King station after the morning rush hour. See it larger.
Someone on Sam Javanrouh’s blog wrote: “Recycle, they say. Wouldn’t it be better not to produce this kind of litter?” Nicely put, I say.
Photo by Sam Javanrouh
The waste land of King Station, morning rush hour
Read more articles by Matthew Blackett
18 comments
At least Metro has Ed Drass with his transit advocacy. 24 hours seems like a complete waste to me.
Those daily fishwrap papers (I’m looking at you, Metro!) are aweful. All they are is a conduit for advertising, and it’s more than obvious that people only use them to pass the time while in the subway… If we installed video news screens inside subway cars (kinda like those in Total Recall) we could do away with this waste of resources.
Well, on the bright side, at least everybody put the newspapers in the recycle bin leaving the litter bag comparatively empty.
It’s funny that Metro reports its readership as about 2x its distribution. It would be nice if all papers could report that!
Kevin> Lots do.
Most newspapers and magazines do report readership that way- newspapers and magazines are frequently read by more than one person. It’s called “reach”.
always wondered why the ttc allows them to be distributed, just creating garbage (recycling) for themselves.
anyone have any idea how much the TTC receives to allow the stacks of metro in the stations?
At least some people still reading the news, allbeit in a very abreviated form.
recycling, nice, sure. but why oh why did they move *all* garbage/recycling to the ends of the platforms! please tell me it wasn’t terrorism related.
Sadly, it was a fear of bombs thst they removed the cans. Silly, eh?
It’s sad that newspapers feel they have to make these trite rags because of dropping readership of their original publications. They, of course, blame the internet.
So much for online news reducing paper consumption!
E-mail this pic to Adam Giambrone! Do they have any cleaning staff at all in the subways?
There will be a presentation at the TTC meeting on Tuesday about station cleanliness. Somehow I think the question of newspapers and recycling containers might just come up.
Even worse is seeing the recycling and trash bags mixed up at so many of the stations.
Since trash and recycling are collected together, the only way to separate them later on is by the colour of the bag.
Clear bags are for trash, blue for recycling. When cleaning staff mix this up, recycling can be trashed, and trash can contaminate recycling.
How hard can it be?!
Matt’s right about the “fear of bombs” removal of the cans from subway stations and platform level (both the round brown tiled garbage cans and the upright rectangular navy blue newpaper recycle bins); however, the roll-out of these particular garbage/recycle receptacles was also for fire prevention and to provide more recycling/capacity.
The TTC used to store garbage in janitor’s rooms during the day and put it out at the end of the subway platform where a garbage train would pick it up overnight after service ended. There was a fire a few years back on the garbage train and the Fire Marshall ordered the TTC to reduce this fire load; so it is now bagged by janitors from these units who then put it out on the street outside the stations until picked up by garbage/recycle trucks. This prototype was used to test capacity and recycling.
Clearly, capacity is still an issue, a picture truly is worth 1,000 words!
A major issue is that the wide open bags do not encourage people passing by quickly to throw the right material into the right bag. The number of Metros and 24s in the general waste and the paper coffee cups in the “cans and glass” recycling bad is terrible.
I think terrorism is a very convenient excuse for just about anything. This was one of the excuses used once by some TTC staff to justify all-perimeter seating on the new subways, against the Commission’s and the public’s general preferences. I have been to London (where terrorism was a genuine fear ever since “The Troubles”), where the use of these open bags for rubbish are common, but they are also at track level. While many are too lazy to dispose of garbage in general, others just won’t carry them upstairs as well. That is why I thought it was dumb to force people to carry garbage upstairs with the sudden loss of the platform-level bins.
How much of this litter is from people leaving the subway system on their way to work? Could they not have taken their paper further along the way and discarded it between the subway station and their destination?
Is common sense that rare a commodity these days?
As some have pointed out, people feel that making the extra minor effort of taking responsibility for their own litter constitutes being “forced.”
The TTC definitely can make a better effort to provide enough bins, but it amazes me that so many adults can feel self-righteous enough about this that they can’t even carry a bit of lightweight trash up a flight of steps or down half a block. I’m not sure why people feel so repulsed by a newspaper or empty coffee cup — you yourself only just drank out of it — that they *need* to dispose of it right away, anywhere possible.