Waiting is the worst thing, especially when you don’t know if what you’re waiting for is really coming or not.
I’m not referring to the Rapture or peace on earth, but to the possible arrival of the next bus.
It’s the information age, and the TTC has had GPS on all its vehicles for three years now. So presumably, at least for those of us who are app-savvy and have the right technology, the waiting should be over. We should be able to ascertain exactly when our next vehicle is coming and plan our arrival at the stop fairly precisely, right?
Theoretically. Sometimes.
The TTC’s customer service charter identifies “specific time-based initiatives… over the next year to improve the transit experience for our customers.” Under the section entitled “Our commitment,” the commission promises to provide streetcar, bus and subway service that will be “reliable and on time.”
But there’s precious little about what steps the TTC is taking to make that happen, outside of hiring 20 bus route supervisors by the third quarter of 2014 and installing 60 new digital information displays that may help you better plan your trip but won’t get you where you’re going any faster.
Technology was supposed to change that. There are now apps like RocketMan, NextBus and TTC mobile to give smartphone/computer users accurate real-time information. They make the Better Way way better – when they work. The reliability of these apps is crucial to public confidence and use of the system.
In my experience, however, any detours on the established routes and the apps get entirely befuddled and start making predictions wildly out of whack. Vehicle arrival times can go from 27 to two minutes, or vice versa, in the blink of an eye.
This, as Brad Ross, TTC executive director of corporate communications, explains to me, is a problem that’s being rectified. Plans to get up-to-date route change information to the third-party designers who make the apps are imminent.
What of people without smartphones? If you have a home computer, mynextbus.com can give you the same arrival info for any stop you choose.
But what if you don’t have a smartphone and you’re on the road and can’t access a computer?
If you’re at a streetcar stop and have texting capability on your cellphone, you simply text the route identification number (shown on the bus stop or shelter) and in pours the info. But those route identifying numbers are only on the 700 streetcar stops in the system. What about the 10,000 bus stops that connect the rest of the city?
I’ve been waiting for this service to expand – to go where no streetcar dares to go – out to all those distant bus stops in suburbia. So how annoying to discover that texting has been available for those bus stops all along. Unfortunately news of the service with the appropriate text numbers has not been displayed on any of the stops. Who knew? And even if you do know, the only way to get the correct number for any given bus stop is to visit TTC.ca and go through a Byzantine amount of clicking to find the route information for your stop.
But what if you only have a land line at home? You can actually call the TTC information line (416-393-4636) and ask for the latest real-time info on next arrival. This works much faster than I would have thought.
Other services are coming that might make fare increases easier to swallow. Next train arrival times are now displayed on subway platforms. In station mezzanines, new electronic boards show next bus arrival times. (It doesn’t say anywhere on these boards that these are GPS-informed, and the attendant at my subway stop knew nothing, but indeed they are – though the Donlands board suffered from the same detour glitches as my local stop and so was unreliable for two months.)
There is now WiFi capability at the Yonge and Bloor subway, and it will be expanding to all stops on the system. But that will take 10 years!
By setting better rider information priorities, the glitches and delays and misinformation may fall away. If that happens, the Better Way may continue to get better. Maybe one day it will actually be the best way. Wouldn’t that be nice?
In the meantime, it might be easier to just look at the current info system as happening in beta time.
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