A few weeks ago, I was on a slow moving, jam-packed Dundas Street bus where I couldn’t see my feet and had to squeeze onto somebody’s lap to let another person by. My free hand gripped the metal bar attached to the ceiling and I could not avoid staring at a poster that read, “No Big Deal” and “Actually it is. It’s stealing and it’s against the law.”

Small type underneath explained there’s no excuse not to pay your fare, and there are fines of up to $425 or criminal charges for not doing so.

The Dundas bus has temporarily replaced the Dundas streetcar, said to be returning in March. None too soon as the TTC seems to have given up on managing the bus, so mercurial is its anarchic service. It all made that poster hard to take.

I’ve often written that the TTC is Toronto’s civic living room, a shared space where we bump into each other. It’s an idealized, even utopian view, but when the TTC is working OK, it’s true. For transit users, the TTC and GO vehicles are as familiar as cars are for motoring commuters.

Imagine, though, if your Mazda 3 greeted you every time you got in it with a, “Hey, you delinquent criminal!” It doesn’t matter if you’re not delinquent and did nothing wrong, you still get the message every time you or your passengers get in.

The advertisement on the Dundas bus is part of a series of other TTC ads that further shame all riders. There are even streetcars covered entirely in condescending slogans that include: “There’s no excuse not to pay your fare,” “Probably won’t get caught” and “Forgot to tap.”

All of this is part of the ongoing fare enforcement debacle on the TTC and GO systems that has elicited rage from a broad range of riders, most if not all of whom pay their fare regularly and aren’t advocating that people not pay (though some do make a broader argument for free transit, paid for through taxes, as unlikely as that would be in tax-averse Toronto). The TTC’s recent fare-evasion study pegged overall unpaid ridership at just 5.7 per cent.

Recent high-profile incidents, including a man who appeared to be pepper-sprayed by TTC officers and a woman on a GO train fined $240 last month for fare evasion even though she says she had tapped and just topped up her Presto card, have touched a common nerve. In trying to understand why the outrage is so widespread, I think it’s because we’ve reached a breaking point.

Transit fares have continued to go up, above inflation, for years and service is increasingly crowded and unpleasant. Achieving transit priority on King Street, a success that needs to spread everywhere, was an excruciating political process.

Riders can be on a streetcar covered in ads lecturing them about paying their fare, with fare enforcement officers on board, while a driver can speed through its open doors (or stop signs, or red lights) with near impunity. One set of commuters faces hyper-policing and draconian fines, while the other, with more deadly and grievous consequences, is treated with kid gloves and lower fines. Imagine if those streetcar ads were directed at drivers?

New automated speed enforcement cameras for drivers are in “warning mode” for the first 90 days, while the TTC is introducing undercover officers to nab fare skippers with surprise. There’s also ample evidence that people of colour will face more scrutiny and force than others.

The Presto rollout has been fraught, with mixed information from the agencies and faulty technology. When questioned, as Metrolinx was when the woman got her $240 fine, the corporate line is everything is fine with Presto, the agency telling people the problems they’ve seen with their own eyes aren’t problems. It was akin to when the Toronto Police told citizens they were enforcing traffic laws when, in fact, they weren’t, a dereliction of duty that has so far gone unpunished.

Nobody wants to take responsibility for Presto’s faults and both agencies have downloaded it, and the wider fare-evasion problem, onto all riders. This is an impossible situation and a public relations disaster for the TTC, the City of Toronto and Metrolinx. People are rightly angry.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

We will put up with a lot, whether it’s crowding or the often-bad politics around transit planning, if there’s a sense that agencies and institutions are on our side. Right now, that is not evident.

That TTC fare evasion report called for a “reset of social norms” and “culture shift” to get a handle on the problem. If we want to find a way to get people to ride transit without breaking the law, a shift that has to happen is respecting transit riders in a way that re-establishes trust and doesn’t treat them as second class or inexplicably more criminal than drivers who put lives at risk every day in this city.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef

Read more about: