Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: We have a transit system here in Toronto that has issues. We put a lot of money into it. Ridership is down and people aren't even feeling safe riding it. It's not just Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver experiencing the same issues.
Transit is a going concern. We desperately need it to work and somehow it has problems no matter how much money we put into it. I'm Mike Wixon. Right here is Paul Micucci. Thanks for joining me, man.
[00:00:32] Speaker C: Hey, Mike, how you doing?
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Good. You know what, you're always good at crunching the numbers. But more than anything, you and I have had really heated discussions about our transit system here in Toronto. I feel the pressure myself as a non transit user because I want more people using it so that I can drive. Yeah, we're clogged. We're congested in the city.
[00:00:54] Speaker C: Yeah, of course we are. And you know, as every major city, we build transit so thinking it would work and thinking that people could safely take it and, you know, we were talking about housing affordability a few minutes ago.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: On another show. And it's, you know, I told the story and the story was starting out because everyone starts out when you live in, you know, the urban centers.
To save money, I took the go train from Mississauga downtown every day. It was a dream job. I was working myself up. You know, I just got into the business I'm in and I took it down, worked all day, made it back and struggled along. But it actually helped me save enough money so I could get to that point where I could buy my first house. I could actually fix up that beater home. I could then go buy a beater car.
You know, there's the progressions. Right. And, and transit was a big part of that because transit allowed me and I strategically and moved right by a ghost station. I literally lived within walking distance because I had to start early in the morning, get home late at night, and I wanted to make it more efficient.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Even rental properties, as you were going through that phase of your life, would say near transit.
[00:02:08] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Just steps away from the ttc. You know, that was a real selling point.
[00:02:13] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Now I don't know if it is. Quite frankly, I think it's prob. It's probably not a selling point because the crime statistics show that the number of people around that transit is causing issues.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: Yeah. It's interesting. Coming up later in the program, we're going to talk about the crime aspect of this. But even just at the top level, numbers on transit.
It's amazing to me, Paul, that we struggle with Transit at all based on the amount of money that we've pumped into it.
[00:02:42] Speaker C: Oh yeah.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: The amount of infrastructure here in Toronto. Vancouver is no different.
A huge amount of infrastructure money has been put in and I would assume in both cases propped up by the province.
[00:02:53] Speaker C: Oh yeah.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: And yet we still have slow moving customers are not happy, things are behind, construction's unending.
Yeah, it's literally unending. We don't have an end date on the most recent transit.
And by the numbers, ridership is down.
[00:03:11] Speaker C: Yeah. As taxpayers we subsidize just as, just we're talking Toronto between Metrolinx and TTC. Yeah, we're roughly 4 billion.
Wow. So that's our operating subsidy on an annual basis just to keep these, you know, the go trains and the subways working and the buses and, and everything.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: That outside of what we bring in in fares, another 4 billion is put in.
[00:03:37] Speaker C: Well, we don't have great fares now, quite frankly. We're down Toronto, we're talking Toronto now. The TTC alone is down 118 million people a year from its top in 2016. Right.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Well that's not so long ago actually either. I mean a 10 year span of drop off of that degree.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Normally you'd say okay, there's no business for this anymore. But I digress.
[00:04:00] Speaker C: Yeah, well, again, you know, to be a first class city, we decided we needed transit. So we went out, we built all the infrastructure. And the crazy thing about it is we continue to build all the infrastructure.
So not only have we not reversed the ridership equation, we continue to double down and build more and connect more thinking.
And this is the thing that I can't understand.
Why do we think people are coming back?
New immigrants who come to Canada will not put up with all the crap they have to endure on subways. They just won't. And they figured out a way to get insurance, get cars to ride share on their own. They figured that out. They're not taking the subway.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: It's interesting. Our transit system in Toronto is so bad and even people that work with us will tell you that their first goal is to get a car.
[00:04:51] Speaker C: Oh yeah.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Because it changes their life from four hours of transit riding to go 18km to 20 minutes each way a day. So there's a, that's a huge advantage in someone's life to cut transit out.
[00:05:08] Speaker C: Oh, it is. They actually, before they actually enhance their living conditions where they live, they actually look for a car now to get off the public transit.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Well, if you're four hours on transit a day, that's four hours of work and a part time job that could give you advancement and then go further out.
[00:05:27] Speaker C: So go out and make your way to Pickering, make your way to Mississauga. You know, you're standing an hour, an hour and a half in the cold, right? Yeah. Just waiting for the next bus, just waiting for the next transit location. You know, it's not sustainable. And, and so therefore people, people don't take it, they don't want to. And then, and then people say, well, I can't get people to work at my location.
Of course you can.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: It's, it's, I think the unreliability of our transit system.
Like I said when I was a, when I was a young guy, I mean, it was two lines and we took advantage of them. We made our way to Finch station on the bus that took a half hour from Vaughan and then from Finch down was a few minutes. And frankly it was efficient.
Not as efficient maybe as having a car at other times. More efficient.
[00:06:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: But it was clean and safe and you felt like you were going to get to your destination without much hassle or much delay. If you got a short turn, oh my goodness on that bus, you were freaked out because it was a rare occasion. If, if a train stopped, there was something major going on.
[00:06:31] Speaker C: Right? Yeah.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: It seems like the unreliability is the underscore now, not the other way around, that the, the safety factor is not there, the reliability factor is not there. That if it's something that you need to build into your work life every day, you're going to find alternatives eventually.
[00:06:50] Speaker C: Yeah. And they do, they do with it. Whether they move, whether they buy a new vehicle, they do find alternatives. And that's the challenge now. We're, we're sinking all this public funds, we're paying taxes, we're increasing our capital spend, you know, and it's expensive to keep all these vehicles, to keep all these people. It's a big operation that the TTC alone is 8,600 people.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: That's, that's the staff.
[00:07:17] Speaker C: That's the staff. And then, and then take Metrolinks. Metrolinx is 7,222 people.
From your last annual report, that's how many people that you take. So you have 15,000 people take this machine to keep it running every day.
And it's a logistics nightmare. But it's not working.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Two times a day. I see people on Metrolinx every other time. Yeah, it seems empty.
Maybe that's just my anecdotal observation, but I see Transit out there that is unused completely and other transit which really needs beefed up because it's under serviced.
[00:07:55] Speaker C: Well, the stuff coming, you know, I know because I go from the west into the central, you know, downtown.
It's a disaster. There's no one from, you know, from the Square One line heading down on the bus line.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:07] Speaker C: To the subway line. It's, it's. No one's using it.
That, that was kind of a waste. That whole McAllion Thruway. That thing just doesn't get used at all. It's sitting there vacant and quite frankly we haven't connected and I don't even know if anyone will when we do.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: So now let me ask you something.
I feel embarrassed asking you this about Toronto, but because in Montreal it seems to work just fine. The transit system seems to deliver people with somewhat greater ease. I don't know why that is Toronto, Vancouver is. It really is a subway.
Do we need the transit system that we have or should we be building infrastructure that services vehicles?
Should we.
[00:08:54] Speaker C: It's too late. We should have to go to infrastructure.
And I know that sounds crazy and people like, oh, we can't build the tunnel under the 401 and everything. I don't think we can. I don't. I'm not thinking that that's an option.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: What? You're not a tunneler.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: I'm not a tunnel.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: But you're not a flat earther.
[00:09:09] Speaker C: No, no, no.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:10] Speaker C: No, but I, I just think it's too late, I think, to get the 401.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Every time somebody says that, Paul, I have a miniature breakdown. Sorry.
[00:09:21] Speaker C: To get the public trust back, to get people to actually get back.
Subway or get back on that go train.
I think you've lost it.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Well, they did it in New York.
[00:09:31] Speaker C: They managed to get people back, but then they had. What do you call them? The red hats.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the, the. Oh, it'll come to me. Angels.
Guardian angels. Thank you.
[00:09:42] Speaker C: Thanks, Nick. Yeah.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: So, yeah, the guardian angels. Now do we want civilian?
[00:09:47] Speaker C: Well, yeah. Vigilantes, I think pretty soon you have to make, you know, I'm. That's a whole other discussion. But I think you're going to have to think about something because we're not doing a great job.
You know that, that incident the other day on the 11th where the guy's running up and down the subway train with a knife, you know, so you take a look how many people are on that subway train?
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:12] Speaker C: 100.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: 100, maybe 100.
[00:10:13] Speaker C: They're not going to ride the Subway again.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: If you've been sitting there, people are never going back.
[00:10:17] Speaker C: No, they're not going to. They're going to find some alternative. And, and those hundred people are going to tell four or five other people, they're going to tell that story for the rest of their life at everybody function. They're going to have that video on their phone that PR you can't get back from.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Unless, look, it's going to end up on our show today.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: It's unavoidable.
[00:10:36] Speaker C: I know. And that's, that's, that's the challenge. But you can't escape that. Right. And in this day and age. Think about when the subway was built. Okay, so you're just talking about kind of childhood memories.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: What do we, like, 60, 162.
[00:10:49] Speaker C: They started in the major before I was born. Yeah, yeah. And, and so, you know, they, they got it, you know, the main line. But in those days, no one had a phone.
People didn't take pictures. The pr. They probably had incidents. You just didn't hear about them as much.
So, you know, they were able to get away with it. They were able to keep the credibility on the system going. You know, when people came to town, the first thing you did from a small town, you said, come ride the subway with me. And people like, wow, I've never ridden a subway before.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Right. It was a big deal.
[00:11:19] Speaker C: Yeah. But that's all gone now.
[00:11:20] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:11:21] Speaker C: Right. So people, the expectations of people now and the ability to share that communication of their experience on the TTC is so much faster and so much so. Your quality has. And we haven't reached that quality bar. Right. We're still down here. And the required quality to ride that thing has got to be up here, and we're not going to get there. I just, I just think the chances of us making that leap and getting to the point.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: So, you know, I wrote the Transit in London this summer. Oh, wow. And man. Okay, so here's what I think works about that system that we're missing entirely. First of all, there is a police station at every station.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: There are police in every station for the tube, for the, for the underground. There are transit police at almost every bus exchange along the way.
The cars are clean. There's mannerisms.
Subway is culture there.
So when something's part of your culture, you take care of it.
[00:12:24] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: And I think Canada, for whatever reason, we don't have respect for our own transit system.
If we did, we would put more cops, not just four. Thank you. Olivia Chow for police in it anyway.
[00:12:38] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. On each line. So there's like eight mine. They're supposed to. To cover seven days a week.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:43] Speaker C: For all operating hours.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So. And I don't even know if they.
[00:12:47] Speaker C: Have crisis workers, which I think is.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: Even get more of those in there. Let's get. If, if the, if 25% of the problems that we're having in our subway result in a, in a, an arrest that has to do with mental health, then let's get them in there too.
[00:13:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: But our culture is. Abuse the subway. Our culture is the subways below us.
Figuratively as well, that we don't have this. I'm a businessman going to. This is my means of transit. I must respect it alongside everybody else. I saw that in London. I don't see that in Toronto.
[00:13:21] Speaker C: Well, so interesting. New York, London. Couple things to consider. Right. So in London they have a very sophisticated surveillance system. So a friend of mine worked on this years ago. So he went there and he actually worked on the camera system at all major intersections and in the subway. Right. So they, they have a bunch of stuff there that we don't have. They have the ability to do, for example, facial recognition.
So if there is a criminal at large or. So if they get a picture of someone committing a crime, right away that facial recognition goes up and they track the person.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: So every camera's eyeball is looking and.
[00:14:00] Speaker C: They know where he's going, so they're picking up that person. So if they're moving so they're. They're not evading. So right away they can, they're. They're on the, the radios.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:09] Speaker C: And they're saying he's moving up the stairs, he's going to Piccadilly Square.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: So they can actually follow. They've got enough eyes on the total surveillance.
The cameras. Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:21] Speaker C: Is amazing. Yeah, that's. That's the first thing.
Second thing is the number of people to your point. There's someone. So they don't let like that gentleman in the video that you know, that we're going to see.
Basically, he shows up in shorts in the middle of winter, no shirt, a knife in his left hand and a child's backpack.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: Yeah. He would have been spotted on the way in.
[00:14:48] Speaker C: He doesn't get into the subway and.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Stop before he got to the. Oh, yeah.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: They're like, okay, 911 cut him off. Yeah.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: So here we want to talk to you. Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:57] Speaker C: And they're turning him around and setting him up.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:59] Speaker C: So. Or they're picking them up and they're taking them to a psych ward.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:03] Speaker C: So they're dealing with it really quick.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: But that's the key, I think, is you don't see much of it because it's dealt with quick. And then alongside that, once again, there's this culture of respect for the tube.
[00:15:15] Speaker C: What's it cost to park in downtown London?
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Insanity.
So prohibitive New York, same thing.
[00:15:24] Speaker C: Yeah. It's like $50 an hour.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:15:28] Speaker C: So here's the thing, right.
They really force.
So they put parking fees or parking taxes on top of those vendors to discourage people from taking transit into the city.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: And there's no drive zones in the financial district.
[00:15:45] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: So things like that.
[00:15:46] Speaker C: So they do stuff like. So they actively say, you're going to take the train and we're going to secure you in the train. So our commitment to you.
We haven't committed. So the problem is we're not committed to it. And if we were committed, we would follow. We. We would add surveillance. We would increase the taxes on parking, and we'd have the drive lanes. Those are all things we would do that would actually push people to take the train safely.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: But we're actually just straddling them. Yeah.
[00:16:14] Speaker C: You know, we don't. So we don't have it on either side. We don't have enough money to secure it. We. We don't have enough money to put surveillance into it. We don't have enough money.
We want the parking guys downtown to make lots of money, so we won't put taxes on them.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:27] Speaker C: Like, you cannot have your. Your foot in each camp. You have to make a decision. And that's leadership, Mike. See, that's what we're missing right now. We're missing leadership where someone says, you know what? People can criticize him. I know he was a little dopey at the end with the Trump stuff. Rudy Giuliani, Right.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: Oh, he cleaned up that city.
[00:16:47] Speaker C: Yeah. Good or bad?
[00:16:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: Right. He came in and he said, okay, I'm a leader. Here are the 10 things that I'm going to do. Squeegee kids, like, I took care of. I'm going to take care of crime, going to clean up the cities.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: I'm taking the porn out of Times Square.
[00:17:01] Speaker C: Exactly. I'm going to take all this crappy stuff out of Times Square, make it clean again and, you know, make it for people to dance and do flash mobs and have New Year's in again. And he did it. Yeah, we're doing. You know, it's a lot of touchy feely stuff, but there's no directional vision for the city and, and for our.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Major cities, when you coddle everybody, nobody benefits.
[00:17:24] Speaker C: No one best. So that's why the transit system has gone to where it's gone. Because, you know, listen, it's all those 8, 600 people and the 7, 000 people. I'm sure they're all good people. I'm sure they go to work, they work hard every day. I'm not slagging on them.
If you do not have leadership that can actually move you along. So, so let's see. Okay.
Has the TTC ever come forward to city council or any major transit and said, I want my own police force armed?
[00:17:56] Speaker B: No.
[00:17:58] Speaker C: Have they ever come forward and said, I want a surveillance system like London?
[00:18:02] Speaker B: No.
[00:18:03] Speaker C: No. So. So then you know what? You're not serious and you're not committed. And if you're not committed, then you're.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Going to end up with issues.
[00:18:10] Speaker C: What you have now, people who sleep in the subway commit crimes in the subway. So now what you're doing is you're a catchment for all your social issues.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Crime lands at the top of that list and transit crime is up. Yeah. Recent survey, 40% of Canadians said that they didn't feel safe on their local transit system.
[00:18:34] Speaker C: Yeah, no, of course. Well, look, you know that, that thing the other day, just case in point or sample, you know, quite frankly, I would never.
And you know, you gotta. Those guys. Wonderful. Those good Samaritans who actually took it upon themselves to move that gentleman off the subway while he had a knife going up and down the train.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Those guys were incredible. I don't even know where they got the courage to do it, to be honest with you. The guy was. Well, you know what? Crime is sort of the next leap in this discussion. I'm going to get Jeremy Grimaldi to come in and have a chat with us. But first, have a look at this footage shot in the ttc. And then of course, the chief of or one of the police representatives.
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Empty. Yeah.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: And Olivia Chow, mayor of Toronto, reacting to it. And we'll see Jeremy on the other side of that.
You can't kill me.
[00:19:31] Speaker C: You're a goofy, bro. You're walking up down the trailer at night.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: They're going to lose somebody's house.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: I would not.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: And in addition, we're expanding the neighborhood community officer program to Toronto's underground transit neighborhood, the TTC subway system.
We will dedicate four officers between Union and Wellesley station and another four officers between Bloor and Eglinton stations.
This will allow us to have seven day a week dedicated coverage on the Young line to ensure transit riders feel safe and secure on their commute.
[00:20:16] Speaker C: That's a model of policing that builds safer communities together. And that's what we are doing more today.
These officers work in the same neighborhoods every day.
They get to know people over time and build trust. When that happens, crime goes down and people feel safer.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: Jeremy Grimaldi, GTA crime reporter for Metroland, joins us. Jeremy, thanks so much for taking the time today.
[00:20:43] Speaker D: Anytime. Glad to be here.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: You know, it's, I love having you on, but it's always on the heels of something wild that has happened in crime in the gta. This time it's on the heels of a video of actual citizens, riders on the TTC chasing down an armed assailant who's obviously struggling mentally and maybe even on drugs. And I guess you've probably seen that, that video.
[00:21:12] Speaker D: Indeed. Yeah, it's, it's shocking. It's, it's wild times in Canadian crime, or GTA crime, whatever, however you want to describe it. But I haven't seen anything like it. And it's a new phenomenon. It wasn't like this 10 years ago.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: No, it seems like we were on a trajectory. You know, Paul and I just before this, having a discussion off camera. And we'll add to that on this show that although ridership is down, confidence in the safety as a rider, as a TTC passenger, certainly in Toronto, Vancouver's having similar scenarios.
Overall, Canadians don't feel safe on transit. And things like this, I think, are certainly contributing to it. And we're seeing it almost right away because people are posting it, obviously. But this trend of reduced ridership I think has a lot to do with how people feel about being on transit.
[00:22:07] Speaker D: Yeah, it's, it's a, it's an interesting phenomenon. We've seen it in the United States as, as the violence has grown on their public transit systems. We're now seeing it in Canada in, in Vancouver and in. And in Toronto.
I mean, what, what's happening, I think is without, without looking at the numbers, this is just anecdotal, is that those that can afford to get somewhere via another mode of transport will be oftentimes choosing that other mode of transport because of the, some of the things we see in newspapers and online daily.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I can see what you're saying. I mean, and also the one feeds the other. It's almost a, it's cyclical in the sense that. Okay, look, I've got to Find another means of transportation, whether it's Uber, cab, my own vehicle.
You know, that becomes part of the consideration that drives people into creating course more traffic issues and things like that. But it's not really. And I took a look at the numbers and maybe I've misread them and I'd be curious to know what your opinion is.
It doesn't look like any of this is random. There's almost a pattern to this that makes this kind of crime preventable. And of course, Olivia Chow is now saying that we're going to have subway community officers, but it doesn't really seem like the numbers of officers would be able to cover off enough of this safety requirement.
[00:23:45] Speaker D: Yeah, this is multifaceted. First of all, I, I would say it's similar to the argument that police use every budgetary cycle where they say, well, you can cut our budget, but that mean fewer officers, that'll mean more crime.
It doesn't really work like that because, you know, you don't have police officers hiding behind trees waiting for things to happen.
Things happen sort of randomly, first of all. And second of all, a lot of the people committing the crimes are unstable and so a lot of times they don't have control over necessarily what's about to happen. So it's not as you, as if you could predict, you know, a lot of cars are being stolen in this neighborhood. Let's scout out that neighborhood. This is a wealthy area and there's been home, home break ins in, in the, in the city. Let's, let's, let's look at this and send officers there. It's not something that you can do in that way.
So you can, you can try and put more people down there. But it's, it's really, I, I would say an institutional problem that, that we've got to tackle in different ways.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: You say that and recently Calgary just cleaned up their streets. They did a program whereby multiple arrests were made in a certain area where people needed to access transit into the core or out of the core of the city. And they went and cleaned up that specific area by making arrests, putting people into hospital, making sure people got institutional help as they needed it, and you know, otherwise were connected with family accordingly. If they had outstanding warrants, they were, you know, put before a judge to deal with those.
So that has proven to clean up that area pretty effectively pretty quickly. I don't see any moves in Toronto like this.
[00:25:39] Speaker D: Yeah, they're very controversial. And again, I don't know if that's to do with Alberta's mandatory drug rehab rules that they, they're planning on instituting or, or talking about instituting.
But it's one of those things we, I think it was under Harris took away a lot of mental health, you know, housing, not, it's not housing treatment centers, I should say.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:11] Speaker D: And, and since then, the problem has spilled onto our streets. And since COVID it's grown exponentially. And you can see that in the TTC numbers.
And these mental health issues are a hard one to wrap your head around and a very expensive one.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: I was going to say, I think cost and the number of people that it takes to be applied to that as a solution can be a challenge. But I think these are challenges. And you mentioned Covid. Well, we came out of COVID addicted to fentanyl.
That was, you know, so prevalent on the streets by the time Covid was over that there was another pandemic happening in the form of, you know, mental illness due to drugs on the street.
And so I can see that it's compounded. My worry is that we think policing is going to be the issue. We have a very limited transit system in Toronto compared to other metropolis cities that are very underground. In many of these cities in Europe and, you know, in America, Mexico, for example, they have seemed to have found some solutions to, you know, per capita keep crime down as much as possible.
Are you seeing out there any promises outside of Olivia Chow putting community officers in here that might usurp crime in transit?
No.
[00:27:41] Speaker D: You know, I just did a story the other day about a man who went into Metro. He was hungry. He's an alcoholic and a drug abuser. He went to grab sandwiches and beer, walked out, security guard stopped him, he showed a closed pocket knife and he was charged with robbery.
And he, he faces now a serious sentence. And I asked him, you know, where, where were you living before? And he said, I wasn't living anywhere. I, I, I sleep on the subway and I sleep on buses when I need to keep warm.
And it just goes to show you, you know, we also talked about the fact that a lot of people are in prison because they want a bed and three square meals a day.
But it just goes to show you the.
Where, where do, where do these people go when they're freezing and hungry and cold and need shelter? A lot of the time it's the ttc. And if you think that that's okay, or if you think that, that there's not going to be problems as a result, you got another thing coming. So I, I think we have to grapple with larger issues, to actually start solving the problem, you know, putting, putting guards down there.
You know, it.
I, I just don't know what it's going to achieve because a lot of times, unless they're police officers, it's a limited amount of things that they can do.
But.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: We almost might need more infrastructure in our transit system that meets mental health, drug addiction, homelessness head on alongside policing.
[00:29:25] Speaker D: Yeah, I just a stat I found interesting when I, before I came on that I looked up one out of every four times a TTC constable reports to the tracks a person is taken into custody under the Mental health Act. That's 25 of the time down there.
He's, he's arresting someone under, under mental health.
So I think, I don't think you need to go much further than that. So.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Yeah, no, a quarter of the cases is a pretty strong supporting story for. We need help prior to these people ending up in our subways and on our buses.
[00:30:06] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Well, look, a couple of the things before you get out of here that I'd love to touch on Overall across Canada, a recent study came out saying that people have a lack of confidence in safety in our transit system, in our stations and on the, the vehicles themselves.
This is sort of a new. I've never heard of a report like this. It's obviously arriving on the heels of a pretty serious increase in crime on our transit systems.
Looking ahead, do you, do you see this as a constant reporting, like transit system crime as its own category? Seems like a new thing, frankly.
[00:30:49] Speaker D: Yeah, I'm a, I'm a father of a couple teenagers. I, I've always, you know, I've traveled the world.
Everywhere I go, anywhere I've ever gone, I always sing the praises of Canada.
Being in Toronto specifically being basically the safest urban area or one of the safest urban areas in the entire world.
Now having, having said that, now what we have is 40% of riders on the TTC feeling unsafe.
When I was a kid, the TTC was the safest place you could be. Really, honestly, not to be old, old guy talking here.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: But no, I, I don't think it was all that long ago, to be honest with you. I, I think Jeremy, we were talking, you know, 15 years ago.
I remember being in the city and happily getting on the transit, happily avoiding a taxi just to do a couple of stops. I would call an Uber now.
[00:31:44] Speaker D: Yeah, for sure. And so now my, when, when my kids want to go downtown, you know, I still say take the subway, but in the back of my Mind, I'm always wondering because, you know, every time I go down in the subway, there's someone talking to themselves or yelling to themselves, yelling at people.
You know, my life's been threatened a number of times by random individuals and not, I don't think they're necessarily violent or going to do anything. That's not my fear. My fear is I send my kid down there and, you know, someone says something like that to them, it's a, there's a, there's an impact, there's a negative impact that doesn't necessarily need to happen. And I do think twice now. So I don't blame people for thinking twice.
[00:32:31] Speaker B: I heard my wife recently say, you know, to the, to our kids, your dad. Thank you. Your dad will drive you, you know, as far as you need to go. Don't be taking transit unnecessarily, please. We'd rather you took an Uber.
You know, an expense that families are going to have to take on, that some people cannot seems to be the only alternative. Or getting stuck in traffic, delivering people in your lives places.
We need a stronger transit system to begin with and we spent so much money on it. As ridership goes down, we need it to be safe so that it can expand, it can actually have meaning in our cities. In Vancouver, the clogging is beginning on the roads. Their transit system is important. In Toronto, it's almost essential in my mind to keeping the city moving at this point because it is so congested with traffic.
We can't let our transit system fall victim to crime.
[00:33:26] Speaker D: No. And it's, it's fallen precipitously. Like it's, it's been five years and it's gone kind of berserk down there and it's, it's sad to see, but I just, I urge people to kind of get a grip on it because you don't want to lose that because it was an institution, not a great institution, as you say, it's limited, but was something that, that you could be proud of. People were respectful of each other. And, and, and at the moment it's, it's turned into something that, that's not that. And, and I, I, I think, you know, we, we should, we should not let. Be okay with it.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Jeremy, I tell people often that you are the last eyes on crime in our nation from a journalistic standpoint. I really appreciate your time on this.
Sadly, soon we'll need you again, I'm sure. Thanks for joining us.
[00:34:18] Speaker D: Always. Thanks. Thanks for the words and having me.
