While the TTC is boasting how “incredibly proud” it is of its response during Toronto’s historic snowstorm this weekend, one woman’s experience proves that not everyone was overjoyed with how the transit agency responded to the record-breaking snowfall on Sunday.
Leya, who requests her last name be withheld, tells blogTO that at 7 p.m. on Jan. 25, she was ready to go home after working a full-day shift at Bathurst and College. Initially, she was waiting for the northbound streetcar to Bathurst Station, where she could then hop on the Line 2 subway and transfer to Line 1 to finally get to her destination of Lawrence Station.
On a typical day, that trip would take 37 minutes, according to the TTC’s Trip Planner. However, Sunday night would be different.
After growing frustrated with the TTC app repeatedly insisting a streetcar was coming “in six minutes” for several minutes straight, she decided to just head towards the subway on foot.
She ventured north along Bathurst St. despite the sidewalks not yet being plowed. Anyone who has trudged through waist-deep snow can imagine the physical strain involved, and Leya took some risky shortcuts to move more efficiently.
“Some of the sidewalks were so bad, I had to go on to the street, which, you know, on Bathurst is a little scary,” Leya says.
Even in these brutal conditions, a one-kilometre walk up to Bathurst Station sounds easy enough. But this is where Leya’s journey got really interesting.
Upon finally arriving at Bathurst Station, the subway was shut down, Leya says, and shuttle buses were allegedly on their way, but she had no idea exactly how long she’d be waiting outside, so, with one kilometre under her belt, she just continued walking to her transfer point at Bloor Station, another four kilometres to the east.
“I walked all the way to Bloor Station and saw nothing,” she says. “The whole way from Bathurst to Bloor, I didn’t see any of these promised shuttle buses.”
When finally at Bloor Station, Leya notices a huge crowd of commuters waiting for a shuttle bus, some of whom say they had been waiting up to an hour outside the station in the freezing cold.
So, with subway service northbound also interrupted, she just continued walking from Bloor up Yonge St. to Eglinton Ave., for almost four kilometres, telling blogTO the walk on the typically lively Yonge St. looked completely desolate aside from the occasional bar patron having a smoke outside.
“The whole walk up to Eglinton, I saw some buses going southbound, but northbound, I [only] caught two buses that were stuck on a hill halfway between Summerhill and St Clair,” she recalls.
From Eglinton, she was finally able to hop on a subway train one stop north to Lawrence for the final leg of her journey home.
Leya says she’s typically a fast walker, yet this treacherous commute took her two hours. She describes the entire walk as slippery, uneven and cold despite being bundled up in a winter coat, mittens, thick socks, snowboots and fleece leggings under her jeans.
“I have no idea how I made it,” she says. She adds that she even noticed a bit of frostbite on her face when she finally made it inside. “My face was tingling like crazy. I could feel my face thawing out.”
Leya argues that because the City and the TTC had advance warning of this massive storm, they should have managed the situation better, rather than, as she puts it, “abandoning people in a snowstorm.”
“The TTC thinks that they’re doing us a service, instead of realizing that they are in service to us,” she says. “They’re really falling down on the job.”
Though more snow is expected to hit Toronto this week, it will be a light dusting in comparison to Sunday’s storm, which hopefully means no more TTC shutdowns and delays.
