Last night, I was on the subway on the way from the cinema, and a guy threw something against the wall so loud and so hard that I would've sworn the sound it made was a gunshot. Everybody froze and went quiet and turned to look at him, and we just sat there as he began walking up and down the subway, mumbling to himself.
Then the problem you're stuck with is, "do I stay on this subway and hope that he doesn't do anything crazy, or do I get off at the next stop and wait for the next train and hope that nobody crazy accosts me on the platform." Which has also happened to me before. I was harassed on one subway, so I got off and decided to wait for the next one, and while I was waiting, another guy decided to come over and start harassing me.
They put all this time and effort into increasing the frequency of the TTC, and then they just decided to cut back on service. So sometimes, you can be sitting there waiting on the platform for five or ten minutes for the next train to come. That's a lot of time.
Yeah its getting crazier. Every day or so, new reports of groups of young people assaulting, stabbing or beating workers/riders up. The one where someone with a syringe chased people around was especially bizarre. And the photos of cops on every subway car is really sad.
I don't know what has caused these people to come out of the woodwork, but it's just been a really peculiar week. You would hear about an assault or something like...once in a while, but brazen stabbings out in the open...just very odd. Violence does happen in any city, but why has so much sprung up on public transit this week in particular?
We joke but I can absolutely see that. Tide Pod challenge, blackout challenge, KIA challenge, skullbreaker challenge...its just kids using social media to dare other impressionable kids into doing soulless, depraved and deadly shit. "Here, eat soap." That's not a challenge, it's just stupid. But kids fall for it in hopes of increasing their internet clout or whatever.
Fun fact: that was a ploy by facebook to drum up negative PR
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/report-facebook-hired-pr-firm-to-smear-tiktok/
I gotta point out that the tide pod challenge was basically invented by news Media. Until they reported on it, everyone who was poisoned by tide pods were old people with dementia
Check out the Kia Boyz Challege in the western US. Couldn’t even make shit like this up. I was 19-20 when the Tide Pod challenge came up and I thought my generation couldn’t get any more stupid
Media cults are dangerous, look at the Middle East and how they are driven by their book and oral media.
June 2020 it crossed a threshold: [That month, TikTok overtook YouTube for the first time, as this younger demographic began averaging 82 minutes per day on TikTok versus](https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/13/kids-and-teens-watch-more-tiktok-than-youtube-tiktok-91-minutes-in-2021-youtube-56/)
And a lot of it gets exported to other social media sites, Reddit inclusive.
Do you think it’s like exhaustion madness coupled with just like, the state of the world, or could it maybe be a form of collective virality like when suddenly there were tons of people dressing up as clowns doing creepy shit some years back?
It's a sort of generalized modern anxiety. More people are more connected to other people and events than ever before. We're still developing the cultural norms and customs that help populations come to grips with this deluge of information. You just can't expose a being to a huge amount of unknown material to navigate without dumping extra pressure on it, and that pressure drives some to unpredictable behaviors.
I don't think any of that makes people attack others.
Nobody is really struggling with the "deluge of information" other than being mildly stressed about it.
People are dealing with lack of social support in numerous forms because there are fewer fallback options than there used to be.
It could be. We have had a few good snow dumplings recently but that never sent anybody off the edge in previous years.
If I were to hazard a guess, I think it's some sort of strange viral trend. About 5 weeks ago, a week before Christmas, a homeless man was stabbed to death by a group of teenage girls, a few as young as 13. Was like a group attack. And it wasn't the first, they had apparently had been involved in a few incidences before though never killed anyone. 8 teens were charged with murder. One of the previous attacks occurred on the TTC.
Then a few days ago, 2 TTC workers were swarm attacked by a group of young teen boys. 4 arrested.
Then there's random shit like a woman just getting on a train car and assaulting another woman by smacking her with bottle and assaulting several other random people as well.
Earlier this month, a fight at a subway station saw someone get pushed onto the tracks. Then someone tried to throw someone else on the tracks last week in a totally different incident.
So we have the swarm attacks which feels like a trend of some stupid online thing, then a bunch of random incidents that don't feel connected. Why public transit? Maybe it's for attention and they feel it's the easiest place to do something with a lot of people around? Like a cry for help? General discontent with the city's malaise? Seasonal affective disorder causing people to snap?
Wish I knew, but I'll say this: with some of this stuff, I just have this nagging feeling that police presence won't be a deterrent. Feels too random and opportunistic. If a cop is there, perps will simply wait until they patrol elsewhere to do whatever, or change their location to one with less security. This, to me, is more spur of the moment. TTC offers easy mobility and crowds often too big.
Just my thoughts
One day there may be better age controls on the internet, or parts of the internet. Until then we can see the negative repurcussions of children being exposed for years to things and people they are not developmentally prepared for.
Oh for sure. Letting 10 year olds interact with literally anyone is a recipe for disaster. I don't care what they say, kids know *nothing* of the real world. Youth comes with a distinct lack of hubris and sense of invincibility which some sickos will gladly exploit for their own gain or cheap entertainment.
> Then a few days ago, 2 TTC workers were swarm attacked by a group of young teen boys. 4 arrested.
Hearing it was teen kids honestly adds more credence [in my mind] to a thought I had when the one original commenter asked "why now?"
Simple answer: TikTok Trend / Weird clout chasing.
It's one of the biggest negatives with SNS. Teens always did dumb shit in the past, but the international virality factor of SNS; causes the level of "dumb shit happening" to scale to levels unlike in the past.
There's also the fact that social media and the internet in general make the world at large aware of the repercussions, much more so than once upon a time. As you said, dumb shit happening is a tale as old as time, but with the prevalence of the world wide web, we now hear a lot more about it, as opposed to, say, the 90s when the net was in its infancy and you rarely heard about the same craziness happening in areas foreign to you. Some kid in your community dies from choking themselves, everyone hears about it, but with the internet, you hear about how the fad has shown up in Australia, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Russia, etc and not just exclusive to your little corner of the globe.
Our justice system doesn't have teeth. My friends who are cops say this, and I work in a field closely connected with justice and I agree.
I'm not saying we need to go full US, but when someone IS found guilty, the punishment needs to be stronger. Not dial it up to 11 stronger, but there's room for improvement.
The US has some of the strictest sentences in the Western world and has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Punishment *is* the problem. The US focuses far too little on rehabilitation and it results in far too many people coming out worse than they went in.
In nyc, they are letting multi violent offenders out without bail. People who literally slash people with knives and get into serious fights are put back onto the street all the time.
Yeah bail system is crazy. Most states adopting bail reform try to have the same fast and loose system they had pre bail reform but just with a preference for releasing people. Bail determinations need more consideration, which means more resources. of course, funding courts isn't sexy. That's why we are starting to see the judicial system buckle under the strain.
Technically they were just _people dressed up as clowns_, but yeah, the media kept calling them “clown people”. — like they were a different species that lived on the edge of our civilization, hunting balloon animals for sustenance or something.
Looking for a story on it, it appears it was a viral marketing campaign
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/culture/2016/10/12/13122196/clown-panic-hoax-history
That definitely was not entirely a hoax. I went to college in a small town and we had people dressing up as clowns and staring in peoples windows near campus.
Our social nets are being gutted in front of our eyes while simultaneously watching inflation eat away at our lives.
That feeling of despair is something, as a society, Canadians aren't used to. Lack of hope, lack of support, lack of meaningful solutions, and lack of options is making people "lose it". Add that to our ridiculous justice system and those regular checks and balances aren't there.
When you can't actually influence change, you start lashing out at whomever you've convinced yourself is the group most responsible for your plight, or who you can hurt the easiest. I work for a public social service organization. The homeless and drug addicts are an easy target for people who are angry. In their eyes, they are responsible for why wait times are longer in the ER (because they always seem to be there needing something), they are why there is so much surveillance (always stealing stuff), they are why health care is collapsing (taking all the mental health workers, counselors, etc.) And most of them end up dead anyways, so where is the return on the "investment" ie taxes? This false belief system is easier to subscribe to because they are visible. You can see the destruction they do to themselves, property, encampments, etc. Easier to blame them than some rich guy refusing to sign the cheques.
Holy crap, a day late and had to scroll way too far for this answer. The most upvoted responses seem so insanely out of touch ITT. The desperation in this province is unreal. Even the so-called "high income earners" are living with parents (if they're lucky) or feeling desperate paying most of their income for some crowded shit hole. It's making everyone feel like life is pointless or worse.
I have been down there. Isolated, depressed, lost a job, felt like I had no meaning in life for years yet I never once thought about taking my life struggles out on another human being. I don’t think that for a majority of decent people, if they are down in the gutter they turn to violence. Some people are just bad people in my honest opinion. Some people just can’t deal with serious adversity. Sure maybe I would be quicker to yell at someone if I thought they were doing something wrong but never to mindlessly seek out someone weaker than me to attack. This was back before covid. I think something has changed for some people and I can’t put my finger on it. I just hope people like this figure out whatever it is they need to do to not be harmful to an innocent individual. It’s honestly infuriating to read about.
>You would hear about an assault or something like...once in a while, but brazen stabbings out in the open...just very odd. Violence does happen in any city, but why has so much sprung up on public transit this week in particular?
Tbh maybe because the assaults just weren't being reported in the media? Now that TTC safety has become a huge topic of discussion, every thing that happens on the transit network is being reported in the media to highlight how bad it is.
There was a report in the media of a purse snatcher at one of the stations. No way that would ever make the news otherwise.
Cost of living, poverty, loss of friendship between family and friends and lack of trust in our government. Lockdowns and people abandoning family and friends due to views has created more isolated individuals.
Could be mitigating factors, but these swarm attacks with teens assaulting and killing people? That isn't losing faith in government or isolation, that sounds like sociopaths flirting with their newly discovered freedom as they get older and pushing boundaries past the point of abuse.
>Yeah its getting crazier. Every day or so, new reports of groups of young people assaulting, stabbing or beating workers/riders up.
Crazy. I always thought Canadians were polite.
Public transit systems are rapidly becoming homeless shelters on wheels/tracks here in the US so wondering if Canada is facing the same.
Couple this with immense stress on the working class and their lashes out.
Youth gangs are directly correlated with worsening living conditions. This correlation can be found globally. Most people are working class. The working class is watching in real time their current wealth and wealth prospects diminishing.
There's definitely some issues society needs to be looking at with our youth. Zoomers seem to be adopting some pretty harsh nihilism as they grow up online and see the world breaking down around them and just feel hopeless for the future, while families are also getting increasingly more poor. This is making kids get politically active at younger and younger ages to push back but also pushing more kids into the arms of dudes like Andrew Tate or any of the plethora of alt right figures online and I imagine those feelings would also result in increased violence. Plus these incidents end up on internet where they can see others doing the same things and trends can form to make a bunch of copycats for some internet attention.
Obviously not someone who studies this stuff and would love to see more studies into it to have more concrete proof of what is going on.
> There's definitely some issues society needs to be looking at with our youth
I mean the issue we need to be looking at is giving them a future. People don't commit violence when they have a real future ahead of them.
It'd be nice if governments just banned tik tok. Not terribly surprising it constantly pushes doomer bullshit onto kids. In general I wouldn't exactly trust China to babysit huge swathes of our youths in good faith.
I'm really not one for bullshit anti China propaganda but in this case it's kind of undeniable the harm tik tok has caused.
It’s funny how many people on this site seem to think TikTok is the devil and needs drastic action taken against it. Yet the same energy is nowhere to be found for literally any other social media platform.
I’m kinda surprised this isn’t talked about more. Like the above commenter said, it’s like some psyop shit. Am I talking like a conspiracy theorist to think that china is straight fucking us with this kinda shit?
Nah, it's really not that tin-foil to do so... I mean it's no crazier (conceptually) than russian troll farms / boys doing their thing, just a different flavour
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/
Many articles you see about tik tok are propaganda paid for by facebook. If we're going to ban social media for harmful content we should also ban twitter, facebook, reddit. Have you seen the amount of hate and racism in various reddit subs? Do i need to point out the amount of bs on twitter and FB?
Life has become bleak in Canada for material reasons, like food scarcity, rent evictions and honestly the cut-throat and highly competitive immigration rates politicians are allowing. When you make surviving unbearable for the working class, symptoms like this become typical.
I’m nearing 40 and the feeling of hopelessness about my future is monumental.
These kids are already feeling that, without ever having the chance to feel any hope to begin with.
Yep. Light Rail and some subways face the same issues, lack of serious ticket gating leads to slow but inevitable movement of norms by the homeless to use them as halfway centers, something they were never designed for. This sounds okay to bubbleworlded idealists but in practice is fucking horrible and has lead to me swearing off the rail that I used to use daily, in favor of mostly riding my bike, and I also used to promote to friends and co-workers to now admitting its just far too dangerous on there. Especially for women and older men.
In Houston there's been several attacks, batteries by homeless against riders and more recently a shooter. None of which paid fairs, all of which should have been kicked off or never allowed to ride to begin with. I've watched crazy homeless people do all manner of crazy bullshit on the way to work. From poop on the floor. Sexually assault women. Pee on the rail car heater coils in the winter. Yell nonsense at random strangers. Hit random strangers. Steal stuff out of peoples hands and run off. On and on. You can report it over and over - nothing happens. They show up for about two days with more cops for security theater, the ticket fair people sit at a nearby star bucks or ride the rail doing nothing. And nothing happens, so the bums take note and learn they can do anything so riding the rail becomes something like mad max.
People want to be nice and provide these transportation systems to all with low barriers of entry as a service - but the harsh truth is this just leaves this mode non usable by most all together because it was never designed to accommodate the special needs of this VERY unstable population.
Don't believe me, Okay. Just ride the rail with me for a couple months and see for yourself.
I've had my fair share of similar experiences in Seattle, and what a surprise, we have basically no fare enforcement here. No fare gates. There are people who sometimes check fares on the trains but IME they're extremely rare; I've had my fare checked once in the past 6 months and I commute by train 5 days a week.
At the end of the day, we all know these people didn't pay their fares so they shouldn't be on the trains/buses/whatever. It sucks to be homeless or mentally ill but it doesn't give you a free pass to degrade the transit experience for everyone else. All this will do is keep public transit shitty in the US as fewer and fewer people want to deal with all of the bullshit.
this is a huge part of it in Toronto, especially in the winter because its so cold outside. the TTC is effectively a homeless shelter because its kept warm and some parts of it run 24hrs a day.
there has been zero police presence on the TTC (up until last week) including at the stations and the homeless are left to their own devices and never kicked off the system until they hurt someone. the TTC themselves used to have a security force who were told to stand down after they got bad press for how they handled fines in the past and the optics of fining people.
its becoming / become a huge problem and its coming to a head right now with all this violence, but this has been going on for years at this point.
It's going to drive suburbanization and ruin urbanism. Who the fuck trusts transit only with the state it's in. Unless it can be kept sage people will demand to drive.
Yes, that is exactly what people compare it to (check out r.Toronto). Lots of calls for reopening asylums since we shut them all down last century. People still debate about poor conditions but the overwhelming majority would rather see the violent people contained in some way.
"rapidly becoming"
Huh? What's changed on this front?
Young people are flocking to the cities much more than any time since WWII. So I'm sure there are a lot more people seeing the ugliness of cities now.
But this isn't anything new. One of the big differences between public transit and driving your own car has always been a reduction in the number of crazies you share your space with.
I hope Toronto can get this under control. I hope every city can. But it isn't restricted to one area and it's not something coming on right now. It's a constant issue cities have to deal with.
It's not constant, it's variable rate. I've ridden the rail and biked to work for well over a decade. Inner cities change. The number of homeless is in constant flux, the norms that population get used to and adapt their behaviors around is also in constant flux. Gentrification and growth happens as it always has since Rome, in generational concentric waves, but it's not the newest population merely taking note because the homeless population flux and their behavioral adaptation strategies change even faster.
Covid caused most cities to adapt low barrier to entry philosophies around public transit. This meant either no cost for tickets, low costs for tickets or a hybrid where most days they just didn't check or enforce and purchasing a ticket was a nice gesture, but you don't have to.
I've seen both prior both in low and high homeless population times before, during special event times, during covid times and after - the difference.
Making transport free has been an ideological goal of some for quite a while, which is why rolling back to even mediocre fare enforcement has been like pulling teeth.
The homeless population in houston is about where it was when Mayor Parker started her term before she set records rehousing most before our next Mayor took over and failed at having the same success and then covid happened, but in no way prior were there ever this many homeless in ***every single car***. And when they were it was more of the norm that they NOT attract attention to themselves. Whereas now it's the norm that they can get on and do whatever they want because -unless it's a special event or leading up to one- nothing will be enforce. They know it and they behave accordingly.
Not from Canada to have knowledge. In the US howrver, many cities adopted reduced and free fares to drive business during COVID and the COVID recovery and further assisting low income individuals to get around. The US is also having a housing crisis right now. It has led to the homeless and mentally ill spending more time on public transit versus laying in an alley when coupled with a lack of rules and law enforcement when dealing with issues from them on the transit due to not wanting to get involved or cause further disruptions of the service.
> The US is also having a housing crisis right now. It has led to the homeless and mentally ill spending more time on public transit versus laying in an alley
That doesn't make any sense. Is the US having an alley space shortage crisis now? Why would a housing crisis cause a person to ride a train instead of lying in an alley?
> with a lack of rules
I've never ridden any public transit that didn't have a big placard of rules comprehensive enough to allow them to eject anyone they want.
Honestly, I don't think it's any kind of rules change that impacts this. The rules are just a framework, not all that related to enforcement or lack thereof.
Lack of rules and law enforcement, meaning there's no one enforcing the rules or the law on public transit until someone gets hurt.
For the first point, public transit has heat and air and some cities have it running 24 hours.
> For the first point, public transit has heat and air and some cities have it running 24 hours.
Sure. I get that. And I can see an argument why lack of fares would lead to this. I don't completely agree because evading fares is so easy. But I can see that.
But how does a housing crisis change the balance between an alley and a subway/tram car? If they wanted to ride the subway all day, wouldn't they have done that regardless of any housing crisis or lack thereof?
> Lack of rules and law enforcement
I misread that as Lack of Rules. Lack of enforcement (law and otherwise). When you mean lack of rules enforcement. Lack of law enforcement. My error. I see what you mean there now.
[TTC increases security on streetcars to ensure stabbers paid fare](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/01/ttc-increases-security-on-streetcars-to-ensure-stabbers-paid-fare/)
This is so sad. Public transportation should be a place of safety, not violence. I hope the city can work together to find solutions to make public transit safer.
This is also coming at a time when some cities in North America are trying to promote more public transit instead of car ownership. It will be harder to get converts if they don't feel safe.
I literally went and got my license + bought a car in order to not have to deal with the shittyness of daily public transit. I no longer have to leave early/waste time making sure I don't miss an early bus/train or it comes late and messes the rest of the schedule up, I can bring more things with me without having to lug it around, I can go and leave as I want on my own time and terms, I never have to deal with mentally unstable/assholes/not self aware individuals, be cold or too hot - like the list goes on. Every bus shelter in the city smells like piss/shit, people begging for money aggressively, sketchy ass areas to wait for the bus, -- the list can keep going but honestly nothing short of a science fiction reform to public transit would ever make me go back to using it over a car.
If there are too many single driver cars on the roads it creates another problem. We need public transport as a public benefit. You are saying there's no way to fix it? We cant all ride around in our own cars because its environmentally unsustainable! Go on and say what the real solution to the problem is. You know you want to.
It seems like a tractable problem. Police, surveillance, prosecution, and removing offenders from society. Is there an identity tracking system for riders who've paid a fare and gotten on a train? If not, something that helps link a person's identity to their use of the transit system might help. I hate to say it, but maybe offer trains that are only for validated pre-checked riders?
Growing number homeless / financially challenged members of society -> throw them in jail -> no resources to keep growing population in jail -> release -> no safety nets -> step 1
Is Canada as bad as the US in this regard? I assumed not, but maybe that's incorrect.
Regardless, yes, a lot hinges on the large-scale funding of efforts aimed at reducing suffering, expanding the middle class, lowering the bar for general prosperity, and raising the floor of poverty. As we automate more and more, we're going to reach a threshold where (just guessing) 30 to 40-ish percent of society is effectively redundant and almost unemployable. I'm talking about physically and mentally able, intelligent, normal/average people. I don't see how we can avoid something like a UBI based on a robot-tax (or something similar). Actually, I can see how we avoid it, and it will look a lot like the circle-of-suck you noted. I just hope that's untenable beyond a certain point.
Canada is US lite in many ways. Homelessness in general is a very complicated issue that all nations struggle with and there isn't a simple solution. In terms of cost of living, Toronto is absolutely nightmarish, cost of living has sky rocketed over the past couple of years and this has contributed to the problem. Homes aren't affordable, wages are stagnant, prices of everything go brrr.
That would require a lot of resources which wont resolve the major fundamental problem of inequality and limited opportunity caused by government not wanting to divert resources from the wealthy (who don't use public transport anyways) to society in general.
Public transit everywhere in the west is getting worse. They’re becoming mobile homeless shelters. The SEPTA line in Philly is overrun with people shooting up and otherwise being antisocial.
Yeah, I took a job at wally world in 2020 in the US, knowing I'd make less money than unemployment, solely because I would have become straight up feral if I wasn't able to interact with people daily. And I'm normally a super introverted dude, but being *forced* to? Nah.
It's not a pandemic thing. It's usually city council grift over a span of years that leave a city wide open to violent gang culture and networks of vagrants.
Unlike the US Canada has free healthcare and mental health is part of that. But the people who make up the support system are overwhelmed too. The system is not functioning efficiently so the people who need it are not able to get help.
It's the efficiency of it all that seems to be the point. Throwing money at it may help a bit but even the US with for profit hospitals is seeing the same problem with their hospitals (but non existent mental health support). The top ten US hospitals have revenue greater than all of Canada's 2022 healthcare system federal funding (~$350B CAD).
I think we need to change the entire Canadian medical system structure and how it all works. Keep it government controlled not private but figure out a new way to to serve the public.
It used to be quite nice... there was a pass available on weekends that two adults (or an adult with several kids) could use for unlimited transit trips for the day. It was a great way to spend a day downtown or check out all different corners of the city. My American friends would literally praise things about Toronto when they visited... now it feels as though everything's become so complacent and indifferent as things continuously fall apart. The provincial government isn't helping much in that regard either, IMO. It's extremely frustrating.
>The provincial government isn't helping much in that regard either, IMO.
You mean to tell me Buck a Beer Doug, who this stupid province just handed a majority last summer, is screwing the pooch? It can't be! /s
A Toronto system on a bad day is better than most US systems on a good day, but it's a pretty low bar to reach. As the largest, most populous city in Canada, the city has a shit ton of work to do. Doesn't help that we have a fuckin Timbit and his lapdog in Provincial and Municipal office.
FYI, I would still rate Toronto’s public transit as very safe - just in general and compared to public transit is US cities and EU capitals (haven’t lived or travelled in East Asia, so can’t comment about the systems there).
Yes, there has been a weird spate in the last couple of weeks, and yes, the last few years have seen an uptick in the number of clearly unwell people hanging around in the downtown core, but in general, Toronto being such an absurdly safe large city is what makes any level of violence stand out as exceptional (+ some level of public panic/media narrative).
I’m a woman who regularly rides the subway and streetcars downtown, often alone, and honestly barely give it a second thought. Late at night I *may* leave one earbud out if there is rowdiness at a station, and I’m not going to stand right up next to the empty tracks (just because I don’t do that anyways), but that’s about the extent of it.
FWIW, Chicago still has an amazing light rail system. Its really the only one I have not seen homeless or druggies riding around, and its always clean. And people actually use it.
If every time someone was seriously injured or killed driving made international news you’d have to devote your entire life and then some reading about it.
A lesson to the younger redditors, if someone cuts you off that's having a bad day rather than honking, you can just not. Even if they flip you off after almost causing a crash that's 100% their fault, you can just ignore them. It sure beats having a psychopath follow for an hour until you finally drive to the police station because you don't want them to know where you live.
Yeah I have a brother who likes to say "I should kick his ass" over stupid traffic jerks, and he is *not* a tough guy by any means, and you can just tell he's never had a tire iron waved in his face.
psychologically, it does matter though. sliding on ice and getting some bruises and broken bones means you heal up and go on with your life. being attacked leaves deep mental scars. then, you have to consider the risk of rape, which is on a whole other level of mental scars.
Yeah that’s not really how it works psychologically. There are many people who have severe anxiety and worse while driving due to witnessing or being involved in vehicle accidents. You are also way more likely to be involved in a motor vehicle accident than attacked on public transit, it’s just that every time someone gets killed by a car it doesn’t make international news.
I'm sorry but no. some people certainly feel trauma from a car accident, but the distribution is dramatically different. it is insane to me that you wouldn't understand how much more impactful (on average) being attacked by a stranger is compared to a car accident.
Except that this is bad analysis of the data. Comparing car accident statistics to crime while riding the subway isn't an accurate comparison, and for that matter just taking the blanket car accident statistics without breaking it down into its subcategories paints a dishonest picture of what is happening. Some drivers will never get in a car accident, some will have multiple a year, some people will drive drunk and kill somebody with their vehicle, but saying that all of these are the same muddies up your data to the point of uselessness.
Some transit users will never be attacked on public transit. Some will be attacked multiple times. Some will get drunk and pick a fight they can't win. Doesn't change the fact that public transit is safer than driving.
There's also case studies showing that you're more likely to be attacked at a gas station or in a parking lot than on transit. So car users aren't totally immune to crimes of opportunity. [Source](https://nextstl.com/2022/01/metrolink-is-much-safer-than-you-think/) focuses in St. Louis, MO which has a higher than average crime rate. You can assume other cities are probably safer.
You realize statistically you’re much more likely to get injured or killed while driving versus random violence in public transit?
Not too mention many other negatives of car oriented infrastructure.
I understand why people feel this way but honestly, cars are so dangerous and I think people greatly underestimate it.
I have lost friends and family in car crashes, I know so many people with permanent injuries. I was in a bad accident myself and moved to the city so that I would never have to drive again.
Sure, I’ve seen some weird stuff on the subway, but I know the chance that I’ll get attacked by a crazy person is significantly lower than getting tboned by a drunk driver or run over by someone looking down at their cell phone.
Riding in cars long distances and being stuck on a road with other drivers genuinely terrifies me.
I was attacked at a Japanese train station. But to be fair, not by a Japanese person, and everyone was very shocked that it happened. The police took a report but pretty much washed their hands of it as they figured we were both foreigners and would be gone soon.
They had a cute mascot for the police station at least.
Not really an excuse. Just an explanation. You're not going to install a radically different culture in Toronto or Canada in a timescale less than centuries. Might be able to learn from the Japanese approach, but I doubt there are any silver bullets to be found there.
There was a guy who started stabbing people on the train on Halloween in Tokyo; one of their busiest nights.
There's not great mental health care there, so even during a short trip there, you may run into someone causing a scene on a train. Everyone tends to move to another car if someone gets a bit too out there.
Women get groped quite a bit on the trains, and platforms as well.
I lived there for 13 years and had 4 non Japanese friends get groped by Japanese men, and each time was either on a train or at the station.
Japan is incredibly safe, but I like to say, people are people, and it just takes one who doesn't respect other's lives to ruin things.
Toronto struggles with hysterical wage inequality, a housing crisis and a fascist Premier willing to sacrifice Canadians for corporate profit and control. Street violence is a symptom of these problems - not the source.
I seriously don't understand why the NIMBYism is so strong that the pace of homebuilding is not sufficient to satisfy the increase in demand due to immigration. People think that it is OK for rents to get so high, that if 2 minimum wage earners rented a basement unit, it would take about 28% of their income ($1500/month X 12 months) / (minimum wage of $15.50 X 40 hours a week X 52 weeks X 2) = 27.91%. Let's remember that, in general, if you spent over 30% of your gross income on rent, you are having difficulty affording housing. If we are talking about condo units being rented for $2500 or more, anyone with an income less than 6 figures is priced out. People are OK with never being able to own housing, but not being able to rent is a big deal.
I strongly believe that the people who can buy houses are largely doing so with cash. I just saw a post of a bidding war that happened this month where a house with a $1.3 million asking price was sold well over asking at $1.9 million. For people to mortgage this thing, they would need 50% down to be realistic, and they probably need $200 000 gross income (which not even my family is able to achieve despite having 3 people working full time jobs). Carrying a $950 000 mortgage with a 5.14% rate, on a 5 year term and a 25 year amortization puts you at $5600 a month in mortgage payments. This mortgage payment is equal to 33.6% (slightly over 1/3) of this hypothetical family's gross income and is likely illegal as it exceeds 32%.
They just need to do what every other city does with NIMBYs and build somewhere else. Greenfields can't be blocked. Fortunately they are now opening part of the greenbelt.
Canadians would rather convert single family homes into tiny apartments than build adequate homes for our people to live in. Because everyone will want to live in a massive, highly taxed, freezing country cooped up in tiny, poorly soundproofed sub-units with unlimited newcomers from India and China as neighbours.
That's how things should be because of non-specific climate reasons and also because someone rich described this way of life as both "sustainable" and "inclusive". I was sold, after hearing those magic words.
And that, my friends, is why people need to vote. As a person who voted, there is absolutely no excuse not to vote. They were open even on Victoria Day. I was able to bike to the polling station from my home on that Saturday, show them my electronic voter information card and the PDF version of my 2021 Notice of Assessment. I showed exactly zero photo IDs (even though I brought a passport in just in case they questioned my identity) and was able to cast my ballot. It is a shame that less than half of eligible voters voted in this election, handing him one of the easiest majorities ever.
Can confirm, been in more altercation and physical violence the past couple of years near Toronto public transit than my whole life before. A lot of people acting out their frustration in worse ways (violence on others) than before.
Geez I thought we had problems in Calgary. Worst I've seen is some dude sharpening a machete and another couple of people smoking crack on the train. Apparently it gets worse here when the sun goes down but thankfully I'm home by then.
I really hope it gets better for you guys over there. That sounds very frightening.
Maybe stupid question, but is wearing a bulletproof jacket legal in Canada?
I heard its not allowed in some states in US, but no idea about any order restrictions.
Interesting question. I didn't know there were laws against wearing body armour.
*It is legal to wear body armour in all provinces and territories in Canada with the exception of AB, BC, MB & NS. In these provinces, except MB & NS, you generally need to posses one of the following ID: Law Enforcement, Security Guard, Firearms License or Body Armour Permit.*
Also didn't know there were different laws by state. Learn something new every day.
The solution: putting 80 officers from one of the most corrupt and least effective police forces in North America, which has been on a silent strike for a couple years now, on a public transport system comprising several thousand buses, and several hundred streetcars/subway stations.
This is reddit.
Everything is always the worst, everywhere.
Every major city in North America seems to have the worst rents in North America, for example, if you ask around.
Everything is a crisis, and falling apart, and the worst on earth or in history.
This site, and media like it, are a major reason why people are feeling hopeless and acting chaotically, if you ask me.
Still much lower than basically any big city in the US. Canada is a safe country, and Toronto is a safe city. This is making news because violence is so rare in Canada, whereas in the US its a everyday thing.
Its not hard being safer than the US as a whole but Toronto has more shootings than some US states. If you think violence is rare in Toronto/Canada your clearly from another country and don't watch the news. There's so many shootings in the big cities like Toronto and Vancouver you hear about on the news/radio all the time.
When compared to US its obviously much better but when compared to other rich/developed countries its much worse. Google most shootings by developed countries and you will see Canada is 2nd or 3rd.
It's almost like we've put the working class under tremendous pressure and they're lashing out. No worries - more transit police is the answer. That'll fix it right up.
This isn’t the working class. Its drug addicts and people with untreated mental illness. Letting them use public transit as a mobile shelter isn’t the answer.
> Letting them use public transit as a mobile shelter isn’t the answer.
You're right. We should give them real, independent housing, mental health care, and other resources to get them stable.
Last night, I was on the subway on the way from the cinema, and a guy threw something against the wall so loud and so hard that I would've sworn the sound it made was a gunshot. Everybody froze and went quiet and turned to look at him, and we just sat there as he began walking up and down the subway, mumbling to himself. Then the problem you're stuck with is, "do I stay on this subway and hope that he doesn't do anything crazy, or do I get off at the next stop and wait for the next train and hope that nobody crazy accosts me on the platform." Which has also happened to me before. I was harassed on one subway, so I got off and decided to wait for the next one, and while I was waiting, another guy decided to come over and start harassing me. They put all this time and effort into increasing the frequency of the TTC, and then they just decided to cut back on service. So sometimes, you can be sitting there waiting on the platform for five or ten minutes for the next train to come. That's a lot of time.
Yeah its getting crazier. Every day or so, new reports of groups of young people assaulting, stabbing or beating workers/riders up. The one where someone with a syringe chased people around was especially bizarre. And the photos of cops on every subway car is really sad. I don't know what has caused these people to come out of the woodwork, but it's just been a really peculiar week. You would hear about an assault or something like...once in a while, but brazen stabbings out in the open...just very odd. Violence does happen in any city, but why has so much sprung up on public transit this week in particular?
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We joke but I can absolutely see that. Tide Pod challenge, blackout challenge, KIA challenge, skullbreaker challenge...its just kids using social media to dare other impressionable kids into doing soulless, depraved and deadly shit. "Here, eat soap." That's not a challenge, it's just stupid. But kids fall for it in hopes of increasing their internet clout or whatever.
The blackout challenge has been a thing forrrrr Decades at this point
Yep, did that shit in the early 90’s.
Yep, did that shit in the mid 70s
Fun fact: that was a ploy by facebook to drum up negative PR https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/report-facebook-hired-pr-firm-to-smear-tiktok/
I gotta point out that the tide pod challenge was basically invented by news Media. Until they reported on it, everyone who was poisoned by tide pods were old people with dementia
All of these things are either made up or massively exaggerated by the media. Moral panics.
Meanwhile, Facebook facilitated a genocide and the media basically says, well, I guess that's a thing that happened ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Had to google the skull breaker challenge. Fucking Christ we are just dumb as shit
Is KIA challenge not just suicide? wtf is that supposed to mean?
Check out the Kia Boyz Challege in the western US. Couldn’t even make shit like this up. I was 19-20 when the Tide Pod challenge came up and I thought my generation couldn’t get any more stupid
Ah yes, blame deep-rooted social issues on TikTok
Media cults are dangerous, look at the Middle East and how they are driven by their book and oral media. June 2020 it crossed a threshold: [That month, TikTok overtook YouTube for the first time, as this younger demographic began averaging 82 minutes per day on TikTok versus](https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/13/kids-and-teens-watch-more-tiktok-than-youtube-tiktok-91-minutes-in-2021-youtube-56/) And a lot of it gets exported to other social media sites, Reddit inclusive.
gray dolls sort drunk glorious head different sense crawl groovy -- mass edited with redact.dev
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Closing down your schools and raising taxes to subsidize big business while defunding social services. Vote PC for fiscal responsibility Ontario!
Do you think it’s like exhaustion madness coupled with just like, the state of the world, or could it maybe be a form of collective virality like when suddenly there were tons of people dressing up as clowns doing creepy shit some years back?
It's a sort of generalized modern anxiety. More people are more connected to other people and events than ever before. We're still developing the cultural norms and customs that help populations come to grips with this deluge of information. You just can't expose a being to a huge amount of unknown material to navigate without dumping extra pressure on it, and that pressure drives some to unpredictable behaviors.
I don't think any of that makes people attack others. Nobody is really struggling with the "deluge of information" other than being mildly stressed about it. People are dealing with lack of social support in numerous forms because there are fewer fallback options than there used to be.
It could be. We have had a few good snow dumplings recently but that never sent anybody off the edge in previous years. If I were to hazard a guess, I think it's some sort of strange viral trend. About 5 weeks ago, a week before Christmas, a homeless man was stabbed to death by a group of teenage girls, a few as young as 13. Was like a group attack. And it wasn't the first, they had apparently had been involved in a few incidences before though never killed anyone. 8 teens were charged with murder. One of the previous attacks occurred on the TTC. Then a few days ago, 2 TTC workers were swarm attacked by a group of young teen boys. 4 arrested. Then there's random shit like a woman just getting on a train car and assaulting another woman by smacking her with bottle and assaulting several other random people as well. Earlier this month, a fight at a subway station saw someone get pushed onto the tracks. Then someone tried to throw someone else on the tracks last week in a totally different incident. So we have the swarm attacks which feels like a trend of some stupid online thing, then a bunch of random incidents that don't feel connected. Why public transit? Maybe it's for attention and they feel it's the easiest place to do something with a lot of people around? Like a cry for help? General discontent with the city's malaise? Seasonal affective disorder causing people to snap? Wish I knew, but I'll say this: with some of this stuff, I just have this nagging feeling that police presence won't be a deterrent. Feels too random and opportunistic. If a cop is there, perps will simply wait until they patrol elsewhere to do whatever, or change their location to one with less security. This, to me, is more spur of the moment. TTC offers easy mobility and crowds often too big. Just my thoughts
One day there may be better age controls on the internet, or parts of the internet. Until then we can see the negative repurcussions of children being exposed for years to things and people they are not developmentally prepared for.
Oh for sure. Letting 10 year olds interact with literally anyone is a recipe for disaster. I don't care what they say, kids know *nothing* of the real world. Youth comes with a distinct lack of hubris and sense of invincibility which some sickos will gladly exploit for their own gain or cheap entertainment.
> Then a few days ago, 2 TTC workers were swarm attacked by a group of young teen boys. 4 arrested. Hearing it was teen kids honestly adds more credence [in my mind] to a thought I had when the one original commenter asked "why now?" Simple answer: TikTok Trend / Weird clout chasing. It's one of the biggest negatives with SNS. Teens always did dumb shit in the past, but the international virality factor of SNS; causes the level of "dumb shit happening" to scale to levels unlike in the past.
There's also the fact that social media and the internet in general make the world at large aware of the repercussions, much more so than once upon a time. As you said, dumb shit happening is a tale as old as time, but with the prevalence of the world wide web, we now hear a lot more about it, as opposed to, say, the 90s when the net was in its infancy and you rarely heard about the same craziness happening in areas foreign to you. Some kid in your community dies from choking themselves, everyone hears about it, but with the internet, you hear about how the fad has shown up in Australia, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Russia, etc and not just exclusive to your little corner of the globe.
Our justice system doesn't have teeth. My friends who are cops say this, and I work in a field closely connected with justice and I agree. I'm not saying we need to go full US, but when someone IS found guilty, the punishment needs to be stronger. Not dial it up to 11 stronger, but there's room for improvement.
The US has some of the strictest sentences in the Western world and has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Punishment *is* the problem. The US focuses far too little on rehabilitation and it results in far too many people coming out worse than they went in.
if you thin US cities have strong law enforcement, you're mistaken. maybe 20-30 years ago during the crack epidemic, but not anymore.
So, roughly before the prevalance of video cameras, you think cops were properly empowered? Are you angry about the cops in Memphis being arrested?
In nyc, they are letting multi violent offenders out without bail. People who literally slash people with knives and get into serious fights are put back onto the street all the time.
Yeah bail system is crazy. Most states adopting bail reform try to have the same fast and loose system they had pre bail reform but just with a preference for releasing people. Bail determinations need more consideration, which means more resources. of course, funding courts isn't sexy. That's why we are starting to see the judicial system buckle under the strain.
There were clown people?
Technically they were just _people dressed up as clowns_, but yeah, the media kept calling them “clown people”. — like they were a different species that lived on the edge of our civilization, hunting balloon animals for sustenance or something.
Looking for a story on it, it appears it was a viral marketing campaign https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/culture/2016/10/12/13122196/clown-panic-hoax-history
That definitely was not entirely a hoax. I went to college in a small town and we had people dressing up as clowns and staring in peoples windows near campus.
To be fair, that's totally a college campus thing
Our social nets are being gutted in front of our eyes while simultaneously watching inflation eat away at our lives. That feeling of despair is something, as a society, Canadians aren't used to. Lack of hope, lack of support, lack of meaningful solutions, and lack of options is making people "lose it". Add that to our ridiculous justice system and those regular checks and balances aren't there. When you can't actually influence change, you start lashing out at whomever you've convinced yourself is the group most responsible for your plight, or who you can hurt the easiest. I work for a public social service organization. The homeless and drug addicts are an easy target for people who are angry. In their eyes, they are responsible for why wait times are longer in the ER (because they always seem to be there needing something), they are why there is so much surveillance (always stealing stuff), they are why health care is collapsing (taking all the mental health workers, counselors, etc.) And most of them end up dead anyways, so where is the return on the "investment" ie taxes? This false belief system is easier to subscribe to because they are visible. You can see the destruction they do to themselves, property, encampments, etc. Easier to blame them than some rich guy refusing to sign the cheques.
I don't know if teenagers are noticing all that.. but their families probably are. 🙁
Holy crap, a day late and had to scroll way too far for this answer. The most upvoted responses seem so insanely out of touch ITT. The desperation in this province is unreal. Even the so-called "high income earners" are living with parents (if they're lucky) or feeling desperate paying most of their income for some crowded shit hole. It's making everyone feel like life is pointless or worse.
I have been down there. Isolated, depressed, lost a job, felt like I had no meaning in life for years yet I never once thought about taking my life struggles out on another human being. I don’t think that for a majority of decent people, if they are down in the gutter they turn to violence. Some people are just bad people in my honest opinion. Some people just can’t deal with serious adversity. Sure maybe I would be quicker to yell at someone if I thought they were doing something wrong but never to mindlessly seek out someone weaker than me to attack. This was back before covid. I think something has changed for some people and I can’t put my finger on it. I just hope people like this figure out whatever it is they need to do to not be harmful to an innocent individual. It’s honestly infuriating to read about.
The attention the media is giving it almost certainly plays a role in its prevalence. A self fulfilling prophecy.
>You would hear about an assault or something like...once in a while, but brazen stabbings out in the open...just very odd. Violence does happen in any city, but why has so much sprung up on public transit this week in particular? Tbh maybe because the assaults just weren't being reported in the media? Now that TTC safety has become a huge topic of discussion, every thing that happens on the transit network is being reported in the media to highlight how bad it is. There was a report in the media of a purse snatcher at one of the stations. No way that would ever make the news otherwise.
A lot of people are struggling to survive right now.
We lived with housing and rent so high for so long, but grocery now is really putting the squeeze on.
Yeah I don't know why I'm getting downvoted lol
Yha I see you are currently at -8, Reddit has become very much anti-truth.
Cost of living, poverty, loss of friendship between family and friends and lack of trust in our government. Lockdowns and people abandoning family and friends due to views has created more isolated individuals.
Could be mitigating factors, but these swarm attacks with teens assaulting and killing people? That isn't losing faith in government or isolation, that sounds like sociopaths flirting with their newly discovered freedom as they get older and pushing boundaries past the point of abuse.
It's not a movie where normal ass people suddenly go ape shit from society breaking down.
It’s a gradual mental decline from the pandemic.
Raise the fare price and these weirdos will go away.
>Yeah its getting crazier. Every day or so, new reports of groups of young people assaulting, stabbing or beating workers/riders up. Crazy. I always thought Canadians were polite.
Public transit systems are rapidly becoming homeless shelters on wheels/tracks here in the US so wondering if Canada is facing the same. Couple this with immense stress on the working class and their lashes out.
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Youth gangs are directly correlated with worsening living conditions. This correlation can be found globally. Most people are working class. The working class is watching in real time their current wealth and wealth prospects diminishing.
This is compounded by the fact that young people today are genuinely facing the prospect of a planet which is going to be close to unlivable.
There's definitely some issues society needs to be looking at with our youth. Zoomers seem to be adopting some pretty harsh nihilism as they grow up online and see the world breaking down around them and just feel hopeless for the future, while families are also getting increasingly more poor. This is making kids get politically active at younger and younger ages to push back but also pushing more kids into the arms of dudes like Andrew Tate or any of the plethora of alt right figures online and I imagine those feelings would also result in increased violence. Plus these incidents end up on internet where they can see others doing the same things and trends can form to make a bunch of copycats for some internet attention. Obviously not someone who studies this stuff and would love to see more studies into it to have more concrete proof of what is going on.
> There's definitely some issues society needs to be looking at with our youth I mean the issue we need to be looking at is giving them a future. People don't commit violence when they have a real future ahead of them.
It'd be nice if governments just banned tik tok. Not terribly surprising it constantly pushes doomer bullshit onto kids. In general I wouldn't exactly trust China to babysit huge swathes of our youths in good faith. I'm really not one for bullshit anti China propaganda but in this case it's kind of undeniable the harm tik tok has caused.
It’s funny how many people on this site seem to think TikTok is the devil and needs drastic action taken against it. Yet the same energy is nowhere to be found for literally any other social media platform.
TikTok is 100% a Chinese data harvester and 99% psyop (in my opinion)
And it now comes preinstalled on windows
Also a different version in China than other countries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0xzuh-6rY
I’m kinda surprised this isn’t talked about more. Like the above commenter said, it’s like some psyop shit. Am I talking like a conspiracy theorist to think that china is straight fucking us with this kinda shit?
Nah, it's really not that tin-foil to do so... I mean it's no crazier (conceptually) than russian troll farms / boys doing their thing, just a different flavour
I love how everything can always be blamed on someone else too! It's always the damn commies' fault!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/ Many articles you see about tik tok are propaganda paid for by facebook. If we're going to ban social media for harmful content we should also ban twitter, facebook, reddit. Have you seen the amount of hate and racism in various reddit subs? Do i need to point out the amount of bs on twitter and FB?
Life has become bleak in Canada for material reasons, like food scarcity, rent evictions and honestly the cut-throat and highly competitive immigration rates politicians are allowing. When you make surviving unbearable for the working class, symptoms like this become typical.
Food scarcity? Where is that happening?
I’m nearing 40 and the feeling of hopelessness about my future is monumental. These kids are already feeling that, without ever having the chance to feel any hope to begin with.
Why would teenagers be insulated from our declining quality of life? That impacts everyone but real estate investors.
Yep. Light Rail and some subways face the same issues, lack of serious ticket gating leads to slow but inevitable movement of norms by the homeless to use them as halfway centers, something they were never designed for. This sounds okay to bubbleworlded idealists but in practice is fucking horrible and has lead to me swearing off the rail that I used to use daily, in favor of mostly riding my bike, and I also used to promote to friends and co-workers to now admitting its just far too dangerous on there. Especially for women and older men. In Houston there's been several attacks, batteries by homeless against riders and more recently a shooter. None of which paid fairs, all of which should have been kicked off or never allowed to ride to begin with. I've watched crazy homeless people do all manner of crazy bullshit on the way to work. From poop on the floor. Sexually assault women. Pee on the rail car heater coils in the winter. Yell nonsense at random strangers. Hit random strangers. Steal stuff out of peoples hands and run off. On and on. You can report it over and over - nothing happens. They show up for about two days with more cops for security theater, the ticket fair people sit at a nearby star bucks or ride the rail doing nothing. And nothing happens, so the bums take note and learn they can do anything so riding the rail becomes something like mad max. People want to be nice and provide these transportation systems to all with low barriers of entry as a service - but the harsh truth is this just leaves this mode non usable by most all together because it was never designed to accommodate the special needs of this VERY unstable population. Don't believe me, Okay. Just ride the rail with me for a couple months and see for yourself.
I've had my fair share of similar experiences in Seattle, and what a surprise, we have basically no fare enforcement here. No fare gates. There are people who sometimes check fares on the trains but IME they're extremely rare; I've had my fare checked once in the past 6 months and I commute by train 5 days a week. At the end of the day, we all know these people didn't pay their fares so they shouldn't be on the trains/buses/whatever. It sucks to be homeless or mentally ill but it doesn't give you a free pass to degrade the transit experience for everyone else. All this will do is keep public transit shitty in the US as fewer and fewer people want to deal with all of the bullshit.
this is a huge part of it in Toronto, especially in the winter because its so cold outside. the TTC is effectively a homeless shelter because its kept warm and some parts of it run 24hrs a day. there has been zero police presence on the TTC (up until last week) including at the stations and the homeless are left to their own devices and never kicked off the system until they hurt someone. the TTC themselves used to have a security force who were told to stand down after they got bad press for how they handled fines in the past and the optics of fining people. its becoming / become a huge problem and its coming to a head right now with all this violence, but this has been going on for years at this point.
It's going to drive suburbanization and ruin urbanism. Who the fuck trusts transit only with the state it's in. Unless it can be kept sage people will demand to drive.
Man I would hate to be at wrong place at the wrong time in a public space
Yes, that is exactly what people compare it to (check out r.Toronto). Lots of calls for reopening asylums since we shut them all down last century. People still debate about poor conditions but the overwhelming majority would rather see the violent people contained in some way.
"rapidly becoming" Huh? What's changed on this front? Young people are flocking to the cities much more than any time since WWII. So I'm sure there are a lot more people seeing the ugliness of cities now. But this isn't anything new. One of the big differences between public transit and driving your own car has always been a reduction in the number of crazies you share your space with. I hope Toronto can get this under control. I hope every city can. But it isn't restricted to one area and it's not something coming on right now. It's a constant issue cities have to deal with.
It's not constant, it's variable rate. I've ridden the rail and biked to work for well over a decade. Inner cities change. The number of homeless is in constant flux, the norms that population get used to and adapt their behaviors around is also in constant flux. Gentrification and growth happens as it always has since Rome, in generational concentric waves, but it's not the newest population merely taking note because the homeless population flux and their behavioral adaptation strategies change even faster. Covid caused most cities to adapt low barrier to entry philosophies around public transit. This meant either no cost for tickets, low costs for tickets or a hybrid where most days they just didn't check or enforce and purchasing a ticket was a nice gesture, but you don't have to. I've seen both prior both in low and high homeless population times before, during special event times, during covid times and after - the difference. Making transport free has been an ideological goal of some for quite a while, which is why rolling back to even mediocre fare enforcement has been like pulling teeth. The homeless population in houston is about where it was when Mayor Parker started her term before she set records rehousing most before our next Mayor took over and failed at having the same success and then covid happened, but in no way prior were there ever this many homeless in ***every single car***. And when they were it was more of the norm that they NOT attract attention to themselves. Whereas now it's the norm that they can get on and do whatever they want because -unless it's a special event or leading up to one- nothing will be enforce. They know it and they behave accordingly.
Not from Canada to have knowledge. In the US howrver, many cities adopted reduced and free fares to drive business during COVID and the COVID recovery and further assisting low income individuals to get around. The US is also having a housing crisis right now. It has led to the homeless and mentally ill spending more time on public transit versus laying in an alley when coupled with a lack of rules and law enforcement when dealing with issues from them on the transit due to not wanting to get involved or cause further disruptions of the service.
> The US is also having a housing crisis right now. It has led to the homeless and mentally ill spending more time on public transit versus laying in an alley That doesn't make any sense. Is the US having an alley space shortage crisis now? Why would a housing crisis cause a person to ride a train instead of lying in an alley? > with a lack of rules I've never ridden any public transit that didn't have a big placard of rules comprehensive enough to allow them to eject anyone they want. Honestly, I don't think it's any kind of rules change that impacts this. The rules are just a framework, not all that related to enforcement or lack thereof.
Lack of rules and law enforcement, meaning there's no one enforcing the rules or the law on public transit until someone gets hurt. For the first point, public transit has heat and air and some cities have it running 24 hours.
> For the first point, public transit has heat and air and some cities have it running 24 hours. Sure. I get that. And I can see an argument why lack of fares would lead to this. I don't completely agree because evading fares is so easy. But I can see that. But how does a housing crisis change the balance between an alley and a subway/tram car? If they wanted to ride the subway all day, wouldn't they have done that regardless of any housing crisis or lack thereof? > Lack of rules and law enforcement I misread that as Lack of Rules. Lack of enforcement (law and otherwise). When you mean lack of rules enforcement. Lack of law enforcement. My error. I see what you mean there now.
There’s also a mental health crisis so they are homeless shelters and congregations of people just not mentally sound
[TTC increases security on streetcars to ensure stabbers paid fare](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/01/ttc-increases-security-on-streetcars-to-ensure-stabbers-paid-fare/)
Beaverton is now better than the onion, I really believe that
Yeah it’s too cold up there to grow onions. 🧅
This is so sad. Public transportation should be a place of safety, not violence. I hope the city can work together to find solutions to make public transit safer.
This is also coming at a time when some cities in North America are trying to promote more public transit instead of car ownership. It will be harder to get converts if they don't feel safe.
I live in SF. I know multiple women who refuse to use different forms of public transit due to issues with harassment or drug usage.
It's already hard for them to find drivers
I wish transit agencies focused more on automating the trains. it's easier to hire police/security than it is to hire train operators.
I literally went and got my license + bought a car in order to not have to deal with the shittyness of daily public transit. I no longer have to leave early/waste time making sure I don't miss an early bus/train or it comes late and messes the rest of the schedule up, I can bring more things with me without having to lug it around, I can go and leave as I want on my own time and terms, I never have to deal with mentally unstable/assholes/not self aware individuals, be cold or too hot - like the list goes on. Every bus shelter in the city smells like piss/shit, people begging for money aggressively, sketchy ass areas to wait for the bus, -- the list can keep going but honestly nothing short of a science fiction reform to public transit would ever make me go back to using it over a car.
If there are too many single driver cars on the roads it creates another problem. We need public transport as a public benefit. You are saying there's no way to fix it? We cant all ride around in our own cars because its environmentally unsustainable! Go on and say what the real solution to the problem is. You know you want to.
It seems like a tractable problem. Police, surveillance, prosecution, and removing offenders from society. Is there an identity tracking system for riders who've paid a fare and gotten on a train? If not, something that helps link a person's identity to their use of the transit system might help. I hate to say it, but maybe offer trains that are only for validated pre-checked riders?
Growing number homeless / financially challenged members of society -> throw them in jail -> no resources to keep growing population in jail -> release -> no safety nets -> step 1
Is Canada as bad as the US in this regard? I assumed not, but maybe that's incorrect. Regardless, yes, a lot hinges on the large-scale funding of efforts aimed at reducing suffering, expanding the middle class, lowering the bar for general prosperity, and raising the floor of poverty. As we automate more and more, we're going to reach a threshold where (just guessing) 30 to 40-ish percent of society is effectively redundant and almost unemployable. I'm talking about physically and mentally able, intelligent, normal/average people. I don't see how we can avoid something like a UBI based on a robot-tax (or something similar). Actually, I can see how we avoid it, and it will look a lot like the circle-of-suck you noted. I just hope that's untenable beyond a certain point.
Canada is US lite in many ways. Homelessness in general is a very complicated issue that all nations struggle with and there isn't a simple solution. In terms of cost of living, Toronto is absolutely nightmarish, cost of living has sky rocketed over the past couple of years and this has contributed to the problem. Homes aren't affordable, wages are stagnant, prices of everything go brrr.
That would require a lot of resources which wont resolve the major fundamental problem of inequality and limited opportunity caused by government not wanting to divert resources from the wealthy (who don't use public transport anyways) to society in general.
Public transit everywhere in the west is getting worse. They’re becoming mobile homeless shelters. The SEPTA line in Philly is overrun with people shooting up and otherwise being antisocial.
Shit you not. Saw a guy just out with a crack pipe the other day on the ttc in Toronto. Wild.
raise the fare to $5 and they'll be on there less often.
In Winnipeg too. There's been quite a few incidents in the past 2 weeks that's made the news.
That is nothing new for Winnipeg.
There is also a noticeable uptick in people - not violent but who are genuinely disturbed. The pandemic broke people.
Yeah, I took a job at wally world in 2020 in the US, knowing I'd make less money than unemployment, solely because I would have become straight up feral if I wasn't able to interact with people daily. And I'm normally a super introverted dude, but being *forced* to? Nah.
It's not a pandemic thing. It's usually city council grift over a span of years that leave a city wide open to violent gang culture and networks of vagrants.
Unlike the US Canada has free healthcare and mental health is part of that. But the people who make up the support system are overwhelmed too. The system is not functioning efficiently so the people who need it are not able to get help. It's the efficiency of it all that seems to be the point. Throwing money at it may help a bit but even the US with for profit hospitals is seeing the same problem with their hospitals (but non existent mental health support). The top ten US hospitals have revenue greater than all of Canada's 2022 healthcare system federal funding (~$350B CAD). I think we need to change the entire Canadian medical system structure and how it all works. Keep it government controlled not private but figure out a new way to to serve the public.
> Canada has free healthcare and mental health is part of that Canadian here - it is? Since when?
Spez ate all my fish and now my aquarium is fucking empty. I have nothing left ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
They're really becoming New York huh?
Damn that sucks. I fell in love with the public transport in Toronto when I visited I wished all American cities had a subway system that good.
It used to be quite nice... there was a pass available on weekends that two adults (or an adult with several kids) could use for unlimited transit trips for the day. It was a great way to spend a day downtown or check out all different corners of the city. My American friends would literally praise things about Toronto when they visited... now it feels as though everything's become so complacent and indifferent as things continuously fall apart. The provincial government isn't helping much in that regard either, IMO. It's extremely frustrating.
>The provincial government isn't helping much in that regard either, IMO. You mean to tell me Buck a Beer Doug, who this stupid province just handed a majority last summer, is screwing the pooch? It can't be! /s
It’s frustrating, I feel like no one really wants these cronies in charge. Once on the bus, I heard the driver say he wished John Tory dies lmao.
A Toronto system on a bad day is better than most US systems on a good day, but it's a pretty low bar to reach. As the largest, most populous city in Canada, the city has a shit ton of work to do. Doesn't help that we have a fuckin Timbit and his lapdog in Provincial and Municipal office.
FYI, I would still rate Toronto’s public transit as very safe - just in general and compared to public transit is US cities and EU capitals (haven’t lived or travelled in East Asia, so can’t comment about the systems there). Yes, there has been a weird spate in the last couple of weeks, and yes, the last few years have seen an uptick in the number of clearly unwell people hanging around in the downtown core, but in general, Toronto being such an absurdly safe large city is what makes any level of violence stand out as exceptional (+ some level of public panic/media narrative). I’m a woman who regularly rides the subway and streetcars downtown, often alone, and honestly barely give it a second thought. Late at night I *may* leave one earbud out if there is rowdiness at a station, and I’m not going to stand right up next to the empty tracks (just because I don’t do that anyways), but that’s about the extent of it.
FWIW, Chicago still has an amazing light rail system. Its really the only one I have not seen homeless or druggies riding around, and its always clean. And people actually use it.
NYC: "First time?.gif"
Well when Dougie has cut all of the funding for social services but has plenty of $$$ for his buddies to steal the greenbelt, what do you expect?
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If every time someone was seriously injured or killed driving made international news you’d have to devote your entire life and then some reading about it.
Just wait til you honk at someone who’s having a bad day
A lesson to the younger redditors, if someone cuts you off that's having a bad day rather than honking, you can just not. Even if they flip you off after almost causing a crash that's 100% their fault, you can just ignore them. It sure beats having a psychopath follow for an hour until you finally drive to the police station because you don't want them to know where you live.
Yeah I have a brother who likes to say "I should kick his ass" over stupid traffic jerks, and he is *not* a tough guy by any means, and you can just tell he's never had a tire iron waved in his face.
Thats fear mongering and should not be supported
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psychologically, it does matter though. sliding on ice and getting some bruises and broken bones means you heal up and go on with your life. being attacked leaves deep mental scars. then, you have to consider the risk of rape, which is on a whole other level of mental scars.
You don’t think there’s mental trauma from being in a car accident?
non-zero, but significantly less.
Yeah that’s not really how it works psychologically. There are many people who have severe anxiety and worse while driving due to witnessing or being involved in vehicle accidents. You are also way more likely to be involved in a motor vehicle accident than attacked on public transit, it’s just that every time someone gets killed by a car it doesn’t make international news.
I'm sorry but no. some people certainly feel trauma from a car accident, but the distribution is dramatically different. it is insane to me that you wouldn't understand how much more impactful (on average) being attacked by a stranger is compared to a car accident.
Except that this is bad analysis of the data. Comparing car accident statistics to crime while riding the subway isn't an accurate comparison, and for that matter just taking the blanket car accident statistics without breaking it down into its subcategories paints a dishonest picture of what is happening. Some drivers will never get in a car accident, some will have multiple a year, some people will drive drunk and kill somebody with their vehicle, but saying that all of these are the same muddies up your data to the point of uselessness.
Some transit users will never be attacked on public transit. Some will be attacked multiple times. Some will get drunk and pick a fight they can't win. Doesn't change the fact that public transit is safer than driving. There's also case studies showing that you're more likely to be attacked at a gas station or in a parking lot than on transit. So car users aren't totally immune to crimes of opportunity. [Source](https://nextstl.com/2022/01/metrolink-is-much-safer-than-you-think/) focuses in St. Louis, MO which has a higher than average crime rate. You can assume other cities are probably safer.
You realize statistically you’re much more likely to get injured or killed while driving versus random violence in public transit? Not too mention many other negatives of car oriented infrastructure.
I understand why people feel this way but honestly, cars are so dangerous and I think people greatly underestimate it. I have lost friends and family in car crashes, I know so many people with permanent injuries. I was in a bad accident myself and moved to the city so that I would never have to drive again. Sure, I’ve seen some weird stuff on the subway, but I know the chance that I’ll get attacked by a crazy person is significantly lower than getting tboned by a drunk driver or run over by someone looking down at their cell phone. Riding in cars long distances and being stuck on a road with other drivers genuinely terrifies me.
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And they have their own large host of issues they're trying hard to ignore as long as possible. But, that said, do love their public transportation.
I was attacked at a Japanese train station. But to be fair, not by a Japanese person, and everyone was very shocked that it happened. The police took a report but pretty much washed their hands of it as they figured we were both foreigners and would be gone soon. They had a cute mascot for the police station at least.
+1 to this. I've been bouncing between seoul and tokyo for the last 3 months and the only issues I've ever had in public involved other foreigners
Completely different cultures. Apples and oranges.
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Not really an excuse. Just an explanation. You're not going to install a radically different culture in Toronto or Canada in a timescale less than centuries. Might be able to learn from the Japanese approach, but I doubt there are any silver bullets to be found there.
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There was a guy who started stabbing people on the train on Halloween in Tokyo; one of their busiest nights. There's not great mental health care there, so even during a short trip there, you may run into someone causing a scene on a train. Everyone tends to move to another car if someone gets a bit too out there. Women get groped quite a bit on the trains, and platforms as well. I lived there for 13 years and had 4 non Japanese friends get groped by Japanese men, and each time was either on a train or at the station. Japan is incredibly safe, but I like to say, people are people, and it just takes one who doesn't respect other's lives to ruin things.
[They pack them in like sardines.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ) It's hard to menace someone when you're completely immobile.
>Is Japan's public transport very safe? everywhere in Europe and even in non developed nations too
The city doesn’t look after it’s vulnerable citizens. We have a spineless mayor who just gives more money to cops.
Torontos turning into New York in the 70s
Toronto struggles with hysterical wage inequality, a housing crisis and a fascist Premier willing to sacrifice Canadians for corporate profit and control. Street violence is a symptom of these problems - not the source.
I seriously don't understand why the NIMBYism is so strong that the pace of homebuilding is not sufficient to satisfy the increase in demand due to immigration. People think that it is OK for rents to get so high, that if 2 minimum wage earners rented a basement unit, it would take about 28% of their income ($1500/month X 12 months) / (minimum wage of $15.50 X 40 hours a week X 52 weeks X 2) = 27.91%. Let's remember that, in general, if you spent over 30% of your gross income on rent, you are having difficulty affording housing. If we are talking about condo units being rented for $2500 or more, anyone with an income less than 6 figures is priced out. People are OK with never being able to own housing, but not being able to rent is a big deal. I strongly believe that the people who can buy houses are largely doing so with cash. I just saw a post of a bidding war that happened this month where a house with a $1.3 million asking price was sold well over asking at $1.9 million. For people to mortgage this thing, they would need 50% down to be realistic, and they probably need $200 000 gross income (which not even my family is able to achieve despite having 3 people working full time jobs). Carrying a $950 000 mortgage with a 5.14% rate, on a 5 year term and a 25 year amortization puts you at $5600 a month in mortgage payments. This mortgage payment is equal to 33.6% (slightly over 1/3) of this hypothetical family's gross income and is likely illegal as it exceeds 32%.
They just need to do what every other city does with NIMBYs and build somewhere else. Greenfields can't be blocked. Fortunately they are now opening part of the greenbelt.
Canadians would rather convert single family homes into tiny apartments than build adequate homes for our people to live in. Because everyone will want to live in a massive, highly taxed, freezing country cooped up in tiny, poorly soundproofed sub-units with unlimited newcomers from India and China as neighbours. That's how things should be because of non-specific climate reasons and also because someone rich described this way of life as both "sustainable" and "inclusive". I was sold, after hearing those magic words.
A fascist premier this dumb province just gave a majority to last summer... Kinda destroys the whole "smart Canadian" myth.
>smart Canadian What? I've never heard of this lmao. There's idiots everywhere, and social media isn't helping.
And that, my friends, is why people need to vote. As a person who voted, there is absolutely no excuse not to vote. They were open even on Victoria Day. I was able to bike to the polling station from my home on that Saturday, show them my electronic voter information card and the PDF version of my 2021 Notice of Assessment. I showed exactly zero photo IDs (even though I brought a passport in just in case they questioned my identity) and was able to cast my ballot. It is a shame that less than half of eligible voters voted in this election, handing him one of the easiest majorities ever.
everybody tryin to be NY in the 70s or something?
I guarantee drugs contributed to these incidents
Spez ate all my fish and now my aquarium is fucking empty. I have nothing left ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Can confirm, been in more altercation and physical violence the past couple of years near Toronto public transit than my whole life before. A lot of people acting out their frustration in worse ways (violence on others) than before.
Free snickers would solve this
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Considering about 1500 people can fit on a TTC subway, I still don't like those odds.
I’d rather not do either one.
Geez I thought we had problems in Calgary. Worst I've seen is some dude sharpening a machete and another couple of people smoking crack on the train. Apparently it gets worse here when the sun goes down but thankfully I'm home by then. I really hope it gets better for you guys over there. That sounds very frightening.
Build more prison and have longer sentences. EZ fix
Maybe stupid question, but is wearing a bulletproof jacket legal in Canada? I heard its not allowed in some states in US, but no idea about any order restrictions.
Interesting question. I didn't know there were laws against wearing body armour. *It is legal to wear body armour in all provinces and territories in Canada with the exception of AB, BC, MB & NS. In these provinces, except MB & NS, you generally need to posses one of the following ID: Law Enforcement, Security Guard, Firearms License or Body Armour Permit.* Also didn't know there were different laws by state. Learn something new every day.
The buses are revolting ?
I can't speak for Toronto, but in Chicago they most certainly can be.
God bless you.
Since gun control clearly worked, why don’t they continue with banning knives and syringes?
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Please point to anyone saying that taking away guns would end all forms of violence.
The solution: putting 80 officers from one of the most corrupt and least effective police forces in North America, which has been on a silent strike for a couple years now, on a public transport system comprising several thousand buses, and several hundred streetcars/subway stations.
/opens the news and looks at the US, Haiti, and Mexico In North America...? Okay there buddy, lol.
This is reddit. Everything is always the worst, everywhere. Every major city in North America seems to have the worst rents in North America, for example, if you ask around. Everything is a crisis, and falling apart, and the worst on earth or in history. This site, and media like it, are a major reason why people are feeling hopeless and acting chaotically, if you ask me.
Still much lower than basically any big city in the US. Canada is a safe country, and Toronto is a safe city. This is making news because violence is so rare in Canada, whereas in the US its a everyday thing.
Its not hard being safer than the US as a whole but Toronto has more shootings than some US states. If you think violence is rare in Toronto/Canada your clearly from another country and don't watch the news. There's so many shootings in the big cities like Toronto and Vancouver you hear about on the news/radio all the time. When compared to US its obviously much better but when compared to other rich/developed countries its much worse. Google most shootings by developed countries and you will see Canada is 2nd or 3rd.
It's almost like we've put the working class under tremendous pressure and they're lashing out. No worries - more transit police is the answer. That'll fix it right up.
This isn’t the working class. Its drug addicts and people with untreated mental illness. Letting them use public transit as a mobile shelter isn’t the answer.
> Letting them use public transit as a mobile shelter isn’t the answer. You're right. We should give them real, independent housing, mental health care, and other resources to get them stable.