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By Go Transit to Hamilton for the Day - Execution

Getting Started

I am awake at 5:30, not unusual for me. I have plenty of time to shave, shower, dress, pack a picnic box-lunch of eggs, cheese, tomato and popcorn. My options are open – picnic in a park or bring my lunch home if I’ve found a good café.

All my planning and map/route-reading boils down to this: a short list of trains-that-are-good-to-catch, and the bottom line is that I need not worry about schedules – just stroll down Bay Street to digest my breakfast (large bowl of oatmeal) and enjoy the cool calm air of the city as it too wakes up.

The little map reminds me to make an initial circumambulation of the Hamilton’s downtown core on Bay, Hunter, John, Wilson and York, with King and Main as reference points.

That’s it! Off I go!

The escalator from York Concourse is still broken. It ran for about two weeks after the concourse opened back in April 27th And hasn’t worked since. Welcome to the Pan-Am games. (There were men at work on it the next day; probably going to get it working for the Pan-Am games, local taxpayers not being important enough to warrant a functioning system)

I check the incoming balance on my card – there is $71.46 left on card but when I tap it (ostensibly to get on a GO Train) the balance drops to $66.16, so presumably the maximum charge for me on a GO Train is $5.30.

My balance at the end of the day was $54.20.

So under twenty dollars to ride by Go Transit to Hamilton and ride the Hamilton Street Railway for a part of the day.

More about this later; for the time being, I was thrown by the platform number “42” for the trip to Hamilton. Huh? I’m more used to seeing “27” and the like. Where is platform 42 – could be as far south as Toronto Islands. Nope! It’s over in the bus terminal, and since it was already five to seven when I first saw this announcement there was no way I was going to make it over there. Oh Well! Stick with Plan A – catch the 7:13.

If you look carefully at my rotten flash-less photo you’ll see the word “BUS” at the right-hand end of the centre block of the first line.

Who Knew? My “Lakeshore West GO Train and Bus Schedule” does not show this 7:00 a.m. bus.

Huh?

I understand that I will get the 7:13 but the ticket-wicket man can’t tell me what platform it will be; he says they never know what platform it will be on. I find this odd that scheduled trains do not have scheduled platform assignments.

We know that platforms are numbered up to 27, maybe beyond that, and there are at most seven GO lines feeding into the city plus two VIA trains and an Amtrak. Ten from twenty-seven left seventeen when I was in school.

The train pulls in; we stare through the northern side doors at the passengers staring through the southern-side doors. We are watching them wait for their doors to open so that they can get off, after which our doors will open so that we can get on. But our doors open before most people have gotten off anyway, so what’s the point of delaying the doors? I stand (im)patiently while thirty-two stragglers (I counted) wander down the stair well.

We are late leaving, but not late enough to get the train cancelled. How late? About five minutes. By the time we reached Mimico we were only three minutes late, according to my camera – which is suspect anyway

I enjoyed the view on the way to Aldershot; I saw the apartment where I rented at Long Branch, Port Credit locales and so on.

I found this platform canopy odd. My first thought was that, like glasshouses, there was some sort of crank arrangement to open the roof.

But closer inspection shows that everything is fixed rigidly anyway. And anyway, why crank open the roof of a wall-less shelter?

Perhaps somebody’s brother-in-law got the contract for the roofing.

We pull into Burlington and stop. And stay stopped. Why do I feel that we spend more time in the stations than rolling on the rails? Is it because we spend more time in the stations than rolling on the rails? Will I bring a stop-watch with me on my next trip?

Answers in the next GO Train Epic Journey.

We pull into Aldershot and over the P.A. system we hear “Take all personal belongings before leaving the train” or similar.

Why only at the terminal station? Why not at every stop? Otherwise why say it at all? Are only terminal passengers affected with terminal memory-loss?

I swing my bag over my shoulder, check that my head is screwed on (Thanks, Mum!) and hop off the train. I remember to swipe my card, but am at the wrong exit. There are no signs at exits saying the equivalent of “Chris you’re an idiot; you need to go the other way if you want to board a rubber-wheeled vehicle to Hamilton.

Or even a simple sign “Buses” with a big arrow.

8:52 and here I am having just left the Information Counter at the Hamilton Street Railway part of the Go Transit terminal. The nice lady has explained to me that they have run out of bus maps.

Run Out.

And no, there isn’t a spare one tucked away in someone’s desk drawer. I try my pleading-face “I am here to ride on the buses all day and need a map” to no avail.

Lady points behind her to the paper map pinned to the far wall, too far away for her to read it, and therefore too far away for anyone in my position to read it, and says “That’s the only one we’ve got”.

I resist the impulse to ask what good it is doing pinned high up on a wall where no one can read it without walking ten feet towards it, and move to the Information rack, having been invited to help myself to leaflets.

Leaflets are not a map, and leaflets, while they might assist in detailed planning of a trip, do not contribute towards the overall plan of a day’s trips.

For the first but not the last time today I form the impression that Hamilton Street Railway has raised incompetence to the level of an art

Back in 1968 I was using 80-column punched cards to program computers to do Inventory Control systems; that’s almost fifty years ago. Punched Cards. Honest!

And yet Hamilton Street Railway doesn’t employ a simple concept like “Re-order points” let alone mind-blowing complexity like “re-order quantity”. So here’s an overview:-

If you go through 500 maps per month and it takes 2 months to get an order filled, well that means you’ll go through twice five hundred maps while you are waiting for the order to be filled. So when your collection of maps drops to 1,000 it is time for you to place an order for more maps.

Trust me; it’s not a difficult concept.

I resist the impulse to shout “Fire!” and point to the far end of the hall, then rip this second map (she lied to me!) off the stand and scurry out the northern doors.

And yes, that’s a third map fixed to the front of a part of the kiosk that can’t be used now.

The nice lady reels off a stream of places where I might be able to dig up a map, but since I am a visitor to the city and she is not, place names like “Lacks”, “Lecks”, “Licks”, “Locks” and “Lucks” mean absolutely nothing to me as would “Mount Lawley Subway” to you, if you were visiting Perth (it’s not a subway at all, it’s a bridge, and trains go OVER it, not UNDER it, and ... but you get the idea)

I begin to wander the streets in search of a Hamilton Street Railway Transit Map. I pass this building, a telecommunications oddity.

We are used to seeing microwave antennas on the tops of tall buildings; makes sense to me.

But who mounts them partway down the side of a building?

Isn’t higher-up-is-better in force here?

By 8:59 I have found my way to the unstaffed Information desk at the famous MacNab terminal. Maybe nice-lady phoned ahead and said “Duck out of sight until he’s gone; he wants a MAP!”. Maybe not.

Along the way I have asked three bus drivers if they have or know where I could get a map. A printed map is essential for my mode of travel. No one has a map.

I’m not brave enough to sit behind the desk, pose as an Information officer: (“You could try at “Lacks”, “Lecks”, “Licks”, “Locks” and “Lucks”, and if all else fails try at the Mount Lawley Subway”) and in a quiet moment search the drawers. As I walk out of the MacNab I come across a driver heading for a break.

I ask this fourth driver about maps. “In here” he says so we head indoors to stare at the unmanned desk, which throws him for a few seconds but then “Wait Here” he commands, and I obey, for he ducks through one of those Staff Only doorways and emerges sixty seconds later with a shake of his head; “Sorry; none in there”. Bless him; he has asked his buddies in there, but of maps there are none.

There is the traditional bus map pinned or glued to the board; one of the original print run when they got four made, I guess.

Still and all I must admit that by not having any support staff here it is all kept very neat and tidy. No clutter. No clutter at all.

So I trudge off again. Armed only with my little contingency map that tells me to explore every street within Hunter, York/Wilson, Bay and John, I tramp around the tramps. I am now searching for the Tourism Office, the Public Library, or even a sign saying “Chris you can get a Transit Map here!”.

The white lettering on a pale blue background against a pale blue sky (who dreamed that up?) says “Hamilton City Centre”. I know that because I wrote it down in pencil in my notebook.

Nothing.

The streets are bare. This part of the downtown core is a desert. I think this is how it would look and I would feel if I were in one of those Russian Industrial Cities in Siberia.

The man on the bench is not waiting for a bus; the other people are walking to get to where they want to be, and yet this looks like a fairly important street.

Did I already say that Hamilton is dirty and gritty? If not I’ll say it later.

Freight trains of chemicals roll through the heart of the city. At half past nine a long rake of tankers was slowly hauled towards Niagara or perhaps Buffalo or Fort Erie. I’ll swear I saw these same tankers being hauled through Toronto four times last week. Why don’t they decide where they belong and just take them there straightaway?

Or (this idea gained credence as my day with Hamilton Street Railway wore on) are we all just tiny stick-figures on God’s Model Railway of Life?

The roadway I am on (Hunter Street?) boasts unappealing drab grey pitted concrete barriers on the side, which does not enhance my mood.

I reach John Street, my eastern boundary, and there is the GO terminus. For the first, but not the last time today I contemplate cutting my losses and going home. I’ve not been in Hamilton an hour, but what’s the point of wandering around lost, and annoying the heck out of each bus driver by jumping on and then asking “Where does this bus go to?” (“If you don’t know, why are you jumping on ...?”)

Hamilton is gritty and dirty; a desert; wastelands; buildings are drab, shuttered, and sleazy. Tattoo parlors, pawnshops, and the like can be found on every block; the downtown core is depressed and starts to drag me down with it.

I trudge northwards. At this point I’d settle for a greasy meal at a breakfast diner. I could nurse a coffee, read a newspaper, and pretend that I’m having fun.

And then go home having eaten Canada’s Most Expensive Breakfast.

The streets are deserted; there is no life. The building in the background is being demolished in a piecemeal fashion. It doesn’t come down one floor at a time, but looks like one of my molars on a bad day at the dentist.

That’s the 9:31 Go Bus heading back to Aldershot; I could have been on that bus ...

The bicycles are part of a rent-a-bike chain, and if I had any plans to return to Hamilton (I don’t), I’d possibly explore Hamilton using that system. It seems more extensive than Toronto’s system which is confined to a small part of the downtown core.

As I walk I am struck by the emptiness and lack of human life. I am, of course, accustomed to Toronto’s downtown core where people walk around, literally, 24 hours a day, and the early morning (6 a.m. say) has well-dressed people going to work, and people sweeping the streets or staffing dry-cleaning outlets.

I think I’m still on John Street; I have lost interest in exploring Hamilton, and am now just circumambulating the core for the sake of appearances.

There is plenty of space in this parking lot; In Toronto it would be jam-packed. Hamilton seems quite dead and almost as dispirited as am I.

Hooray! I’ve already been here. I can go home now!

I did find a diner on John Street but left after five minutes when it was apparent that the two staff were more interested in chatting with existing customers than serving a gent in long pants, shoes and socks and a dress shirt, no tie.

I know that this attitude is self-serving – the more things that go wrong, the more everything seems to go wrong. I am more used to diners where they bring you a cup of coffee while you wait and say “Be with you in a minute!”

I am ticked off too, because in reply to an email I sent to Hamilton Street Railway over a week ago asking for the link to their PDF map, they sent a reply including “We will mail out a hard copy of the schedule to the address you provided below.”.

The printed map – unexpected but keenly anticipated – had not arrived by today, Wednesday, two days after my trip, and I now suspect that the Hamilton Street Railway representative who said it would be mailed out didn’t realize that Hamilton Street Railway doesn’t have any Transit Maps!

Anyway; here I am, back where I started. I will continue westwards until I can turn south and make my way back to the GO station and head home in time for lunch and a cup of tea.

A little further west I see the street sign “MacNab Street”. Good. I know this street; I’ll hang a left and walk through the Hamilton Street Railway Bus Terminal and make my way to the Go Station.

I turn to my left and it isn’t a street at all!

It’s a ramp – with the name “MacNab Street” - down to a parking garage!

Gaaaaaaah!

I continue westwards and suddenly realize that the glass wall no longer says “Farmers Market” but reads “Hamilton Public Library”. I must have walked right past here half an hour ago and just not seen it at all.

What kind of a library doesn’t put a honking big sign out in the street saying “PUBLIC LIBRARY”? Or even “Get Your Books HERE”?

Is Hamilton embarrassed about its library?

I pondered this and other questions throughout the day; there was plenty of pondering time while I waited for bus connections.

I am of the conclusion that Hamilton is built to cater to residents, not visitors, tourists or newcomers.

Think about it. If you live and work here, you don’t need a bus map, and you know where the library is, and you don’t eat your breakfast at a diner.

Only outsiders want to know this kind of stuff. This conclusion came to me over and over again as I struggled – as an outsider – to make sense of the city as a whole, but especially to make sense of the Hamilton Street Railway’s lack of approach to a Transit System.

Why do I insist on a map? I have a loaded Presto Card. Why not just jump on a bus? Because I want to follow where I am as I ride around town, I want to learn as I explore; and I also want to be able to make a decision to transfer to another route as opportunity presents itself.

Once I am on a bus I may find that I am in boring-suburban-house land and elect to get off that route pronto to find a more interesting, or at least a different part of town.

If you doubt this, ride the routes #1, #2, #3 and #4; they all/each traverse the same part of the city with the same outlook. Ride the routes #22, #21, #41 and #43; they all/each traverse the same part of the city with the same outlook. Ride the routes #22, #23, #24, #25, #26 and #27; they all/each traverse the same part of the city with the same outlook.

So, into the library and the nice librarian at the front desk says they have no Transit Maps down here, but there might be one on the fourth floor. I get trapped in a maze which is cunningly disguised as an A/V materials section, but finally nut it out (B.Sc Maths) and ride the elevator to the 4th floor. I see two racks, one rack has bus timetables, but no Transit Maps.

This is ridiculous. Why didn’t I head home an hour ago while I was not too far behind?

Then I spot another librarian, tucked out of sight on the far (blind) side of the elevators.

“Yes”, she says cheerily, “Lots of them. How many do you want?”

I explain that I cook, and do my own laundry and sewing and ask her if she is married. She laughs; yes she is. The Good Ones are always married!

I unfold the map in the elevator and return to the front desk, holding the map in front of me so that it hides me completely. My first floor librarian is treated to a Transit Map that says “I cook, and do my own laundry and sewing and are you married?” She laughs; yes she is. All the good ones are!

Sigh.

Even unmarried, I am right now the happiest man in Hamilton, but that will soon change.

I return to the GO Terminal, mistakenly believing that this had more local buses; it does not, but it does have a few.

This photo is time-stamped 10:15. The earlier photo was taken at 8:52. I have had wasted for me 90 minutes of my day-exploring-Hamilton.

A number 2 Barton bus is idling away; I hop on and tap my Presto card. I am good for two hours of bus rides now; should account for quite a chunk of Hamilton, right?

After 20 minutes trundling through a neighbourhood that seems to extend tattoo-parlor wise from the downtown core to Ottawa Street I decide to leap off and take a small tour of an industrial area, because the #41 Mohawk runs north of Barton through the industrial area, then loops back and crosses to south of Barton, up The Mountain (strictly speaking The Niagara Escarpment, a hill in any other town) and then runs west across the upper part of the city to The Meadowlands Terminal.

I leap off too because I am sitting in a seat in the front section of the bus. These seats all face inwards, so:-

(a) I cannot see what’s on the street behind my back, which cuts out half of my knowledge of the city

(b) I am trying not to stare at the people opposite me who are trying not to stare at me.

(c) It is impossible under these circumstances to take a photo because

(d) Most people would object to me taking repeated photos of (apparently) them.

(e) There is very little window space through which to shoot a photo across the width of the bus and

(f) All I can see is a flash-by-flash of colour as we pass each building. There is no opportunity to anticipate anything worth photographing.

There is no need to tap OFF on the Hamilton Street Railway because it is a closed system. One fare across the system, with a 2-hour transfer window which turns out to be rather useless (but see “transferring to another route” below)

Here I am waiting for that #41 Mohawk. The street is not unclean; across from me a man is cleaning a clean shop window; there is pride here.

10:53 the #41 is on time and I take a quick tour of a small part of the industrial area; I have lost an hour and a half of my day in the search for a map; so I have curtailed my plans. A new objective emerges: I’ll take the 41 westbound to the end, hook on to a #43 eastbound to its end, then transfer to #11 and tour the harbor front area. (I soon learn that it is futile to plan anything while using Hamilton Street Railway)

We detour along Barton instead of crossing directly, and head up Kenilworth. I learn later that these printed maps are out of date in terms of newer streets in Hamilton, so it’s no surprise that the routes marked on the printed map are out of date.

My tap-and-display reads 1 hour and 31 minutes left. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?

It isn’t.

(but see “Transferring to another route” below)

About half the buses on which I rode sported some passenger engaging the driver in chit-chat. This passenger is leaning into the driver’s field of view; could be kissing him on the cheeks for all I know, he’s that close.

You can see the longitudinal (is that correct?) seats that have the prisoners facing each other. (But see “decals” below)

The windows in the rear section are covered in translucent decals; translucent, just, but not transparent; and not those stippled things we are used to elsewhere.

The decals carry a mish-mash of bus routes, which conveys nothing to newcomers like me.

What am I to make of this?

And if you are a regular user, what do you care about the #18 Waterdown bus when you shuttle back and forth on the #43 Rymal every day?

The seat layout and the obstructed windows mean that this essay, of all my travel journals, lacks the usual set of photos. You can’t take photos from Hamilton Street Railway buses, and what’s more, you can’t see what you are going past.

Any other bus system I’ve ridden lets me look out the window and spot a diner, or a model railway store, or a second-hand bookshop. I can leap off, spend some money, and then continue my journey.

But not the Hamilton Street Railway; its mandate is to ferry cattle from home to work and back again.

As advertised, the #41 takes me up the mountain. We would have a panoramic view of Lake Ontario and the Hamilton’s coastal plain were the windows not covered with impenetrable decals.

Is this Hamilton Street Railway’s cheapskate way of avoiding having to wash windows? Plaster them with decals so you can’t see out anyway? This system is not designed for tourists or newcomers to transit.

Just before we reach the terminus the driver tosses me off the bus. Nicely, but quite decidedly off. He seems puzzled that I am sitting quietly on the bus. Am I going to the hospital? No, I’m going to the Meadowlands terminal. Well HE is going to the hospital.

I guess I had boarded a #41A, so now I walk to the next bus stop and wait 20 minutes for a #41 to carry me to my objective. While I wait two #41s zoom eastwards, and once again, I wonder whether I ought not just cross the street, ride a #41 back to a north-south street and make my way back to the Go Bus terminal and home.

Here’s what I don’t understand: Hamilton Street Railway runs TWO routes, the #41, and the #41A. Both routes run the same roads except for the difference at the western end, when the #41A ducks into the hospital and waits there for 20 minutes, whereas the #41 goes to Meadowlands – and waits there for twenty minutes!

Why not make it just one route, call it the #41CG (for Chris Greaves) and make it loop THROUGH the hospital grounds and then continue on to Meadowlands?

Instead of having a route that connects to #5, #16 and #43 every forty minutes, you’d have a route that connects to #5, #16 and #43 every TWENTY minutes. You’d also have a route that runs through the hospital every TWENTY minutes. That ought to be handy for hospital patients and visitors. It would be better use of resources; what’s the point of having buses sit for twenty minutes when they could be used for carrying paying passengers?

The #44 does a pirouette in the Ancaster Business Park; the #5A and #5C have learned to do a little loop off King Street; the #55A is clever enough to do a little loop around Arvin Avenue.

Here is an overview of what it would mean to the lazy #41. Either just drop the little section outlined in Purple, or service that stretch on the eastbound leg, the trip through the hospital on the westbound leg. The worst case would be no worse than the current case – if you were arriving via Meadowlands and wanted to ride by bus to the hospital, you’d wait for the bus that loops through the hospital. That would mean at most a 20-minute wait, whereas right now it is 40 minutes between buses for the hospital.

Hamilton Street Railway seems to have no idea at all about what might best serve the passengers.

Admittedly I’ve never run a Transit System; but I’ve used transit systems – mainly buses – in the UK, France, Germany, Singapore, Australia, the USA and Canada for sixty years of my life, and I can’t .recall anything this poorly designed.

But I wait. I try to be patient. I am retired, on vacation, have no schedule, except a rapidly-waning desire to explore Hamilton.

In this shot you can see that the front-section windows are stippled, Buildings can be seen in the middle distance, but good luck trying to read a street number off a doorway. Also you can’t take a photo through the stippled window glass.

Another passenger stands and talks incessantly with the driver; I learned that this is a feature of Hamilton Street Railway – many of the trips I took had a passenger distracting the driver in city traffic. Why does Hamilton Street Railway tolerate this? Why not equip the drivers with a speech equivalent to the “Pay the Fare or Else” script and ask passengers to stand behind the yellow line, shut up, and let the driver focus on driving safely?

Behind me a teenager’s radio drowns out the announcements of the stops. Yet another obstacle for newcomers to transit.

The covered-up windows make me think that I am in a prison bus being ferried between penitentiaries. I certainly am penitent about my trip to Hamilton.

We are approaching the Meadowlands Terminal If there is only one bus waiting, then that’s the bus for me; if more than one, then which one is leaving first? This will be a no-brainer.

“Endemic” is the word that comes to mind at the Meadowlands Terminal.

The Meadowlands Terminal sports four bus spots, line astern. One for each of the four routes for this terminal.

The #41 bus pulls into the second spot; the third spot is empty, but the fourth spot, two bus-lengths ahead of us, has a bus. So that’s the bus for me!

In the time it takes me to get off the empty #41 and walk half the length of the empty bus bay towards the Other Bus, the Other Bus turns into the Mystery Bus by virtue of the driver pulling out and leaving me behind. In about ten seconds I am level with where the door was before the bus pulled away.

Out here we have nothing except a Tim Horton’s on one corner; the rest of the area is sports fields, woodland, emptiness.

In any other transit system in the world a driver would check their rear-view mirrors, see a bus pull in, see a passenger descend and start walking towards his bus, and wait for the passenger.

Hamilton Street Railway is not geared towards passengers; it is geared towards driver’s schedules, and that means that passengers requirements come last and management’s requirement for smooth statistics come first.

I had this view endorsed by a resident of Hamilton, a daily bus user, later on in the day.

Even Toronto’s Toronto Transit Commission buses have been known to wait for passengers.

I complete my walk towards the bus pillar and see that it was the #16 which pulled out without waiting for me.

The bus pillar tells me that the next bus will leave in one hour.

The #16 is not a long route; my guess is that one bus does it during off-peak hours. In the map above I have outlined the #16 route, with the Meadowlands terminal in the top-right corner of the outline. The route is through a quiet area, rural, light industrial. It surely cannot take an hour for the bus to complete a circuit. So what would it matter if the driver has waited twenty seconds for me?

Later in the day I spot the other end of the #16 route in the Ancaster Industrial Area; driver reading a book. Plenty of spare time on this route.

Our #41 was delayed 2 minutes because a descending passenger wanted to stand on the step and finish his conversation with the driver. And the Hamilton Street Railway driver allowed this. Other passengers were craning their necks “Why are we stopping”, so it was not just grumpy and petulant little me who was curious.

The two hour transfer time is not generous when so much time is soaked away in waiting for the next bus. Were I on my way to a meeting, this would cost me an hour of my transfer time, and make me an hour late for my appointment.

(Note by comparison how the Peterborough Transit System has made it IMPOSSIBLE for any bus passenger to miss any connection. They are clever up Peterborough way).

I take a photo of my #41 bus, hiding behind a bus shelter. How can the #16 driver NOT have seen me walking up this footpath.

Suddenly another bus roars away.

Whaaaaaat!

Where did he come from?

If you look closely you can see that he was hiding behind my #41.

Too late! I have now missed two connections, the #16 and the #43; partly my fault for not checking the entire four bus bays, but this is due to my frustration at being left behind when I must have been in full view of the #16 driver.

I walk a little closer, just to see if Hamilton Street Railway has any more surprises for me.

Nope. Just the driver of the #41, probably laughing his ass off at my predicament. Something with which to regale the boys when he gets back to the staff room.

So I wait and play a game called “Count The Pieces of Garbage in the Grass”.

And I wait for the #5 to arrive. I crouch like a tiger ready to pounce. With Hamilton Street Railway if you blink, you miss the bus.

When #5 arrives it is empty so since I can’t take photos of the outside of the bus from the inside of the bus I took photos of the inside of the bus from the inside of the bus.

The rearmost window is covered in translucent decal. A fair bit of light is coming through but there again we are in direct mid-day sunshine. Riding along a street one can’t see detail at all.

The adjacent window is mostly stippled except for a two-foot section. The upper window (that can open to admit air) is covered with an opaque decal.

Further forward we have the annoying self-promoting Hamilton Street Railway blather for the next two windows and again the upper portions too are blanked.

A young mother has climbed aboard, Behind her and stretching all the way to the front of the bus are stippled windows, hopeless if you want to take a photograph (few people do), but equally hopeless if your eyesight is poor or if you are challenged at swiveling your neck in anyway.

Especially so since you must be looking across the width of the bus, which makes the stippling even more effective at blocking detail (which is why stippling is effective at carrying an advertising messages to those people who are OUTSIDE the bus!)

I sit freezing on every bus and the noise from the air conditioning unit drowns out the stop announcements.

At 12:51 we set off on the #5, or it might be the #5A. We travel through McMaster University but I can’t see much through the windows. It might be a beautiful campus; it might be worth returning to walk around, but I won’t return, because I don’t know whether it is beautiful or not.

Hamilton Street Railway’s window decals successfully seal passengers from the outside world. The message seems to be “Sit down and shut up until we get there”. A bus ride is not meant to be a pleasure for the visual senses.

I can not bear the frigid air. This is before I learned to shift to an aisle seat, so I bail out at Cochrane Road and King Street and walk north to Queenstown Road. It is pleasant to be warm again, and not shielded from the view of the world.

The street is has older houses, they are well kept with neat, trim lawns and flower beds. Park in any direction that you please.

Then I start walking west along the north side of Queenstown Road, finding amusement as I go.

Here is a flower shop; they sell flowers; bright and attractive plants. You know.

And outside the flower shop - framing the flower shop - are two ugly concrete planters, about two-foot cubes, with a collection of short stubby weeds.

Why in the name of all that’s profitable would one not plant peonies, pansies or petunias? OK, peonies may be too big, but surely a $20 bank note at the local Variety Store ought to win you half a dozen attractive pots AND a bar of chocolate?

Here’s another reason why the tourist needs a copy of a Transit Map. Many of the shelters I saw were vandalized and the Transit Map had been removed.

It wasn’t me did it, Honest! And I didn’t see many shelters. My transfer times were so great that I tried to maximize my time rolling on the streets.

But those shelters I studied (and I had plenty of time to study them while waiting for the next bus) were not great sources of data for anyone thinking of boning up on the routes.

I suspect my loss of heat is behind my desire to consume quantities of fat and sugar. I am not quite hungry enough to visit a palace of pizza pieces, but getting close. Who knows how many diners and family restaurants I passed on a bus without knowing it?

When I get to Park Road North I give up and hop onto a #1 King westbound to the city core. Tattoo shops and Acupuncture clinics clamor for business. What’s the difference between tattooing and acupuncture?

Young and able-bodied passengers do not accommodate elderly and mother-with-stroller. In turn those people make it worse for everyone by not folding up their foldable walkers while they are seated. “Have pity on poor me; I am taking up space to show you how burdened I am”

We have two strollers and three 4-wheeled walkers in the front section of the bus; boarding passengers have trouble negotiating the aisles. Hamilton seems to have a very high proportion of grossly obese and mobility disabled passengers.

It gets so bad that the driver won’t allow mothers with strollers to board at the front and insists that they board through the rear doors; another small delay while Mum tries to work out what’s going on. Great. Now the egress from the rear doors is blocked too!

Announcements have but two scrolls of the destination before the sign goes dead. And announcements are made before the bus leaves the preceding stop, so if the announcement is “Big Road”, you blink and you miss it! “Upper Wellington Street and Rymal Road West” lasts long enough for you to crane your aching neck around the people standing in front of you and catch a confirmatory glimpse of the rolling sign.

We take on another 4-wheel walker and another stroller; the situation is now beyond ridiculous.

The driver comes on the PA with an announcement about a change of plans. I miss the announcement because the kidiot next to me is talking full-volume on his phone; I tap him on the arm and ask him to tone it down so I can hear the announcement, but he is a self-centred resident of Hamilton “It’s OK, I’m getting off at the next stop too”. He hasn’t heard what I’ve said, and is focused on what he is planning to do rather than on what someone else might need or want to do.

Three o’clock slides away into oblivion. Hamilton is a city of boarded-up shops, closed businesses, ...

For Lease Contact ThisExasperatedRealEstateBroker; more pawnbrokers, nail painting, tattoo parlors, ...

I am starved for calories after five hours sitting in the freezer section of Hamilton Street Railway and stumble into the only jewel of the day: Burrito Boyz.

I order a Steak Burrito; I can’t remember ever ordering a Burrito. I sit down and wolf it down; it is delicious. I come close to ordering a second to take with me and eat on the bus.

A read a blurb in The Toronto Star about how the Pan-Am games won’t be such a hassle in the city. Those visiting Hamilton are in for a shock.

The writer hasn’t grasped the principle of Profit Margins. If we are having congestion problems with 450,000 people entering Toronto every day, think of the impact of 250,000. If we can deal with 400,000 but that extra 50,000 tips us over into congestion, think of what 250,000 extra will be doing.

But see also “Go Trains” as I prepare to escape Hamilton, below.

I finished my burrito and freshened up in the clean washrooms. So clean that I decided to rinse and dry my face. Felt a great deal better afterwards.

I haven’t felt this good since arriving in Hamilton over six hours ago. Burrito Boyz is good for both body and soul.

The service was friendly, helpful and excellent, the food tasty and warm. I left as a very satisfied customer. Maybe they’ll take over the transit system?

I had read my Transit Map while eating my burrito. A set of north-south bus routes have been assigned locations in sequence; the route numbers increase from right to left on the map, east to west on the ground. My latest objective is to leap on to any bus between #21 and #34 so as to transfer to a westbound #44 and ride it to the end (Ancaster Business Park) and then all the way back east to Eastgate)

By now you should know that Hamilton Street Railway can thwart the best of plans, or at least drop a spanner in the works.

So it is that I board a #26 and we shoot out of the downtown core and up Upper Wellington Street crossing Mohawk (My #41 route earlier in the day).

I fail to pull out my reading glasses to study my Transit Map in detail because I have left my reading glasses on the washbasin in Burrito Boys. (sad)

We trundle to Rymal where I descend to catch the #44 westbound which is sitting there at the lights.

Hooray!

The #44 zooms away as I wait to cross the street to catch it from my #26.

Boo!

What is it about Hamilton Street Railway that its drivers can’t hazard a guess that a bus passenger might be transferring to another bus?

Is the focus on brownie points for drivers that master the accelerator pedal rather than focusing on passengers? Do they all have shares in Diesel Oil suppliers?

It is especially annoying because Hamilton suburbs are not a place of pedestrians; if you see a pedestrian near an intersection, chances are good that they are on their way to catch a bus.

At 16:13 I take a photo southwards along Upper Wellington Street. This is where I came from - Urban Desert; a long straight road with cars.

It will not have escaped your attention that the best time to take photos is when I’m NOT on a bus, and these intervals are lengthy.

I ask a young guy at the bus stop if he is waiting for the #44 and he says no, and he also says that I just missed it, which I had guessed.

We start chatting.

He whips out his Smartphone and tells me that there’ll be another #44 in 28 minutes, (but in the end I wait more like 40 minutes as timed by my camera). My friend says this usually happens. He transfers from the #44 westbound to the #26 southbound daily, and most times misses his connections by a minute or less.

It says a lot for the Hamilton Street Railway that they can manage to force missed connections in BOTH directions. Think about that!

At 16:28 my friend has passed on, on a #26 southbound. Lucky Devil.

I wait.

Again.

A 30-minute slab of my transfer time is being hacked off while I stand here, marooned in the desert.

The view of where I am going to looks just like the view of where I came from

Hamilton Street Railway continues to thwart discovery

Cars roll by me east and west.

The view of where my bus is coming from (I hope!) looks just like the view of where my other bus came from.

I would not call Hamilton a scenic city at all.

Cars roll by me north and south.

If you live or work in Hamilton, you go by car. Hamilton Street Railway is not geared towards moving passengers around the city in an efficient manner.

My friend’s closing remarks included the phrase “I could get to and from work faster if I had a bike”, and I wondered why he didn’t buy one.

This is a car-oriented city, and it’s easy to see why.

Why would one wait 30 minutes to make a transfer when the entire trip by car would be only 15 minutes. Compare a 15-minute travel time with a 30-minute wait while you’re not even ON a bus?

Look! A Bus!

Honest! But don’t get excited; it could be just another #26 heading back downtown. The bus that brought me here has already shot past me on its way back. No doubt the driver gave a wry grin as he saw me stranded here.

Is it?

Can it be?

Yes!

It’s a bus.

I can’t make out what route yet, and it will be a while until it has negotiated the tailback of single-lane traffic waiting to get through the intersection of two major streets – Rymal and Upper Wellington. Why are these roads single-lane?

But there you have it. 35 minutes between photos, and the actual wait was about 5 minutes longer than that, so it’s a 40-minute slice out of the transfer time, and another 40 minutes taken from my life by Hamilton Street Railway.

If I’ve read the schedule correctly, this bus is running 13 minutes late on what is largely a rural route; that is, the bus is not delayed by inner-city congestion.

At 16:49 I am on a #44 westbound bus and without a doubt I have met the surliest most unhelpful ground staffer out of 50 to 100 I’ve had dealings with so far this year in Southern Ontario. If I needed another reason to stay away from Hamilton this guy would be it; but I don’t, so he isn’t.

I am not supposed to be riding the Hamilton Street Railway for pleasure; the Hamilton Street Railway does not intend that bus-riding be pleasurable.

At 17:08 we pass the other end of route #16 (remember Meadowlands from lunchtime?) the driver is reading a book. This is the route that couldn’t wait 10 seconds for me earlier in the day; it’s important that Hamilton Street Railway drivers get to their book-reading place on time.

We have twenty minutes to kill, so the #44 driver reads a book and I get out of the bus to get warm and eat an apple.

Ancaster Business Park is not exciting, nor did I expect it to be.

They grind coffee here.

They still grind coffee here.

The front wheels of buses sport brushes to contain slush in winter time. The rear wheels have regular mud-flaps, but there again the rear wheels do not swivel. The brushes cope with the swiveling of the front wheels.

We are due to leave at 17:32, so at 17:30 I tap the door to gain entry, and tap my card. There is 1 hour 16 minutes left, so my 40-minute wait at Upper Wellington caused my two-hour transfer to expire. This is why a 2-hour transfer is nowhere near as useful as it might sound. Two transfers could slice one hour and forty-five minutes out of two hours!

What happens if my 2 hours expires while I’m on the #44 eastbound? What if it had expired while I was on the westbound and I just sat on the bus? My guess is that the Hamilton Street Railway transit police would handcuff me and frog march me to a police cell, in which case as long as it isn’t air-conditioned I’d be warm!

By 18:01 we are back at Upper Wellington. We have sat for a driver exchange for about 4 minutes.

It is not clear to me why we wait for a green light to allow 6 cars through and wait until the light turns amber, then red, then green again before we force our way into the traffic stream.

At 18:22 We turn onto Centennial. I am exhausted with cold and can’t wait to get to Eastgate, grab a #10 Express and be rid of the Hamilton Street Railway forever.

At Eastgate we wait for the driver of #10, a bright spot in my day for we perch on a concrete ledge like migrating sparrows and stock up with warmth for the arduous trip that awaits us.

I am in my last Hamilton Street Railway bus of the day; it is an articulated bus, and has some forward-facing seats and clear windows, so we know that Hamilton Street Railway can do it if it wants to.

At 18:45 we pull away into the construction zone and I begin to freeze again. I make a discovery: If I sit on the seat away from the window it is not so cold.

Is this why so many Hamiltonians sit on the aisle seat blocking access to window seats? Maybe Hamiltonians are smarter than I thought.

At 19:04 I exit the Hamilton Street Railway.

I watch a Go Transit bus flash by me marked “Aldershot Go Station”, so I’ve just missed that bus and have thirty, or perhaps sixty minutes to complete a ten-minute walk.

On the off-chance that my glasses have turned up I head back into Burrito Boyz and Bless Them!

They have my glasses.

And my Undying Gratitude.

Yay for Burrito Boyz!

As I head south down John street I see a GO train up ahead. Who knew?

Yep! It’s a GO train alright.

By 19:28 much confusion abounds, caused largely by me.

On the bus platform I ask a fellow my age, if this is where I catch the Go Bus for Aldershot to get the train to Union Station. He says no, that I am wrong; that this will be the non-stop bus to Union Station in Toronto. I say to him “No, you are wrong; the buses only go to Aldershot and then you have to get off the bus and wait for a train and ride the train to Union”. No, he says, he has it on good authority ...

A Pan-Am greeter guy wanders up and says “Starting Thursday full bi-way service to Hamilton for Pan-Am games and forever”. Me and my friend don’t believe him. I don’t trust any transit staff who use the word “should”, so I’m surely not going to trust a Pan-Am greeter who claims “should” about Go Transit.

My friend and I are on great terms; I say I’ll duck into the terminal and ask. He says “You’ve got five minutes is all”. But I know he’s wrong. I have fifty minutes.

At the Go Transit ticket wicket the lady assures me that yes, my bus will be at platform 9 and yes, the next bus is non-stop to Union from platform 8. I dash outside as a bus pulls in to platform 8 and assure my friend, who mounts the bus.

I wander back to check my bus and see that I have at least another 30 minutes wait.

Why am I playing this game in my mind? I rush back to my friend’s bus; the driver assures me that once she closes the doors, in about a minute, she won’t open them until we are safe inside the Bay Street Go Bus terminal in Toronto.

I leap aboard.

My friend and I have both traveled the world and we discuss European transit systems until we get to Toronto. We check with the bus driver who goes Tap-Tappity-Tap on her keyboard and reports that it was just 50 minutes door to door.

I have reached Union Station in 50 minutes versus a half-hour wait for a bus that then makes a trip of 90 to 135 minutes via bus and train.

At 20:22 I climb off the bus and walk home.

Conclusions

Was it really that bad?

Yes.

My advice is “Don’t go to Hamilton for a day-trip”. Nor a few days for that matter. Hamilton Street Railway will thwart your every move.

How bad was it?

Rolling	Standing	Time	Event
0:23		10:20	Board #2 Barton
	0:10	10:43	off #2
1:07		10:53	Board #41A Mohawk
	0:18	12:00	off #41A
0:10		12:18	Board #41 Mohawk
	0:23	12:28	off #41
1:11		12:51	Board #5A Delaware
	0:24	14:02	off #5A
0:40		14:26	Board #1 King
		15:06	off #1 King (lunch)
0:32		15:46	Board #26 Upper Wellington
	0:31	16:18	off #26
0:23		16:49	Board #44 Rymal W
	0:23	17:12	off #44 (wait in loop)
1:00		17:35	Board #44 Rymal E
	0:10	18:35	off #44
0:19		18:45	Board #10 King E
		19:04	off #10
5:45	2:19		Sub-Total
	8:04		Total
		71%	% Rolling
		29%	% Standing

This table summarizes my day from the moment I stepped onto the first Hamilton Street Railway bus to the moment I stepped off my last Hamilton Street Railway bus. I read the timestamps on my photos and used times written down in my notes, taken from my cell phone. Allow a leeway of a minute or two, but no more than that.

I travelled between 10:20 and 19:04; remember that prior to 10:20 I spent ninety minutes in the morning looking for a Transit Map.

I travelled in the downtown core, in the outer suburbs, and in the mid-suburbs; I think I did a good spread of routes.

Twenty-nine percent - about one third of my traveling time was spent waiting for transfers, and that is being generous to Hamilton Street Railway, since I took the first bus available (I did not wait one hour for the #16 to return, but took the next bus that I was aware of, in this case a #5A).

I took several long trips, which works in favour of Hamilton Street Railway. Four of the nine trips were over thirty minutes; three of those trips were an hour or longer each, so I wasn’t taking short trips of just a few stops, then forcing a transfer.

From the back of the Transit Map; note that the trip must be completed within the transfer time. It is not clear to me how I am supposed to know to the minute how long a trip will take given that some buses are 15 minutes late, nor how I would re-tap my card AFTER the transfer had expired and BEFORE an inspector boarded the bus.

I think the transfer window is flawed within the Presto card system.

It’s not fair to think of Hamilton Street Railway as being in operation since 1874 as far as maps, schedules and transfers go. But I think that 1987 might have been a good time to start printing maps. What were YOU doing back in 1987?

I would have expected the kinks in the supply chain to have been ironed out of the system by now.

No doubt about it, Hamilton Street Railway’s policy (again from the back of the Transit Map) is as firm as any other Transit System in the Western World. Drivers are not supposed to chat with passengers, and passengers are not supposed to chat with drivers.

This Safety Line rule is vigorously ignored in Hamilton

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Postscript: I checked my mail on Monday, July 13, 2015 and there was an envelope from Hamilton Street Railway.

A hand-written address may have slowed down the mail-sorting process somewhat – in Toronto mail-sorting is done by machine, but perhaps not so in Hamilton.

The postmark is quite clear – the envelope was franked on Tuesday June 30th, in theory giving it three days (Wed, Thu, Friday) to reach me in time for it to be of use to me early Monday morning.

Who knows what held up this envelope and its map?

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7092187927 CPRGreaves@gmail.com

Bonavista, Wednesday, June 03, 2020 7:56 AM

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