A year after TTC track supervisor Peter Pavlovski was struck and killed the TTC is admitting that its night crews frequently disregarded basic safety measures to save time.

A report on the internal investigation into Pavlovski’s death, which was before the TTC board on Wednesday, says the TTC is considering the installation of new track warning systems and other procedures to help protect crews, who work in the brief hours when customers aren’t riding the system.

Pavlovski, a 49-year-old father of three, and another crew member who survived the collision just north of Yorkdale station didn’t see or hear a southbound work car around 4:45 a.m. on Sept. 14, 2012, until it was too late. Nor did the driver of that car know that a crew was on that section of track.

Neither Pavlovski nor his teammate alerted the TTC’s transit control office that they were moving to the south track from the northbound sight where they had been previously working.

There are several reasons they might not have done so, says the report. Work cars are scarce during the off hours so they likely weren’t expecting to see one. And the PAX phone system that is used to contact the transit control centre from the subway tracks wasn’t reliable, the report goes on.

Night maintenance crews are in a constant race against the clock, said John O’Grady, the TTC’s chief safety officer, who was part of the investigating team.

“Time is a premium commodity at night. Anything that takes time runs the risk of not being done,” he said.

“For a person with work to do at track level, they’re supposed to call into the transit control centre. It’s a black and white rule. But there’s various incentives for them not to do so, in as much as it could take a long time for them to answer the phone, or they could say (the worker) can’t go or they could tell me to wait and I wouldn’t get my job done,” said O’Grady.

The report notes that, “It is part of the culture . . . for workers, including supervisory staff, to cross into unprotected areas for short periods of time. Typically this is done with the best of intentions to improve productivity. The function of maintaining track in a state of good repair is safety critical work and staff does what is necessary to achieve their nightly objects.”

The tragedy also occurred in a particularly dark and noisy location, according to the report.

Since the accident, maintenance crews have had additional safety training and the TTC has hired 15 safety experts to work in virtually every area of the organization, said O’Grady.

That move has replaced the TTC’s Work Safe, Home Safe program that used employees to model and monitor safety procedures in the system. It resulted in a 25-per cent reduction in injuries but then the improvements stalled, he said.

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The TTC is evaluating whether to extend its blue light system to track work done while the subway is out of service. During customer hours, track crews place a blue light on the track to indicate their presence to train operators. But since it requires travelling to the end of that stretch of track to deliver the light, there’s a reluctance to add that extra task to the already compressed off-service work schedule, said O’Grady.

The Ministry of Labour did not lay any charges in relation to the Sept. 2012 incident.