Mayor takes old subway during scorcher of a summer

Toronto was under severe weather warnings yesterday as the temperature soared to 40 Celsius, again! It’s a summer that may go down as one of the hottest on record in Canada’s largest city.  Already the month of August is now the hottest ever, according to records at the city’s Pearson Airport.

Enduring 38 days of over 30 Celsius temperatures this summer, hundreds of thousands of Torontonians found themselves stranded in overheated old subway cars on the city’s aging east-west corridor.

“We will do better next year, and going forward”

While the city, so often touted as an example to the rest of the world as the most successfully multi-cultural, has much to be proud of, the dated infrastructure that did not keep pace with rampant growth and development, is now challenging that success.

Bianca Spence, described as a transit activist, invited the Mayor, John Tory, to ride along to see what people were dealing with.

Some people scoffed at his acceptance of the invite during the morning rush hour, as it’s the late day rush hour in peak heat that’s the major challenge.

But the subway didn’t fail Ms. Spence. In an interview with CBC Radio last night, she described the experience as “perfectly terrible”, The 31-stop trip across the city was beset with 7 delays, some for medical emergencies, another for a 10 to 15 minute halt in the tunnel, and a mandatory transfer at one point, from one train to another, as the first had to go “out of service”.

Spence said the mayor was “very uncomfortable in the hot subway” as people stood, packed into subway cars at maximum capacity.  A CBC reporter recorded a temperature of 34 Celsius in one of the cars.

The Mayor, who often takes the north-south subway route, which is equipped with comfortable new cars, emerged at the west-end terminus with a clearer understanding of the challenges facing commuters in the Greater Toronto Area. He said it was “eye-opening”.

“We will do better next year, and going forward” the Mayor vowed.

The TTC CEO, Andy Byford, once a Station Foreman in the London Underground, confirmed that new trains on order won’t be available until 2025, but in the meantime he said he’d asked employees to delay vacations this year, in an effort to repair as many of the air conditioning units as possible, on the east-west fleet.

Temperatures will drop as we move into the autumn, but while people begin to feel some relief, it’s worth wondering what former mayor, Rob Ford, might have done.