According to the TTC brain trust, the best way to enter the Red Rocket is through the back door.

The Toronto Transit Commission wants passengers to use the rear entrance as well as the front when boarding a streetcar. That already happens on the Queen line, but could be extended to all routes early next year.

The idea is to cut the time spent getting on and off, which a recent TTC study identifies as a major cause of delay.

No doubt about that. Waiting for people to embark can take forever. No doubt, either, that allowing passengers to use the back door could help. But it’s not a solution, and no one should confuse it for one. In fact, the new arrangement could well make a bad a situation worse.

That’s because the issue isn’t how people get on the streetcar, it’s how they get them off. Letting riders exit through the front door, which has become standard operating procedure, means those getting on must wait before they can board. Requiring users leave by the back door — as was historically the case — reduces crowding and wait times.

But that would require big changes in passenger behaviour and commuter culture generally. Suddenly, we would have to start thinking about our fellow sufferers, er, riders, with whom we reluctantly find ourselves sharing space.

When a streetcar pulls up to a stop today, disembarking passengers rush the front door in an effort to be first off. The crowd getting on waits impatiently — or not — for its turn. Meanwhile, the back doors remain largely forgotten.

Because the proposed rear-entry scheme only applies to Metropass holders or those with transfers, not all riders are entitled to use it. If you have tokens or tickets, you go to the front door. So why not restrict it to those boarding and save the back doors for disembarking?

But even that doesn’t include seniors, the disabled or parents with Hummer-sized strollers; they will continue to use the front door to get on and off.

What’s left are the unhappy truths of transit in Toronto: an antiquated fare system, outdated rolling stock, chronic underfunding and political hostility. The lack of dedicated rights-of-way and co-ordinated transit signals as well as planning regulations and an infrastructure that privileges the car mean the deck is stacked against streetcars. Ask any TTC passenger stuck behind a car turning left; never have so many spent so much time waiting for so few.

The city’s failure to understand that transit is just one element of a much larger issue — mobility — has resulted in a set of policies too disjointed to be effective. Indeed, the streets of the city are a textbook case of official confusion and duelling priorities.

Toronto transit is stuck in the 1970s; while everything else has changed, the TTC remains little altered. It has become a relic, almost quaint. Only the horses are missing. New LRT technology will go a long way to enabling the commission to catch up with the times, but more is needed.

The front door/back door scheme acknowledges an obvious problem, but doesn’t provide much of a solution. It’s more about optics than operation.

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The answer, of course, lies in how we use our streets. Until we get past the notion that cars and trucks, moving and parked, have a right to be in the way, surface transit will never realize its potential. Passengers are the least of the King streetcar’s troubles. Indeed, it should carry more. The real problem is that the roads are overwhelmed by vehicular traffic. Get that out of the way and streetcars will do the rest.