TTC Considering Doors On Subway Platforms
Posted May 25, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
At the end of a month in which at least two incidents involved riders reaching the tracks below, the TTC is considering adding safety fences on all of its subway platforms.
That’s bittersweet news for Theresa Kelly, who fell onto the tracks and landed herself in the hospital earlier in May.
“I have flashbacks, over and over,” Kelly said from her hospital bed Sunday. “I hurt myself over and over again because it feels like it’s actually happening again.”
But accidents aren’t the only danger. Last week a 46-year-old man was pushed onto the tracks from behind at College Station and that suspect is still at large. Fortunately the victim in that incident survived, unlike Charlene Minkowski, who died more than a decade ago when she was pushed in front of an oncoming train.
Now the TTC has hired a consultant to determine how much a safety gate plan would cost. Either way it won’t come cheap. The new doors would have to line up with the doors on the subway cars, involving a new signal system. That system could cost $342 million, which is saying nothing of the $6 million the gates would cost at each of the city’s 69 stations.
And it won’t happen quickly either: The Yonge line would have automatic control by 2016, and the Bloor line would get the technology in the early 2020s.
“We’re still looking at this with respect to a feasibility study, there’s no guarantee that we’ll be implementing platform edge doors in the near future,” said TTC representative Brad Ross.
Despite the recent events however, the TTC says the study has been in the works for months and the consultation process is expected to take about a year.
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