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Cult of transit lovers

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Cult of transit lovers
Passionate about buses and subway maps, they love the TTC.
Why won't it love them back? By Leslie Scrivener
Mar. 11, 2006. 09:04 PM
The Star

Seventeen-year-old New Yorker Kevin Bracken had been in Toronto for only two weeks when he met Lori Kufner on the Queen streetcar on their way to the same party. He got on at Portland, she at Yonge. Both the girl and the streetcar won his heart.

That was in 2004. Today, Bracken and Kufner are 19 and in their second year at the University of Toronto. Through their website (newmindspace.com), they organize parties in public spaces (remember that pillow fight in Dundas Square?). In a nod to that first meeting on our transit system, in January they held a Faerie Tale Streetcar party. Revellers wore tiaras and translucent wings, and vines were looped through the car (which they'd rented) so that it resembled a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Unlike many of us who regard Toronto's streetcars and subway trains as merely a form of transportation, Bracken and Kufner are devoted to the city's public transit — the buses, the Red Rockets, the timetables, the numbers that identify each car or bus like a beloved's name.

It's the Toronto Transit Commission that they feel less affection for. Preoccupied with budgets and filling seats, it is indifferent and, they say, sometimes hostile to their affections.

Take John Martz. A 27-year-old blogger who fancies word games, he recently created a TTC subway map that turned each stop's name into an anagram. Lansdowne became Snow Laden, Dundas West turned into 'Twas Sudden, and so on. It seemed like a harmless winter chuckle and not much more. The commission was not amused. Its legal department sent Martz a letter ordering him to remove the map from his website or face legal action.

The commission explained that it feared some riders, especially those for whom English is a second language, wouldn't get his map as a joke. It looked too much like the real thing.

"Maybe we're overly protective of our customers, but we carry 1.4 million a day and we try to react to the smallest one who might become lost or confused," says TTC spokesperson Marilyn Bolton.

Then there's Sean Lerner, 32. Last year he created the TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide, which tells riders which subway car will stop closest to the exit stairs at their destination. It's been downloaded 40,000 times, yet it isn't linked to from the official TTC site because his website also includes links to a site on infiltrating TTC property.

"I think they are afraid to take risks, and have a very conservative mind set, especially upper management," Lerner says of the commission. "They focus on the status quo."

Matt Blackett might agree. A multi-talented 31-year-old, the publisher of the artful spacing magazine created a series of buttons of patterned designs from Toronto subway stations. The TTC wasn't interested. They say they aren't in the button business. Since last year, Blackett has sold some 50,000 buttons at bookstores like Ballenford and Pages.

"I want them to like us," he says, not so much with yearning, but with a hope that he and his ilk might be listened to at the TTC's head office.

And maybe, in its own, institutional way, it does.

"Who could be against these guys when they are fun, ironic and good humoured?" Bolton says. "They come to us with the best of intentions and goodwill."

The cult of transit lovers embraces myriad personalities. Among the common varieties:

Transit Geeks: Men (and, far less often, women) who are fond of the machinery. Here's a conversation from Yahoo's Toronto transit discussion board:

Dave: "I rode on an Orion 7 on route 29 a few days ago... don't know what fleet # but... "

Robert: "Would that be a Cummins engine? The Detroit Diesel Series 50 that is in TTC's existing Orion 7 fleet is no longer in production."

Urbanists: The people who enjoy living in the city core, and rely on the TTC. They're in their 20s and 30s and don't own cars.

Infrastructure fetishists: People who develop a passion for a particular aspect of the urban landscape — fire hydrants, say, or bike rings or maintenance hole covers. Or, in Blackett's case, sidewalks.

Environmentalists: People like Gord Perks of the Toronto Environmental Alliance, and also a founder of Rocket Riders, a group that meets monthly at City Hall and advocates for a variety of transit causes, from pocket timetables to a transferable Metropass. They see good transit in a pedestrian- and cycling-friendly city as interdependent.

Artists: "As a graphic designer, I have a love hate-relationship with the subway system," says Blackett. "I love the blandness and consistency of the Bloor line." Last month spacing held an art show, In Transit, of photos, paintings and videos inspired by the "everyday beauty" of Toronto buses, subway and streetcars. The magazine's next issue will be devoted to transit.

Activists: People like Steve Munro, 57, who last year won the Jane Jacobs prize for the decades he has spent advocating for a strong transit system. He remembers taking a ride on the inaugural trip of the Yonge St. subway line when he was 5. He was on a committee in the '70s that helped save the city's streetcars and is now part of Rocket Riders. His transit knowledge is vast, but by remaining an outsider, rather than someone employed by a transit agency, he's able to speak more freely. "The people at TTC are more concerned with self-preservation. You don't see the kind of passion you see in me and other urban activists."

Romantics: The poetic transit users who see the TTC as part of the mythology of the city. "It's the setting where our lives play out," says Shawn Micallef, 31, one of the creators of the murmur project, the audio documentary that has recorded stories and memories, accessible by cellphone, in Toronto neighbourhoods. "The TTC is like the electric bloodstream of the city."

For younger transit lovers, the streetcars and subways hold the most allure. "The rails are solid and permanent," says Micallef, dressed in black, with heavy frame glasses, red socks and blue runners. "The buses could disappear, and there would be no remnant of it."

For the young, the social side is important, too. "You hear conversations, people rub against you, you smell them. People become more like people and we overcome our sense of otherness, especially when we meet people who are from another land."

And it's a great equalizer, adds Blackett, who was with Micallef last week as the two travelled the city, attending a series of meetings — ironically, they admitted with some embarrassment that, pressed for time, they took the car that day — and stopped in a coffee shop to talk about their passion. "In a car, I can't meet people I know but haven't seen for a while. It's isolating in a car. But there's equality and great commonality in transit. My rich lawyer friend can take it as much as I can. It's wonderful."

But for every fun-loving, free-spirited transit lover — like Kevin Bracken or Micallef — there is an intense, detail-driven, nuts and bolts fan.

Michael Vainchtein, 25, an analyst at one of the big banks who's also working on a degree in mathematical finance at U of T, has a website called Mike's Transit Stop. He includes pamphlets, construction notices and photographs, including one of the delightfully named Overland ELF, a Wheel-trans bus. (ELF stands for economical low floor.)

His current ambition is to photograph all of the city's buses and streetcars. Photography has even overtaken his former passion: transit maps. It's all a way of documenting the changing city and providing a record of the way we are and were.

It leads one to gently ask if some transit lovers might have slightly obsessive personalities.

Not at all, says Lerner, who created the rider efficiency guide. "I'm working on another project, washroomquest.com. It's a database of public and not-so-public washrooms. If I was obsessive, I'd stay on transit."

Meanwhile, spacing's Blackett, who also teaches newspaper design at Humber College and is a freelance graphic designer for non-profit organizations, looks at TTC promotions and groans.

He uses as an example a recycling poster that shows a garbage can with faces.

"It's like a Grade 7 art project," he says. "Why not have a poster contest, and instead of five people creating, have citizens and riders engaged? That way you try to take some ownership." Blackett says he even called the TTC last year with a long list of marketing ideas. "They told me I couldn't tell them, because they have to tender their ideas. I told them they don't know my ideas yet."

And that's what really frustrates him. "All these people are promoting transit. We know it's a good thing, it makes the city vibrant and alive, but the only time the TTC seems to contact someone is when they have an objection."
 

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