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Thursday, December 14, 2017

The woeful saga of switches and signals

Winter is just starting folks, and, due to mild winters since the last deep freeze of 2014, it appears Metrolinx has forgotten about GO Transit and its system.

This week has been unacceptable. Trespassing incidents aside, there is no excuse for shoddy maintenance or neglect. Asking passengers who pay close to $400 a month to get to work to have patience, and to continue have patience, is disrespectful. It is not fair to those of us who get into work one to two hours late, and then have to stay late to make up the time, only to face switch issues on the way home, whereas five hours of our day was spent commuting is... well, it's just plain wrong.

This was raised at the Townhall on Tuesday night and Metrolinx's management team accepted responsibility, admitted it wasn't right and pledged to do better. And on Twitter, Metrolinx's media spokesperson admitted there were failings. Accountability is important but admitting failure means striving to do better. We've got four more months of inclimate weather to get through. Winter comes every year. Winter happens in other countries with far more extensive commuter networks and their switches and signals operate quite fine.

Enough with bad winters, Metrolinx. Let's work on making winter on the GO better.

I also realized that at the end of the year board meeting for Metrolinx, there was no fare increase. Considering we got slammed in September, and with the woeful service issues this month, there would have been a full scale riot if they even tried to push one through for next February. We pay enough. We're also tired of learning about $100 million dollar cost overruns on Metrolinx projects. You can't have this kind of mismanagement of infrastructure and then come begging with your hand out to the passengers inconvenienced by these boondoggles *cough* Burlington *cough* for more money.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

I know that I am more than fed up with the same F-ing issues time and again. With them spinning the wheel and figuring out a new excuse for the delays - Tuesday alone had 3 different ones (Transit Safety investigation, Police Investigation and Signal issues).

We pay too much for such shoddy service and for bandaid solutions and for lip service with their performance.

I have started working from home more. Why should I pay $18/day for the inconvenience of taking a service that may or may not get me to work at some point during the day?

At least I can work a full day in the comfort of my own home, not have to make up the time and most importantly, not pay into a system that doesn't give a shit about their customers.

Because if they gave a shit, they would FIX THE DAMN SYSTEM instead of demanding more and more money for nothing.

Anonymous said...

Worsst - not an announcement to be heard at Whitby for 45 mins - while I calmly read all GO WEB updates to my other waiting friends.

G said...

Yeah, the text/email announcements are unreliable at best. Half the time I'm already on the train when I start getting messages--what good are they supposed to do me then!?

Also frustrating: while sitting motionless on the tracks because of "signal issues", Via and freight trains are buzzing by at full speed. Can we please figure out what amazingly reliable technology they're using and adopt it on the GO lines?

Bicky said...

It's my understanding that fare increases will be moved to September; as we had with the last one, and not happen in February.

People will burn down the system if there's an increase in February.

Anonymous said...

Well at least Metrolinx isn't planning to drastically increase their service on the back of this broken system. Wait...

Anonymous said...

This week was terrible. The same day I had a 2.5 hour morning commute with a packed train and two medical emergencies likely because of crowding. Then on the way home we were delayed again with no announcements at union station and the departure vanished from the screens.
I tweeted asking for responses to both Passenger Charter violations (safety due to overcrowding and no announcements) and received no response at all (a third passenger charter violation)
$20 a day folks. At least both rides were free. I was expecting the to use the medical emergencies as an excuse but thankfully not since we were already 30 min delayed by that point.

Unknown said...

And the shit show continues.....



From: GO Transit [mailto:no-reply@gotransit.com]
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2017 10:57 AM
To: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Subject: Lakeshore East Disruption

Due to a switch problem there are no trains between Whitby and Oshawa. GO Buses will take passengers between Whitby and Oshawa until further notice. We apologize for the inconvenience.

________________________________________