TransitFan News

A matter of bad luck, or fate, I’ve been spending the last month trying to figure it out. Let me fill you in on exactly what I’m talking about.

It was a cold icy winter evening of December 28th, 2009, I was just getting out of work, and I walked to the edge of the building and saw my bus coming down the street. I was on the other side of the street, so I flagged down the driver, and she stopped and waited for me at the new bus stop that was created just two months earlier. It took a construction company all summer long to carve out the stop to make it safer (supposedly) for pedestrians.

I crossed the street and onto the sidewalk, and turned to board the bus, and I must have hit some really slippery black ice. I slipped and fell onto the ground. I really thought nothing of it, since I didn’t feel any pain, I felt mostly embarrassed. So I tried to get up, and I fell right back down, I couldn’t even get up!!! I then started to freak out! The driver put the bus in park and climbed down the stairs to give me a hand, I managed to climb onto the stairs, and then looked at my left foot, and realized that it was pointing in the WRONG DIRECTION!!! The driver asked if I needed an ambulance, and after looking at my foot, I said ofcourse.

The dispatcher came on and said it would take atleast 20 minutes and it would be inconvenient or something along those lines, things were pretty blurry by then. After waiting a few minutes, by this time a second bus pulled up behind. I was on a route 23, (rush hour bus) and the bus behind was a 32 (regular service bus). Since the bus I was in was scheduled to end the route at the hospital (how convenient), I said look, how about I just ride to the end of the line at the hospital, and she was like, fine, and the driver of the second bus told everyone to get off the bus we’d make an express run to the hospital.

People on the bus infact grumbled about getting off and asking how they would get to their destination on the 32, she explained to get a mini-bus at the mall and take the 33 (local route) to their stop. 2 people outright refused to get off, and so we made two stops along the way to the hospital and made several short turns to skip the traffic and took the highway the rest of the way to the hospital.

We pulled up to the front entrance of the hospital, and we parked just past the regular bus stop just before the loop to enter the hospital emergency entrance, and the driver parked the bus and she ran inside and brought out a wheelchair and physically lifted me up (!) and carried me down the stairs and into the chair and drove me into the hospital!

We signed in and I waited to be looked at the triage section, and I thanked her so much, and apologized for making her late for her next departure, and she said, “I don`t care, I just have the Kahnawake run after and nobody usually rides that departure anyhow”.

I thanked her again, she was really so nice!

I’m not sure what else I could have done, I was pretty much a dead-weight and couldn’t even walk! I spent the evening in the hospital getting x-rays and they temporarily wrapped up the ankle. Two weeks after, several more x-rays and lots of doctors poking my ankle, we found that I had infact shattered 3 of the main bones that held the ankle onto the leg and it would require surgery to fix the broken bones back into place.

So now is the 25th of January, I’m still in a temporary cast, and awaiting another doctor’s visit to see if they can remove the staples that they put on the week before to close up the incision where they operated. I can’t say that it was the most comfortable experience, and when I looked at it for the first time, I pretty much passed out from the sight of it.

I’m still in a lot of pain and probably will be for quite some time to come. I’ve been prescribed several narcotics to help ease the pain, including Morphine and Demerol as well as lighter doses including Tylenol that I can take between doses.

I’m going to find out soon when I can get my real cast, and according to the doctor, that even after it heals, it still could take me 3-6 months to get back to normal walking again! This plus several visits to a physiotherapist and lots of exercise. This is going to be a long “walk” back to recovery so to speak.

So for my bus sightings, the last bus I was on was on December 28th, 2009. And it was CITSO #855, and thanks again to the nice driver who was able to help me out…

The one thing I found useful about OPUS was that you could use Interac to buy your 6 tickets at the machine, rather than carrying cash with you. I was ripped off 3 times by the OPUS machine claiming that my payment was accepted then later resending the message and saying it was refused, yet ended up charging my bank account. Thankfully it was removed from my account, but only 4 days later! Still, it was pretty useful for those that had no money. Now I find out that beginning last month that they will no longer be distributing 6 tickets in the automated vendors. So I have to go back to the Changeur, with cash, just like the good ‘ol days. Which means in the end that this new system has reversed back to how it was in the past, except now you’re given a piece of paper that if you put it in your pocket, there’s a high probability that it won’t work anymore when you try and use it. So infact, the system has reversed even further back. Magnetic tickets never refused me if a corner was bent, or ever got stuck in the turnstile preventing people from using that turnstile until someone fixes it.

I don’t use public transit everyday, like I used to, but right now I’ll tell you that my once or twice a week voyage into the city where I never had any problems with transit before, with the exception of the line closures, now boasts a slew of new problems I’d rather pass on. I’ve gone through 2 OPUS cards that just plain stopped working after 2 or 3 uses, several trips to the changeur to reissue a ticket so that the machine would read it, and even some instances where I was able to validate my ticket, but the turnstiles would refuse to unlock to let me through and I was forced to slip through because there were 20+ people waiting in line at the changeurs box.

Now, I’ve never calculated exactly how much time it takes to board, I know for a fact that it takes longer than the previous methods of payment. I watched a whole bus load of passengers board the 165 yesterday at Guy-Concordia metro and each person had to stand by the opus reader a good 4 to 5 seconds while it read their card, and in most cases, out of about 25 people that boarded, none of the cards were accepted on the first try. There was always this little red light that lit up, once, sometimes twice, and then the passenger looked bewildered and then tried again a few seconds later, and it worked. The same with student fares, a yellow warning type light lit up to let the driver know it was a student fare and to verify the image. But how many drivers will actually do this? And calculating all this time it takes to board a normal departure, multiply this by 2 or 3 for rush hour crowds, and if a load of 60 passengers boards and each has to pass their smart card, and it takes 5 seconds to have their card accepted, (and a lot longer if its refused, because that’s the time the passenger will take to argue it out with the driver), and even if it’s 2 seconds longer, that means 120 seconds more, and possibly 2 or 3 traffic lights later, and then more people rushing for the bus that don’t want to wait for the next departure now waiting impatiently behind.

One good thing though that remains is that during huge crowds of people, there is almost always a supervisor (CO) available on hand, and in most cases when crowds are expected they schedule buses with higher capacity (Classics instead of LFS models), and they forego the fare taking and board as many people as possible in as short of time as possible, front door, back door, or wherever there’s an opening; pack it in as they say! And pay later. I can only imagine if each individual person had to pay during these events, and how they would all have to board in the front and wait their turn…

Inspectors are soon going to be travelling the metro line as well, making sure everyone’s all paid up. But with all the bugs in the system that aren’t yet resolved, I can only imagine that this will be an easy cash grab for those that thought they had paid and infact didn’t due to a hicup in the system.

And you know what. All this work to prevent fraud, and the only people it’s really going to affect are the honest people that pay for their fare whenever they use transit… The rest will continue to hop turnstiles, walk right passed bus drivers when getting on and spit at the feet of inspectors. And that’s how life will go on…

Now that everything is almost reliable with the new STM buses, they have to make another change to break something that has worked for 50+ years!

Check out this video of the crazy beeping bell!