… on the Toronto transit system.

This is part of the Toronto visit series.

A TTC transfer with the date and route printed, and marked for 12:30 going uptown. July 1st is the 182nd day of this year.

TTC streetcar fares are CAD$3. They give you this transfer, with the intention that you can catch another route to complete your one-way trip “within reasonable time allowance.”

The rule for TTC transfers is that you can only make transfers at a “transfer point,” basically where two routes meet. You’re not supposed to get off at one stop and do anything else before resuming a trip, and that includes walking around the block to another stop, or doing a stopover to pick up something quick, or backtracking (i.e. return trip), or some other complication. This intention is justifiable but utterly unenforceable except in the most obvious case of same-route continuation or retracement. In almost all cases, the only information on the transfer of value to the conductor is the day of the year — and that’s all they have time to check for anyway.

In the Seattle Metro system, it doesn’t matter what you do with the transfer, as long as you do it in the allotted time. This time-based system is quite a bit more sensible than the Toronto system and is actually fair. However, the Toronto system in practice degenerates to a time-based system, too, except that you are forced to embark at transfer points. Beyond that, what you did in between (getting off transit and getting back on later) nobody knows for sure — could have been multiple transfers, could have been something else. So it just reduces where you can get on with a transfer to a subset of the stops, which is silly and causes confusion.

Aside from this stupidity, I’ve noticed something interesting about the streetcar system, in that often the front of a streetcar has one route number and the back has another. For example, I believe I’ve sighted these front/back pairings:

• 505/506 on College Street
• 510/511 on Bathurst Street
• 511/509 on Queens Quay

At first I got so confused because one route is supposed to be at the next thoroughfare over, not this one. This all seemed coincidental until I realized that the cars are bidirectional and either end can be the front. So that’s smart, because though the route numbers correspond to some path on a particular street, the same physical car can legitimately carry multiple routes. The fact that these front/back discrepant routes seem to form either a complete circuit or meet somewhere outside downtown (check system map here) probably means the cars can switch routes without ever having to turn around at a certain point. Quaint.