I have been riding streetcars, buses and subways in this town for 17 years now. My options are richer than yours, which is an accident of local geography.

I have, within walking distance of my front door — and by walking distance, I mean seven minutes, max — the Queen car; the King car; the College car; the Dundas car; also available to me is the Lansdowne bus which will deliver me to the subway if I choose. And in my 17 years here, I have not seen one incident which required the use of force to solve.

But the TTC has decided to allow rear-door boarding on streetcars and buses, and the pointy-headed engineers who run the place are afraid of what might happen. They don’t trust us. And so they are hiring fare inspectors, and they are planning to arm these inspectors with batons.

I have two words for this.

I cannot print them here.

A confession: my wife is a fare jumper. She sometimes uses the King or the Queen car to return home from her job downtown; on occasion, after she has waited an unreasonable amount of time in the rain, the snow, the heat or the cold, the streetcar is so crowded that boarding from the rear is not just an option, it is the only option; and when it is so crowded there is no way for her to push her way to the front to deposit her token.

Use a baton on her?

As far as I’m concerned, the arming of fare inspectors is a blunt and ugly solution to a petty, and largely imaginary problem.

I put it to you that if a fare jumper really is drunk or unruly — alas, it is almost always men who are drunk and unruly — and if there is a confrontation, odds are there will be escalation, and an escalation will lead to a cracked skull or a broken arm if the fare inspector is armed with a baton.

For a $3 fare?

The normal solution — it happens rarely in my experience — is that, if there’s ever a hassle about a fare, or the validity of a transfer, the driver simply stops the car and tells the unruly fellow that no one is going anywhere until he leaves.

Case generally closed, because the average idiot cannot bear the pressure brought to bear by the disapproval of other riders.

If that doesn’t work, yeah, sure, call the damn cops.

Of course, the cops do not have a stellar record in this town when it comes to confrontations on public transit.

Ask Edmond Yu.

Ask Sammy Yatim.

Oh, wait, sorry, we can’t ask them; they’re dead. And that’s another problem, because public transit is the ride of choice for those who are poor, or who suffer from mental illness.

I ask you to imagine what will happen when a dispute is not resolved with a baton; the cops come, prepared to use even more force.

Makes me sick.

No matter what the engineers at the TTC imagine of life in the real world — no, let me put that another way: no matter how dangerous those engineers imagine life in the real world — no, let me put that still another way: no matter how frightened those engineers are of us, if you arm an inspector with a baton and send that person on patrol, the baton is going to get used.

Baton, nice word.

Bandleaders use batons.

Club, please.

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I wonder, as an aside, what the cost of those fare inspectors and their clubs will be, on an annual basis, compared to the imagined loss of income because of fare-jumping? I also wonder what is the cost of a human life when a $3 confrontation results in death?

Finally, I wonder why it is that those with any power in this town are always so damned eager to crack our skulls with clubs, or electrocute us with tasers, or pump us full of lead?