[URBAN NOTE] "How the TTC keeps tiny delays from turning into giant transit disasters"

[rfmcdonald]

Chris Bateman has a fun little article in Toronto Life, with photos by Giordano Ciampini, looking at the control centre where the TTC engages in the careful, minute-by-minute, regulation of activity on the tracks.

There are a number of reasons your morning subway commute is such an unpredictable mess. Mechanical issues, like this morning’s electrical fire at Main Station, often throw the subway off schedule, forcing the TTC’s engineers to improvise quick rush-hour fixes. But far more common are emergency alarms, which are triggered whenever a passenger presses the yellow strip inside a subway car. In 2015, there were 2,674 alarms—an average of more than seven a day, many of them related to minor medical issues that didn’t genuinely warrant emergency treatment. Talk to TTC staff about this and you instantly sense their exasperation. “If people feel unwell, it would help us if they get off the train and ask for help,” said Mike Palmer, the TTC’s subway chief. “Just get off and sit on the platform for five minutes.”

The nerve centre in the fight against subway delays is the TTC’s Transit Control room, located in a high-tech office in a location the agency doesn’t like to disclose for security reasons. There, a team of employees spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week ensuring one of Toronto’s most critical pieces of infrastructure runs safely and, ideally, on time. Here, step-by-step, is what happens at Transit Control after a rider lunges for the strip.

On this particular morning, the first person in Transit Control who hears about a passenger alarm is Kelly Gray, who manages communications to and from subway trains. The driver of the train alerts Gray over a radio link. She punches the information into her computer, which triggers a goofy “uh-oh” sound effect that the entire Transit Control staff can hear. (There are other sounds for other types of emergencies, like ominous beeping for a power failure.) Once Gray has logged the alarm, all action taken by TTC staff is recorded in her electronic file.