Louise and The Men of Transit

New Safety

There must be a better route. This line was a no-go.

The customers waiting for her help seemed to come to the same conclusion. They walked backwards, away from the crowd's swelling towards the doors. Louise shifted to stay alongside them.

Recall the numbers, she adjured herself. Seventy-two floated into her mind, rotated slowly, added a B to itself, exchanged its numerals, magnified themselves into twenty-seven as the B floated off into the distant recesses of her memory.

"I think it's twenty-seven," Louise said.

The customers wrinkled their foreheads at her. One queried: "Twenty-seven? No, no, Cherry." The other one nodded vociferously and echoed: "Cherry."

Louise's smile began to slip out of her eyes. The TTC rebranding was to numbers because numerals were easier, she repeated to herself. Numbers are easier. Like the five and dime was called by its numbers. Main highways are in numbers. Years are in numbers. Milestones are in numbers like her twenty-fifth birthday. "Twenty-five," she exclaimed.

"That is Cherry?" one asked tremulously.

"Yes!" Louise affirmed. "We have to go to twenty-five. And I know where it is!"

Louise led the two customers up the stairs, across the enclosed bridge, and down the stairs to the northbound platform and onto the half-empty Toronto Rocket Cars that had pulled in just as their feet touched the platform. They sat down on a five-seat bench, each seat separated from its neighbour with a strip of white plastic. She said, "We'll go to the Purple Line and catch the bus from there."

"The Purple Line?"

"I mean, Line Four," Louise said confidently, pleased with herself that the numbers were rolling off her tongue.

The customers stared up at the lit-up map over the doorway that faced them as the train rattled up the open trackway towards the tunnel to Eglinton. They looked at each other and began talking in a language foreign to Louise. She sat contented next to them, marvelling at how Toronto, a place of many languages, many ways, all came together on The TTC Way. The two customers shrugged at each other, glanced over at Louise, and sat quietly as the train carried on into Eglinton station, out of Eglinton, and up the tracks through two more stations until it reached the transfer point. As they rolled into Sheppard station, Louise leapt up, saying, "Here we are!"

"We want to go south," said one, unmoving.

"Near the water," said the other.

"Yes, yes," Louise nodded vigorously. "This will take us there. The TTC has many alternate routes for the convenience of customers. Our Chair extols the efficiency of our buses as part of complete transit. The southbound Toronto Rocket Cars are very full in rush hour. We're proud of how popular they are with our customers. I usually wait for three or four of them . . . maybe six," Louise chuckled, "before I can squeeze on and I have to admit," Louise said with a laugh, "I often miss my stop when I leave at this hour because I can't squeeze through to the doors. But that's okay, everyone gets off at Union and then I walk back up to King. But you need to get to your destination quickly, and you shouldn't have to walk. As part of complete transit, twenty-five is more efficient. It'll get you there."

"How do we know twenty-five is Cherry?" the first customer asked as they followed Louise off the Toronto Rocket Cars on to the dark-lit centre platform of Sheppard-Yonge station.

"Why don't you use the street name the bus is on?" The second one asked.

"That's much simpler," the first one added as the second nodded, her fine brown hair swinging in agreement. "Then we'd find our way."