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Newsstand: January 28, 2010
Illustration by Roxanne Ignatius/Torontoist.
A Group of Seven painting is missing in Barrie! Police blame jaywalkers.
We’re kidding (we think), but in the atmosphere of the past couple days, it would be understandable to suspect that the cops working the Pedestrian Safety Blitz will lump all jaywalking pedestrians together and blame them for pedestrian safety problems, fairly or not. Police are also planning to crack down on drivers using cellphones, but the prevailing message yesterday was that people should feel guilty (and pay up) for not showing cars the same kind of respect they’d show a wild animal.
Christopher Hume, the Star‘s architecture and urban issues columnist, took a swing at police officers this morning when he accused their anti-jaywalking campaign of being a condescending waste of time. His suggestion: take the logic that pedestrians, who stand to be hurt whether or not they’re in the right, should just stay out cars’ ways, and apply it to cases of domestic violence. Bundled with the article is a sidebar in which a police officer does his best to make it sound as though all forms of jaywalking are against the law. In the case of “taking a shortcut across a quiet residential street in the dead of night,” though, he grudgingly allows that jaywalking is not “technically” a crime.
Punchy as it was, maybe Hume’s attack on the notion that jaywalking equals lawbreaking is penance for the front page of rage that ran in his paper yesterday, in which the Star assumed that jaywalking was illegal and characterized people who do it as “ruthless” outlaws. We’ll let you dash over to Spacing for the takedown-y goodness.
The TTC issued a dramatic apology for what Chair Adam Giambrone called “a couple of missteps over the last couple of months.” Giambrone appeared with TTC general manager Gary Webster to express embarrassment over a “perfect storm” of bad PR moments and pledge to deliver a…well, a ton of much-needed stuff. Included amongst said stuff are a Riders’ Bill of Rights, relief for monthly pass lineups, microphones that actually work in fare collector booths, customer service training for staff, and maybe even new uniforms. Out of the 31,532 complaints the TTC got last year, 5,513 (17%) were for surface vehicle delays, and 3,851 (12%) were about rude employees. And precisely one (0.00003%) was—we happen to know—about the tacky, liver-coloured uniforms that don’t even have bowties.
Also, it was confirmed that mildly unnerving fareboxes from those rumours we repeated on Tuesday are real. The clunky devices are meant to weed out fake Metropasses and tokens, and aren’t good for much else, least of all for looking at. If the new farebox is installed across the entire fleet, it will be in place just in time to be incompatible with the Presto smartcard that every other transit system in the region will be using by then.
The office of Canada’s Privacy Commissioner is considering more legal action against Facebook over concerns that their recent privacy policy changes didn’t go far enough. So just imagine what the reaction was like over there when they caught wind of the theft of three laptops that contained “names, addresses, birth dates and social insurance numbers of about 8,600 teachers, most of whom work at elementary schools for the Toronto District School Board.”