I had the misfortune of trying out the SRT shuttle buses today. Even by the astronomically low standards by which I judge our transit system, I was deeply unimpressed.
I got on at STC and got off at Midland, with the aim of doing some photos of Midland and Ellesmere stations. Afterwards, I decided to go back to STC.
Some people were waiting at the northbound stop right outside the station, and there was big "line 3 shuttle bus" sticker on the stop sign pole, so I waited. After about 15 minutes, I started to get concerned, having seen 6 buses go by in the opposite direction without seeing any come my way, so I checked TransSee. I was well aware that NB buses were using Kennedy instead of Midland, but logic dictated to me that, given that in the days of the SRT, Midland was served both ways by trains, that shuttle buses would accordingly also serve the station both ways. I was dismayed to see that buses were not going past Midland and were continuing on Kennedy all the way to Progress. There was no information to be seen about this anywhere, the only thing that in retrospect might have clued me in was the fact that the posters on the doors said that to get to STC, one should board NB on Kennedy at Ellesmere. I however assumed they had been placed at the wrong spot (thinking they wanted to put these at Ellesmere) as the southbound instructions were to board on Midland at Ellesmere, and made no reference to the bus stop right outside Midland station that the shuttles were serving.
I logically assumed that if the bus stop showed a line 3 shuttle sticker, that the line 3 shuttles would stop at that bus stop. I trudged up to Progress to see if there might maybe be a stop there... nothing. In fact, I'm not sure where most of the shuttles ended up going, because there were about 4 that I "TransSaw" northbound on Kennedy at Progress, and only one of them actually passed by, the rest must have fallen through a hole in the world. I waited about 10 minutes for the 43 that TransSee said was 10 minutes away, and then checked again to see it was still another 10 minutes away, so at this point I threw my hands up and walked back to STC, disgruntled.
Now that I've had a chance to sit down and browse the TTC website from the comfort of a computer, I am still not immediately clear on the situation at Midland. The
future of line 3 page is already showing the map for the 903 that doesn't take effect until September 3, so that's not helpful... and they have another, contradictory map for the interim on street routing!!! On this one, Midland is skipped
both ways.
So if you were a worker at one of the employment zones near Midland, and you needed to get to STC... you have no way of doing this, besides walking long distances through the wastes of Scarberia? Is my understanding of this correct?
It really is no wonder that so many Torontonians hate the TTC. I've seen few companies that have such complete and utter scorn for their clientele as the TTC does. Only here would a rapid transit replacement service somehow not serve a station both ways, and then not even communicate that in a clear, foolproof way. But hey, that's what we can expect from a city that removes a rapid transit line from its map without a replacement.