemkin downtown, about as wide as a fingernail.

This is another part where propaganda comes in, since he doesn't actually bother to justify this; he just states it as a given. That right there is the crux of the problem, and the most likely reason why he can find anyone to use as examples in his constant "people want subways" claims - he treats these projects of his as if the only barriers are political. When people at Eglinton Square tell him they'd rather have a subway than LRT to Scarborough, they probably assume that they're equally valid choices, that Ford would not be putting the question forward if the resources to build the subway didn't exist. But they don't; last year, the TTC's estimate for subway construction cost was $351 million per kilometer. Ford's "modest parking levy" would therefore be able to build maybe four hundred meters of subway per year - not including stations, of course. Those are extra.

Rob Ford may cloak himself in the garb of progress, constantly repeat the mantras of sustainability and a "world-class" Toronto - whatever the hell that means - but his actions have demonstrated that those aren't his interests. His is a mayoralty of fiat and pique, in which ideology is the core consideration. Ford has amply demonstrated over the last year that he's incapable of disassociating his own view with what's good for the city; with Ford, it's his way or the highway, and woe betide any light rail train that gets in his way.

Tunnel Visions: Bay Area Rapid Transit

Every once in a while, Acts of Minor Treason hops out of New Westminster, lands in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and looks at different ways of getting around on two rails, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.


Generally speaking, public transit systems operate in the background of life. Aside from a few freaks and weirdos like me, people tend not to take much note of them beyond knowing how to use them to get from point to point. In much the same way as the electrical infrastructure or the water supply system, they tend to be an invisible but necessary component of the modern city, remarked upon at length only when there's a perceived problem. It can be argued that a well-run transit system is one that stays out of the headlines.

There's that, and then there's BART (pronounced "bart"). That's Bay Area Rapid Transit, the regional rapid transit system serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Unlike other transit systems, which make big news when trains get derailed or budgets get cut, in the recent past BART has had the dubious privilege of wide-ranging media coverage as a result of shootings by its police force and attacks against its website and the shutdown of cell phone coverage to frustrate protests. It stands apart from the crowd.

My experience with the system wasn't enough for me to really understand how well the system's run, since it's not nearly as friendly to hop-on, hop-off travel as most city transit systems - I had to plan out my BART journeys to a degree that I've never experienced before while riding rapid transit. Still, it was enough to demonstrate the degree to which BART stands apart from the other systems you'll find across North America. Created to replace the privately-run Key System, an interurban streetcar system that served the cities of the East Bay into the 1940s and rattled across the Bay Bridge into the 1950s, today's BART almost seems like a product of a 1970s view of the future.

System

A ten-car train departs Rockridge Station, running in the center median of California State Route 24.

While BART calls itself a rapid transit network, it's really a combination of urban rapid transit and suburban commuter rail. This sort of setup is fairly common in central Europe, known in German as an S-Bahn but relatively rare outside that area. It can be argued to not even be anchored on San Francisco itself; its headquarters are in Oakland, and one of its lines serves the East Bay exclusively. It also provides the only rapid transit access to and from San Francisco International Airport, through a station connected directly to the International Terminal.

Five lines presently make up the BART system. Rather than named after a specific color or route, they're identified by their respective termini in a manner slightly reminiscent of GO Transit's convention. The Pittsburg/Bay Point-SFO/Millbrae line, for example, runs between Pittsburg/Bay Point in the north west and San Francisco International Airport and Millbrae in the south, and while it's colored yellow on maps you won't hear an official source refer to it as the "Yellow Line." With the notable exception of Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge - which was included in initial network plans, only to arouse popular opposition and fear that service would spur sprawl development - BART service extends across most of the Bay Area, and plans are in place for the lines that currently terminate at Fremont to be extended south to San Jose and Silicon Valley... but this isn't planned to happen until 2025, so don't hold your breath.

Most of the BART system seems to consist of at-grade trackage, either in its own right-of-way or in highway medians, though I did observe some elevated portions around Colma and in western Oakland. The main exception is in San Francisco itself, where it runs almost entirely underground; there are additional underground segment such as the Berkeley Hills Tunnel on the Pittsburg/Bay Point-SFO/Millbrae line, which I did not travel through as it is known to penetrate the Hayward Fault and I was unwilling to tempt fate, considering there's apparently slight-but-nonzero chance that a train inside the tunnel during a sufficiently powerful earthquake could be torn apart. Besides, I was busy in San Francisco anyway.

The network's key underground segment, though, isn't under that much ground at all. The Transbay Tube, which is nearly six kilometers long and takes trains four and a half minutes to travel through¹, is an immersed tube on the floor of San Francisco Bay that connects downtown San Francisco to Oakland. As it carries four out of five BART lines, the Transbay Tube is the system's biggest bottleneck - my departure from San Francisco coincided with weekend track maintenance in the Tube, which shut down one set of tracks entirely and resulted in significant delays and complicated train redirections. It's sufficiently different from the remainder of BART's subway network that there's a section devoted just to it on the emergency evacuation instruction posters inside the trains.

BART is also unique in that it's almost exclusively a rail operator - the only exception is AirBART, a shuttlebus service that connects to Oakland International Airport. Aside from that, depending on where your destination is you may end up transferring from BART onto San Francico's Muni, AC Transit in the East Bay, Golden Gate Transit for journeys into Marin, and so on. Transfers to the Muni Metro are easy within downtown San Francisco, as the two agencies share the four northernmost stations of the Market Street Subway.

Two partially-used BART tickets... there's $0.70 US I'll never see again.

Where BART gets difficult, and presents ample opportunities to trip up the unwary, is in its fares. Unlike every other transit system I've ever used, there are no time-based passes available; you can't get an unlimited-use weekly, monthly, or even day pass. The closest it comes for the general public is the BART Blue High Value Ticket, which gives a 6.25% discount on the ticket price - as they're only available in $45 and $60 denominations, though, they're clearly geared toward the regular commuter riders.

BART fare media is available in two forms - the new Clipper smartcard, similar to the Los Angeles TAP card or the Presto card in the Greater Toronto Area, which is accepted by multiple Bay Area transit agencies - and physical tickets, and for visitors to the Bay Area the latter is what you're going to be dealing with. Though some stations have collectors on staff, generally you're going to be getting your ticket from a ticket vending machine. They're fairly straightforward, once you get the hang of them - you just specify the value of ticket you want, insert your payment, and it will print you a fresh ticket with a magnetic strip and the stored value printed on. As you travel through the system, you feed your ticket into the faregate readers at the departure and arrival stations and its stored value is adjusted accordingly. Once it hits zero, the faregate will open but the machine won't return your ticket, and you'll just have to get another one. The TVMs all have fare calculation tables attached so you can tell exactly how much it'll cost go anywhere from where you are. Planning out routes in advance with the fare calculator means you don't have any partially-loaded tickets left over, but it likewise restricts your freedom to tool around the system.

All BART ticket vending machines accept cash, and specialized machines take debit or credit and debit cards as well - there'll usually be at least a couple at every station, but unless a sign has been affixed (which isn't guaranteed) there's no way to tell which is which from a distance, like if you're lined up waiting to use it. What the machines don't tell you is that there are hard-coded restrictions for using credit cards. Any given credit card can only be used to purchase BART tickets twice in a twenty-four hour period; if you attempt to run it a third time, the machine will flash the message "BART Limits Exceeded," spit out a receipt for the cancelled transaction, and return to the main menu with no further explanation. This happened to me at Colma Station, which fortunately was one of the stations that had a collector on duty who was able to explain just what the hell the deal was. According to her, the restriction was put in place because BART has, in the past, experienced issues with people using stolen credit cards to buy tickets. So I can understand the policy; I just wish there had been some warning about it.²

This is another good reason to either plan out your journey ahead of time or pay cash.

Stations

The main surface structure at Downtown Berkeley Station in Berkeley, California.

BART service began in 1972, and so its station conveniently sidestepped the whole "twentieth-century prison bathroom" aesthetic you'll find so easily from Toronto to San Francisco and New York to Chicago. Architectural styles vary from the concrete brutalism of Glen Park to the windows-and-waterfalls of San Francisco International Airport to 24th St. Mission, which reminded me of Vermont/Beverly on the Red Line subway in Los Angeles. There aren't many of them, either, which is indicative of its nature as a regional rapid transit system - as of this writing there are only forty-four stations for one hundred and sixty-seven kilometers of track.

Depending on where you are, BART stations vary substantially in terms of their function. While the San Francisco stations are indistinguishable from urban subways, the suburban stations strongly cater to the commuter population - one such example is Colma Station, where the actual "station" is dwarfed by the attached parking garage. In the four shared Market Street Subway stations, the BART platforms are installed below the Muni Metro platforms, giving BART commuters temporary glimpses of the San Francisco trains rumbling in and out.

While public art isn't ubiquitous in the system, it does have a presence, such as a mural at MacArthur of what resembled a "bubbly peacock."³ Aside from the shared Market Street Subway stations, BART stations don't tend to follow the same design aside from a preference toward center platforms. They may look like they're poorly lit when you're looking out of a train's windows, but this isn't actually the case - the windows just tend to be foggy. On the whole, from the crennelated concrete walls at Balboa Park to high-ceilinged, almost hangar-like ambience at Ashby, the varying station designs lend some welcome aesthetics to the system.

They're not necessarily designed well, though. At Balboa Park, where the Muni Metro's J Church and K Ingleside lines loop for journeys back to downtown San Francisco, it seems as if BART specifically designed the station to ignore the Muni presence. Unlike in the shared Market Street Subway stations there's no signage indicating where to transfer to Muni trains, even though the loop is immediately adjacent to the station building.

As BART tends to run exceedingly long trains, with ten-car consists fairly common even in off-peak hours, the stations are accordingly large. This can become a problem for people who aren't familiar with the BART system, as while there are platform-level system maps, schedules, and information, there are only a few on any given platform; thus, you might find it only to realize the train that just left was the one you should have boarded, and it'll be fifteen minutes until the next one shows up. Plus, that assumes the map will be accurate when you find it - I found one at Embarcadero Station that, rather having been replaced with an updated version, just had stickers affixed noting that the 820 night bus line had been eliminated as of December 28, 2008.

There are also a surprising number of payphones on the platforms. I suppose they represent a vulnerable underbelly in the event that BART again suspends cell phone service within its stations.

Equipment

An aerodynamic A2 car brings up the rear of a train at Colma Station.

If I had to describe BART cars in one word? Angle-y. If they weren't so spacious, they'd put me in the mind of London Underground 1973 Stock trains. As it is, they seem like they're wider than they are high due to their angled walls - I suppose it may be to make the trains feel more open and less like a traditional subway, which would be particularly important when you've got two thousand people crammed into a crush-loaded ten-car train. There's plenty of room for standing passengers, and most of the seats are arranged in pairs of two, with armrests - no benches like on the Mark I SkyTrains, but no single seats either. The windows enhance the feeling of openness in the trains - since there's no roof-line advertising strip, the windows are able to fill all the wall space from the centerline to the roof. Advertisements in general aren't too common on BART trains, limited to the front and back ends of the individual cars - the remainder of the wall space is taken up by windows, route maps, and emergency evacuation instruction posters.

The most striking aspect of BART's rolling stock is by no means universal, but in the world of rapid transit it stands apart - some of its cars have carpeted floors. While I understand this was fairly common back in the day, most rapid transit operators have switched to using floor surfaces that are easier to clean. It's not every day you'll encounter a BART car with carpeted floors; my only encounter came at the very beginning, on the train I boarded to head into San Francisco from the airport. Still, it set a tone that was a bit "higher-class" - like this isn't just some subway.

It certainly stands apart from Muni. Graffiti is specifically prohibited on BART, and while there was some in evidence here and there was far less than on Muni, where every last LRV seemed to have its windows vandalized. The seats were comfortable as well, but whenever I sat down I couldn't help but thinking about the studies that had been conducted a couple of months previously that had discovered a vast array of antiseptic-resistant bacteria and molds clinging to the fabric. Not that it kept me from sitting down, though - subway surfing is a difficult art to master, particularly when you're unfamiliar with the idiosyncracies of a new system with unfamiliar rolling stock. Considering that BART trains aren't automated - even though they could be, apparently - rides won't necessarily always be smooth.

Ease of Access and Ease of Use

These fare gates control access to the BART platforms at Montgomery Station.

So there I was in 24th St. Mission Station, waiting for a train that would take me to Ashby Station in Berkeley so I could check out a bookstore I heard about in the area. A Dublin/Pleasanton train arrives and I let it go, because that definitely doesn't go where I need to. A Pittsburg/Bay Point train shows up and I get on because that takes me where I need to go, right? It's not until the train departs MacArthur and I'm seeing surroundings I didn't see on my original trip into Berkeley that I realize I'm on the wrong train! That's no good. For me, it underscored the importance of knowing exactly where the various lines split off from each other. Either of the lines going to Richmond would have worked for me. Considering that I was carefully planning out my route so as to not leave any money left over, though, I don't know what would have happened if a BART Police officer had inspected my fare while I was waiting for a train to get me out of Rockridge.

Even when you're aware, though, it can be difficult to make sure you're on the right train. The best way is to look at the screens on the station platforms and listen to the highly mechanical synthesized voices that announce the destination of the next incoming train. Some drivers will announce what line you're riding during station stops, but then again some won't. Rollsigns are right out; BART trains have only a single rollsign, a small digital screen on the front car, and even if the train is going slow enough to read it's hard enough to read that there's really no point at all in it being there. Why they don't have window rollsigns on each individual car, as on the Chicago 'L' or the Los Angeles Metro Rail, I have no idea.

There are no automatic station announcements on BART trains. That job is left up to the operator, who might call out the next station but then again they might not. Whether it's because the speakers in your individual car are busted or because they just don't feel like it is up for debate. Still, it feels unnecessarily unfriendly, and just because they were able to get away with it in the 1980s doesn't mean that it should continue to be that way today. That's the sort of thing I expect from penny-ante operations like Barrie Transit; BART is one of the largest rapid transit providers in the United States.

Not everything is as obvious as it could be. Take the stations outside San Francisco: at Downtown Berkeley, I came across a couple of machines that said "Take Only One When Leaving Station" but were otherwise unmarked. What it gave me was a BART to Bus transfer, a timestamped slip that can be redeemed for a round-trip single zone ride on AC Transit or Santa Clara VTA buses. It was another of the small but constant reminders that BART was tightly focused toward the use of locals, rather than people who had no experience with the system. At least that's what it seemed like to me.

As a regional transit system, and one that's substantially geared toward commuters, headways on BART are rather larger than on other systems; while this doesn't matter much in San Francisco or Oakland, it can be something to reckon with when you're going to somewhere more outlying like San Francisco International Airport - SFO/Millbrae trains arrive only once every fifteen minutes outside of the height of weekday rush hours. Though the platform information screens do give updates on how long it'll be until the next trains arrive, sometimes the information seems more like a suggestion or a guess; I can't think of any other way that the arrival times for Daly City-bound trains could be updated from 20/40 minutes to 15/19 minutes over the course of five minutes.

Conclusion

A southbound train blurs its way out of Balboa Park Station.

Despite its hybrid urban-suburban nature, or perhaps because of it, BART is one of the most well-used rapid transit systems in the United States; in the first quarter of 2011 it boasted an average weekday ridership of 357,800, behind powerhouses like the Chicago 'L' and New York Subway but well ahead of the Los Angeles network and even the Muni Metro. If considered against commuter rail networks, BART beats them all - with 354,300 weekday riders, the Long Island Rail Road comes close but not close enough. Nevertheless, it underscores the degree to which public transit is still an underdog in the States; in that same quarter the SkyTrain claimed a ridership of 349,300, with Metro Vancouver's population of 2.1 million next to the more than three million people who live in San Francisco, Alameda County, and Contra Costa County.

At its heart, I feel like BART is a system that doesn't encourage exploration. I know that the reason cities and regions build public transit networks is for people to get to point A to point B, but that shouldn't be the be-all and end-all of their existence. I would have liked to be able to hop on and off BART from one side of the Bay to the other, getting a view that wasn't confined to just San Francisco, but a fare structure geared toward long-distance commuting suburbanites made that difficult at best.

I get the impression that there are plenty of difficulties on BART. One of the first things I saw on entering San Francisco International Airport Station were information sheets in English, Chinese, and Spanish detailing "Your Rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," which "requires that no person in the United States, on the grounds of race, color or national origin be excluded from, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." It was even more jarring than those announcements about how gambling is prohibited on the Chicago 'L' - I saw them and could only think "what the hell has gone on that they feel it necessary to have to state this front and center?"

Problems, no doubt.

¹ This is an approximate figure, timed off my wristwatch, that does not include full approaches; timing began when the train descended into the tunnel surrounded by shipping containers in the Port of Oakland, and ended on the train's arrival at Embarcadero Station.

² It is extremely possible that there were such warnings and I never noticed them, but if that's the case, I did not notice them for the entirety of my time in the Bay Area.

³ Quoting exactly from my notebook here.

Previous Tunnel Visions

• San Francisco's Muni Metro
  
• Phoenix's Metro Light Rail
  
• The Kenosha Electric Railway
  
• Vancouver's SkyTrain
  
• The Toronto Subway and RT
  
• The Los Angeles County Metro Rail
  
• The Chicago 'L'
  
• The Montreal Metro

Photo: There's No Gridlock on the Rails

What the impending Carmageddon in Los Angeles has really underscored to me is the necessity for major cities to seriously invest in their public transit infrastructures - and what it's demonstrated to me is that Los Angeles wasted a lot of time before it started getting around to that necessity. I know that all the cool cities were tearing up their streetcar networks in the years after the war, but subways were also cool in the 1950s. Hell, Cleveland of all places built a subway in the 1950s. I have to wonder if LA would be in this situation today if it had been building up a subway network over the last sixty years.

Still, at least it has one now... it's a start. In this photo from 2009, a few riders wait to board a train at Union Station.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

PDP #268: Highland, High Ceiling

One of the things I really liked about the Los Angeles subway system is how aesthetics was taken into account during design and construction; as a result, while Toronto's first subway stations tend to resemble neglected 1950s bathrooms, the stations along the Red Line and Purple Line have open, soaring designs that strikes me as a great deal more welcoming. That style's easily seen here, on the Hollywood/Highland station platform, where the roof reflects the tunnels below.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant any entity the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

PDP #262: Toronto City, New York

As TV Tropes says, the City With No Name is often Toronto. Just as frequently, though, Toronto is standing in for some more well known, but less conveniently filmable, city - in the last year alone it's been Detroit, St. Louis, and Geneva in Warehouse 13. Still, when the film crews come in, it's a fair guess that they're remaking a slice of New York City.

On Thursday evening, the crews got to work on the southwest entrance of King subway station, redressing it into the New York City Subway's Fulton Street Station as part of the background for Alphas, a crime thriller pilot for NBC. By Friday, when I took this photo, the transformation was complete. I have to admit, it looks authentic - but then it's been nearly ten years since I've seen a New York City Subway station with my own eyes. Perhaps to a New Yorker, this is obviously wrong.

I mean, disregarding the streetcar behind it.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant any entity the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

The Wikipedian Candidate

If the Toronto municipal election thus far has taught me anything, it's the degree to which people feel as if they're qualified to talk about anything under the sun for the simple reason that they're going to have their name on the ballot. There are most likely a boatload of municipal issues that I lack a deep understanding of - but for me, to talk and act as if I know them as thoroughly as an expert on the matter would be disingenuous at best.

This strain of political action is particularly visible in terms of transit. It's probably the single most important issue in this election, and everyone has their take on it. What gets me about this is that it all sounds like a bunch of posturing and the drawing of lines on maps. I may be the only car-free candidate for Mayor, and I'll be the first to admit that I only have a hobbyist's familiarity with the TTC system. What would surprise me is if the other candidates know as much about the system as they purport to.

Case in point: "Furious" George Smitherman released his new transit plan on Friday. He is - get this, because this will shock and awe you - promising new subways. The Sun's coverage was eminently predictable. I first heard about it via transit guru Steve Munro's careful, detailed, point-by-point criticism of it. Here's the meat of what he'd do as Mayor, if you're unfamiliar:

- Extend the Sheppard Line west from Sheppard-Yonge to Downsview.
- Replace the Scarborough RT with an extension of the Bloor-Danforth Line from Kennedy to Scarborough Centre.
- Extend the Bloor-Danforth Line from its western terminus at Kipling to Sherway Gardens, a stone's throw from the Toronto-Mississauga border.
- Extend the Eglinton LRT tunnel to Weston Road.
- Extend the Sheppard East LRT to U of T's Scarborough campus, in preparation for the 2015 Pan Am Games.

He also includes the Spadina subway extension, the Finch West LRT to Humber College, and the Waterfront LRT in his plan as well - though this is disingenuous at best, I think, since those projects are either already under construction or well on the way to being realized.

While on the bus to and from furthest Etobicoke today, I had plenty of time to reflect on this plan - and something hit me. It seemed disturbingly familiar. It didn't take long for me to realize why: his subway plans are taken directly from Wikipedia. Check the revision for the Bloor-Danforth article from May 21, and that of the Sheppard Line from May 13. The westward extension of the Sheppard line is a particularly common meme, it seems, in the Toronto subway community. Granted, it would make that line a lot more pleasant, and it would slightly increase the crosstown utility of the Sheppard Line, but to champion these things of all things suggests to me that Smitherman is looking for solutions that "make sense" or are potentially popular, regardless of whether or not they will be worthwhile additions to the transit network.

Smitherman's plan is particularly teeth-grinding to me because it makes no mention at all of the Downtown Relief Line. The fact of the matter is that the subway network is dealing with serious capacity issues, and I'm surprised it's not hemmorhaging riders because of the sardine-like experience that is the subway downtown at rush hour. To talk about extending the lines further into the outer city while excess capacity is needed now in the downtown core - to my mind, transit-oriented it ain't.

The Downtown Relief Line is, I believe, an absolutely necessary component of Toronto's transit network. While I have no problem with the idea of extending the Sheppard subway west, or taking Bloor-Danforth further out into Scarborough and Etobicoke, these should not be priority projects. The proper time to start building the DRL was 1985. If we need any subway, it is that subway.

Tunnel Visions: The Toronto Subway and RT

Every once in a while, Acts of Minor Treason hops out of Toronto, lands in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and looks at different ways of getting around on two rails, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.

Every once in a while, I also stay right where I am.

I began the Tunnel Visions series out of a desire to understand, and out of a recognition that true understanding is impossible without a knowledge of alternatives. So I've travelled to Montreal, to Chicago, and to Los Angeles, and will continue to do so - to Buffalo, to Vancouver, to Cleveland, to places even further afield as opportunities permit - ultimately so that I can have a better understanding of my own transit system. For more than twenty years I've been riding the rails in Toronto, and for much of my life they were the only ones I'd ever known. Still, nothing can be truly comprehended in isolation. To paraphrase Robert A. Heinlein: "A person who knows only his own transit system does not even know his own transit system."

On the Montreal Metro, the Chicago 'L', and the Los Angeles County Metro Rail, I had the advantage of foreignness, so that everything was completely new. When I take that same eye to what Frederik Pohl has called our "shiny streamliners," I'm distilling twenty years of experience with procedures and traditions that I had, until recently, taken for granted. This time I'm on my own turf, and the regrettable truth is that it's extremely difficult to see the flaws in something you're pressing your nose against. The Toronto subway system was my first subway system, and for better or worse it will always be the main subconscious yardstick I use when evaluating mass transit.

I know that the subway system has issues. In the end, there's nothing that doesn't. It's underfunded, crowded, skeletal and a bit dirty, but I still love it anyway.

System

A train waits for passengers at Union Station

Toronto's was the first rapid transit system in Canada, opening for service with one line and twelve stations in 1954. Over the next twenty years it expanded quickly, displacing a great deal of the city's existing streetcar system in the process, though major expansion stalled after the 1970s. While the system is anchored in the old city of Toronto, it extends east into Scarborough, west into Etobicoke, and north into North York, linking with bus and streetcar lines along the way. Nearly a million people ride it every day, and it is operated and administered by the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC).

The system today is comprised of four lines and sixty-nine stations. The Yonge-University-Spadina Line, colored yellow on maps, is laid out in a broad U-shape running between its two northern termini at Finch and Downsview stations via Union Station in the downtown core. The green Bloor-Danforth Line, which replaced the city's most heavily used streetcar line, reaches as far west as Kipling station in Etobicoke, connects with the YUS Line at Spadina, St. George, and Bloor-Yonge stations, and continues to Kennedy station in Scarborough. The Sheppard Line's magenta strip is the newest to be added to the map, consisting of five stations beneath Sheppard Avenue East in North York.

A Scarborough RT train departs Kennedy station, turning north

The fourth line, the Scarborough RT (short for "Rapid Transit"), isn't a subway at all. Branching from Kennedy station at the Bloor-Danforth Line's eastern terminus, it follows hydro corridors and industrial back lanes into central Scarborough. It's probably the closest thing to modern light rail, as other cities practice it, that Toronto has. It's the same technology as was originally used on Vancouver's SkyTrain, and was built because the government of Ontario wanted something that could demonstrate the capabilities of its ICTS technology. As it's entirely incompatible with the remainder of the subway system, there have been plans afoot recently to convert it to the same kind of light rail technology planned for the Transit City network - although this is in limbo thanks to the state of Ontario's latest budget.

One system expansion is currently underway - an extension of the University-Spadina branch of the Yonge-University-Spadina Line, north from Downsview to the city of Vaughan in York Region, scheduled to be completed around 2015. The usefulness of this extension is up for debate, particularly considering how stressed the existing lines are - but this is what the provincial and federal governments provided funds for, so this is what gets built. Still, in some ways it's unfortunate that the newest portions of the system are the most removed from downtown. Most of the city's tourist attractions are in the central core, and so if you're not one of the few people like me for whom a transit system is a tourist attraction in and of itself, it's easy to get a skewed view of the system based on the oldest parts of the network.

There are certainly plans for other expansion - there are plenty of plans. What's always been lacking is the political will to back their implementation. One planned expansion, an Eglinton West subway line, was actually in the beginning phase of construction when it was cancelled by the provincial government in 1995. Right now, there are two great hopes of subway expansion in the city. One, the Eglinton subway, is being championed by fellow mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson, as she believes that demand along that corridor is enough to justify a full subway and not the light rail line currently planned for it. The other, which I think is far more necessary, is the Downtown Relief Line - another U-shaped line, but shorter and wider, connecting Pape and Dundas West stations on the Bloor-Danforth Line with the downtown core. This would have the effect of providing commuters from Scarborough and Etobicoke a route to downtown that would not involve a transfer at Bloor-Yonge station, which was not designed for its current passenger numbers - for purposes of comparison, it sees more traffic than all of the Chicago 'L' stations in the Loop combined - and is thus horribly overstressed during rush hours. It was originally proposed in 1985, as part of the "Network 2011" plan that was almost entirely unrealized due to quailing politicians and cost issues, but mostly quailing politicians.

A pass vending machine at Bloor station

Nevertheless, cost issues remain the system's biggest bugbear. The TTC operates the most self-funded urban transit system in North America - 73.8% of its revenues came from fares in 2008. Historically, the province of Ontario provided a generous operational subsidy to keep the system stable, but the election of a Progressive Conservative provincial government in 1995 led to the elimination of this support. The Toronto subway is what it is despite the TTC's financial resources, and not because of them.

As a result, it's hardly a surprise that fares are somewhat higher than other cities. The latest fare increase was in January, increasing the cost of a ride to $3.00 CDN from $2.75. Unlike systems such as the Los Angeles County Metro Rail, there are a great deal more opportunities to get around in Toronto on one fare - once you've dropped your coins in the slot, so long as you remain in fare-paid areas you can stay on the system pretty much indefinitely, surface transit included. This is considerably easier than in other cities for reasons I'll elaborate on later. Myself, I get around with a Metropass, which allows unlimited use of the system over the course of a month for the low, low price of $121. At least it's tax deductible.

Stations

Two trains meet at Old Mill station

What I've come to realize is that there is no single unifying aesthetic across the whole of the Toronto subway system. The TTC doesn't even use its own font consistently.¹ This owes a lot to its age and the piece-by-piece nature of its construction. The downtown core stations represent a 1950s design philosophy, something that has been referred to as a mid-20th century bathroom aesthetic, and it's only as one approaches the fringes of the city that more modern influences come to the fore. Admittedly, though, designers in the 1940s seem to have been interested in purely utilitarian designs - many of Toronto's downtown stations resemble Chicago 'L' stations in the State Street Subway.

Granted, they weren't always this way. When the system first opened in 1954, the platform walls were tiled with Vitrolite - a type of reflective glass that was common in the era but has since fallen out of use, and and which has been removed from all stations except Eglinton. There, I think, the reflective tiles help make the station feel brighter and more open. The Sheppard Line stations, with their generally unadorned concrete walls, tend to reflect more closely the aesthetic prevalent in the Los Angeles subway system.

Non-reflective tiles are used through much of the rest of the system, with differing designs to differing effect - though the low ceilings and long platforms contribute to a kind of "shoebox" effect. This has the effect of making it extremely obvious when a train is approaching, thanks to the wind kicked up by tunnel air displacement. As much of Toronto's subway was built with the cut-and-cover method, rather than the deep bored tunnels of Los Angeles, the high roofs universal there aren't as easily usable here. Some underground portions of the system are so close to the surface that there has been at least one high-profile incident where a road repair crew accidentally broke through the tunnel roof without realizing it was there.

Downsview station, opened in 1996, was designed with a high-roofed aesthetic uncommon on the Toronto subway

Like the systems in Montreal and Chicago, there's no consistency in Toronto with regard to the orientation of the platforms. Aside from Union and Eglinton, which originally served as terminal stations, the oldest stations are all side platforms. Center platform stations, where both tracks are accessible from a single platform, are generally restricted to the newer segments of the line.² A sense of where the lines shift from side-platform to center-platform is useful to subway surfers like me who tend to stand next to the doors that won't be opening at the next stop.

Doors that do open easily, though, are those belonging to bus and streetcar routes that connect to subway stations. Of all the systems I've experienced, Toronto is apparently unique in the degree to which its surface transit routes are tied into the fare-paid areas of subway stations. While the subway-to-bus transfers I've experienced in Montreal, Chicago, and Los Angeles generally involve waiting at a stop right outside a subway station, in Toronto the buses and streetcars come right into the station, to load and unload passengers at bays beyond the turnstiles. For the most part it's only the downtown stations - and even then, only some of the downtown stations - as well as some of the Scarborough RT stations that require travellers to depart the system to make connections.

The bus bay at Eglinton station allows passengers to access the subway directly, with no fare barriers

Still, the state of the stations is not pristine. I imagine that it's due to the system's age, the high traffic levels, and the TTC's shaky financial situation. Particularly in downtown stations, there's more garbage lying around than a lot of people would prefer - much of it tends to accumulate at track level, which causes its own problems when it comes in contact with the electrified third rail and starts to smoke, which necessitates the shutdown of that section of the subway pending a safety inspection. This tends to happen most frequently during rush hours.

It's easy to get a "bare-bones operation" vibe from some Toronto subway stations, and that's not an entirely inaccurate assessment. It's not uncommon for roof facades, like the artificial planking in the previous photograph of the Union Station platform, to have been partially removed. The same is true of wall covers - in some cases, the original Vitrolite tiles in older stations are returning to the surface, albeit covered in the assorted grime of decades. I don't see as many buckets catching roof leaks as I used to, but to encounter one tomorrow wouldn't surprise me.

Equipment

A Bombardier T1 car brings up the rear of a train in Sheppard-Yonge station

"Rocket" is a recurring motif within the Toronto transit system, both within the subway and without. One of the agency's most well-known slogans is "Ride the Rocket." The new subway train model, which will hopefully be delivered at some point in the next few years, is called the Toronto Rocket. It ultimately derives from the first vehicles operated on the subway, the G-series "Gloucester" models, which ran on the system until 1991. Today, the bulk of the system's rolling stock is made up of the Bombardier-made T-series, dating from the mid-1990s, though some of the vehicles date back to 1974. The modernity of Toronto's rolling stock was really brought into clarity for me after I visited Montreal, a city where the newest trains were built in 1976.

Unlike Montreal, but like Chicago and Los Angeles, Toronto's trains are steel-wheeled and run on rails - like those other cities, they're powered by an electrified third rail rather than overhead wires. One disadvantage to this - which, to be honest, I don't recall noticing in Chicago or Los Angeles - is that when they brake, they can squeal considerably loudly, and the way the stations are designed can magnify this. Nevertheless, it's not too bad; I personally didn't even pick up on it until I saw someone from Montreal commenting about it. When they accelerate, they sound exactly like the Siemens P2000 light rail vehicles used on the Gold Line in Los Angeles - or should that be the other way around?

Nevertheless, they're comfortable and air conditioned, which is an absolute necessity considering (a) the kind of crowding they experience during rush hours, and (b) the heat of an average Toronto summer. The Mark I ICTS trains on the Scarborough RT are significantly smaller than the subway cars - they are, in fact, almost precisely the same size as the rolling stock on the Chicago 'L' - and have only back-to-the-wall "bench" seating of the sort you also get on the London Underground's Piccadilly Line. The seat layout on Toronto subway trains is considerably more varied, though they lack the open spaces for bicycles, wheelchairs, luggage, or whatever else that the Los Angeles subway trains feature. Six-car trains run on the Yonge-University-Spadina and Bloor-Danforth lines, while Sheppard and Scarborough RT trains are restricted to four cars.

The vehicles are generally, in my experience, kept to a high standard of cleanliness. Still, they also spend a long time on the rails before heading back to the yard, and so every once in a while I'll come across a spilled drink or a bunch of discarded orange peels or abandoned coat hangers or something on or under one of the seats.³ Unlike the Los Angeles County Metro Rail or the Washington Metro, food and drink are allowed on board TTC vehicles, and because there are plenty of people out there who act as if they have no concept of cleanliness or propriety. It's a grumble.

Automated announcements are universal throughout the subway and Scarborough RT - when the train leaves a station the name of the next will be announced, and it's repeated just before the train enters its destination station. Compared to other cities I've been in, they're pretty threadbare - there's no notification of line transfers when they're available, no regulation reminders like on the Chicago 'L,' not even reminders at the terminus stations. Things could definitely be improved here.

Ease of Access and Ease of Use

A rush-hour only collector booth at King station

I've mentioned this in every single Tunnel Visions post previously, and with good reason - for all the complaints you may have against it, the Toronto subway system is at least scheduled to run very frequently. No matter what time it is, so long as the subway isn't actually closed, if you have to wait more than six minutes for a train then something has gone off the rails.⁴ Service during the day is even more frequent, and during rush hour on the Yonge-University-Spadina and Bloor-Danforth lines, trains arrive every two or three minutes. On the other hand, depending where you are, you may have to wait for two or three or four trains to go by before you can actually find a space on one. I don't use the system during rush hour myself, but I've heard horror stories.

Bicycles are permitted on the TTC. Outside of rush hour, there's no restriction against taking bikes onto the trains. I'd recommend going for the first car if you're bringing your own wheels along - they tend not to be quite as busy as the rest of the train, owing to the manner in which passengers are funneled to the platform in many stations.

All Toronto subway and RT stations are staffed. Generally, this is in the form of one or two collectors, TTC employees who sit in booths like the one pictured above who monitor the fareboxes, process transactions, and generally keep an eye on the station. Their booths are adjacent to the turnstiles - the closest one, meant for people who drop their money or token in the farebox, spins freely, but the others need to be unlocked with a token or scannable pass. A few of the stations have been refitted with wide, arm-blocked gates for accessibility. Some high-traffic stations also have secondary, unstaffed entrances, generally marked along the lines of "TOKEN/METROPASS ENTRANCE ONLY" and equipped with turnstiles that will only unlock when a token is deposited or a card swiped.

Once you're in, though, getting around isn't quite as simple as one might hope, particularly if unfamiliarity is an issue. Signage within the system varies widely and wildly - from original black steel signs from the 1950s and 1960s to modern, roof-mounted information displays and, on occasion, handwritten notes. They're not particularly colorful, and can be easy to miss if you're not looking for them. There are also oddities here and there, like Dundas station's northbound and southbound platforms both existing in separate fare-paid zones - the sort of thing that really has to be learned by trial and error.

Conclusion

The Toronto subway, and the TTC as a whole, have had a bad rap recently. It's only to be expected with a system that's only recently recovered from the funding hammerblow it took during the 1990s, and it's far from being out of the woods. Nevertheless, its present issues distract from a deeper stability. Despite it all, the subway has soldiered on. While transit systems across North America are reducing service, those kind of cutbacks have been taken off the table in Toronto. People can complain, fulminate and bluster - and though I might grumble at the prospect of a long wait as well, I'll always forgive. Whenever I hear the three chimes of the closing doors or the echo of those shiny streamliners and their squealing wheels, I know that I'm home.

POSTSCRIPT: What you've just read was written on Sunday. When I woke up this morning, the first news I encountered was that of the suicide bombings on the Moscow Metro. Attacks and deaths on a transit system are always a horrible business - the prospect is particularly shaking personally, because I've come to view transit systems as sanctuaries when I'm in other cities. It's just a lot of blood that will accomplish nothing except more blood. My heart goes out to the people of Moscow today, but what I really regret is that this sort of thing will, somewhere and somewhen, happen again. Human nature - human madness.

¹ The Joe Clark who was not Prime Minister of Canada has written on this issue extensively, so I won't belabor it here.

² To my knowledge, the stations under University Avenue from St. Andrew to St. George are the only center-platform stations built before 1973 that were not originally built as terminal stations. I have no idea why side platforming was so popular at the time; I can only guess it owed to ease of construction, because there's a lot of duplication when you take stairways and under-track passageways into account.

³ I have encountered all of these things on subways at one point or another.

⁴ Fortunately, this is almost always a figure of speech. The last serious incident on the subway system, the Russel Hill accident, happened in August 1995.

Previous Tunnel Visions

• The Los Angeles County Metro Rail
  
• The Chicago 'L'
  
• The Montreal Metro