TTC vehicles have been involved in almost 18,000 collisions since 2009, including nearly 5,000 that were deemed preventable by the transit commission’s own investigators, TTC figures show.

One bus driver was involved in 30 crashes in the last five years. 181 drivers have been in 10 collisions or more.

The data obtained by the Star includes buses, streetcars and Wheel-Trans vehicles and spans 2009 to 2013.

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The city’s buses and streetcars cover about 150 million kilometres a year, so accidents are bound to happen. But city councillors and the head of the TTC union expressed alarm at the number of drivers who have racked up double-digit collision figures.

“That’s really troubling,” said Ward 34 Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who chairs the Public Works Committee. “When they’re having this many accidents, we have to understand the nature of those accidents, why they’re having those accidents, and whether some of those drivers should still be behind the wheel of a TTC vehicle.”

Minnan-Wong added that he left a phone message with TTC CEO Andy Byford after seeing the crash data. “I wasn’t aware of this. I’d like to see the TTC do a deep dive and present information to the commission and to council to make sure that we understand the situation and make sure that public safety is kept as a top priority,” he said.

If drivers are deemed dangerous, they are taken off the road or fired, said TTC spokesman Brad Ross.The commission could not provide figures by press time on the number of operators fired for collisions between 2009 and 2013. Ross did say there had been 16 cases in which drivers either faced being fired or suspended without pay for crashing their vehicles in 2013.

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The driver who has been in 30 collisions had 27 of them deemed “not preventable.”

When a bus or streetcar gets into an accident, a TTC manager goes to the scene and determines whether the collision was “preventable” or “not preventable.” There are few hard-and-fast criteria for making the distinction — TTC union chief Bob Kinnear called the process “subjective.”

For example, transit operators were only found responsible in two of the 127 collisions between streetcars and cyclists and seven of the 154 collisions between streetcars and pedestrians. (When police lay charges against a TTC driver, the accident is always classed preventable.) On average, a little more than a quarter of accidents receive the “preventable” designation, according to the data that is not publicly available, but was provided to the Star on request.

While acknowledging that a crash tally of 30 seemed “unusual,” Ross speculated that the driver might have been unlucky.

“I can’t explain those — I just simply can’t. I just don’t know why one operator would have so many non-preventables, other than just bad luck,” he said. “Perhaps that operator was on a route that had lots of construction and was prone to fender benders.”

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Still, union head Kinnear, whose job entails defending operators against the transit commission, found that explanation overly generous.

“Bad luck is five or six over a few years,” he said. “When you tell me that somebody has had 30 incidents over the last five years, I’d be severely concerned . . . Even if 29 of them were deemed non-preventable, I would be thoroughly investigating each and every one of those.”

“You gotta ask yourself the question . . . whether or not they meet the standard of being out there operating,” he added.

According to Star sources, the driver with 30 collisions to his name resigned in September 2013 for reasons unrelated to his driving record.

TTC vehicles got into an average of 3,564 collisions a year during the period covered by the database.

“Many of these collisions — the vast, vast majority — are very minor,” said Ross. Some, however, were more serious, like the spate of three pedestrian fatalities involving buses and streetcars in January 2011.

The fiscal cost of TTC crashes is also formidable. The transit commission is self-insured, paying out accident claims from its operating budget. In 2013, its insurance costs were over $27 million. That’s down from about $36.5 million in 2012. (The change is largely attributable to the province’s “no crash, no cash” policy, passed in 2011, which raised the standard required to bring a claim against a transit agency.)

Perhaps unintuitively, streetcars are more than twice as prone to accidents as buses, per kilometre travelled.

Asked how streetcars could crash so often, despite driving on a track, Kinnear replied, “Therein lies the problem. You can’t drive out of the way.”

Data analysis by Andrew Bailey

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