Here’s a rule of thumb, especially useful for those operating public services: whatever rules you make, you ought to expect them to be enforced by some percentage of your front-line staff in a petty, heartless, senseless, self-destructive manner. And you ought to draft your rules with this certain result in mind.

The latest example comes courtesy of GO Transit, which last week had a driver throw a 13-year-old boy off the bus at Wellington and Highway 404 in Aurora because of a Presto card screw-up that was entirely the fault of Presto. The result was that this young boy, stranded alone in the suburbs at 7 a.m. while he was trying to get to his school in Toronto because his Presto card was rejected, and he had no other money to pay his fare, had to walk and find a payphone to phone his mother to arrange to be picked up.

This would be a bad decision by the driver in any case, but it is especially galling here because the boy’s card had been loaded with cash and is set to auto-reload anytime the balance goes below $20. It seems some Presto employee, doing an update in the system, “pressed the wrong button” and instantly erased the balances of thousands of cards. A 13-year-old boy was punished by the transit agency for an act of thundering incompetence made by the transit agency. Whoops.

Presto is a bad, no-good, terrible fare payment system, Chapter 47,908. How could someone build a system like this and make it possible to accidentally cancel thousands of cards in one wrong click? Add it to the pile of complaints and questions about Presto as we march towards making it the only Toronto payment option. Here’s yet another chance to lament that this fiasco has been foisted on the TTC by the provincial government.

But it’s also a chance to observe, yet again, what should be a proverb of bureaucracy: be careful what rules you set up, because someone might just enforce them.

Whenever I write that we should not pass some petty and ineffective new law or make some new rule that seems more like a suggestion of good manners than an enforceable standard for punishment, I hear lots from people who disagree. “This will never be enforced,” they say, or will only be enforced “selectively” in cases of extreme belligerence. Our authorities have common sense and compassion, they say, and the function of the law will be more educational than punitive.

I usually wonder if these people went to high school. My first-hand experience of those years was that virtually every day, a line of kids barely five feet tall, dressed in school uniforms, standing in front of a school building to board a TTC bus were either kicked off or forced to pay a double fare because they did not have their student ID card with them. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that those adolescents were students, entitled to the student discount. But the drivers would say, “rules are rules!” And the rules called for showing a card.

Just like plenty of otherwise reasonable-seeming teachers in schools with dress codes suddenly spend their time confiscating kids’ baseball caps in hallways or sending people home to change because their footwear is too casual. Just like city licensing officers who are presumably human beings in their private lives will order the removal of a little front-lawn library, or a front-yard skating rink, or a lemonade stand operated by a 5-year-old girl. Just like a parent was investigated and chastised by child protection authorities because his children rode public transit to school, and a city bureaucrat refused to allow a community group of immigrant kids to have a skating party at a local rink in Rexdale in 2011 because the kids can’t afford their own liability insurance. The examples could go on and on.

If the rules you put on the books allow someone to be unreasonably cruel, some of those charged with enforcing the rules will interpret that as requiring them to be unreasonably cruel.

Worse still, if those rules assume discretionary enforcement, it’s a fair bet that discretion will be applied unfairly to certain segments of the population. Fairly often in my teens and 20s while I was walking home at night, I was stopped by police and asked for ID, questioned about where I was going, where I was coming from, who’d I’d been with and what we’d been doing. That stopped happening to me as I got older, and I’ve heard from women I know that they have never been questioned in that way. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And we’ve all recently become familiar, through the carding controversy, with how similar street checks were applied with absurdly higher frequencies to Black men, amounting to harassment.

Who gets a ticket for loitering? Or sleeping in a park? Homeless people, that’s who.

Teenagers, young men, people of colour and Indigenous people, homeless people — all of these are likely candidates for the sudden application of a discretionary rule that most think of as seldom enforced. In this instance, though his mother didn’t make it the focus of her complaint, it may be worth noting that the 13-year-old who was kicked off the GO bus is Black. It’s not clear that race was a factor, but it’s certainly the case that I wondered about it when reading the headline before I knew what the boy’s skin colour was.

The boy was given a new card with $120 loaded onto it with an apology. And the transit agency’s spokesperson told the Star that this driver clearly made a mistake, and that GO policy and training are to allow exceptions for unaccompanied minors who are unable to pay the fare. Obviously that policy wasn’t emphasized enough for this driver to remember it above the internalized understanding they should make Presto’s mistakes into customers’ problems.

It’s a lesson we have all too many opportunities to learn: if your goal is to sensitively serve the public, your rules and policies need to unambiguously make that goal as easy to achieve as possible and leave as little room for nitpicking misinterpretation or misapplication as possible.

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

Otherwise it’s almost certain that some of your employees will think it’s their job to leave someone stranded at the side of the road.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire

Read more about: