After a decade with the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), there are still elements that Allison loves about her route as a bus driver. But since the COVID-19 pandemic, her stress level rises as soon as she settles into her seat behind the wheel, and it stays that way until she clocks out. She finds herself just waiting for the next wave of inevitable chaos. Often, she leaves the TTC washroom at shift’s end and finds herself accidentally stepping on a nest of blankets, not knowing what might be inside.

“Honestly, your heart is beating because you don’t know if this person is sleeping, or they’re dead. That weighs heavily, and I don’t care what anybody says,” she tells The Local. (“Allison” is using a pseudonym so she can speak freely without fear of professional reprisal.)

Allison’s experience, and that of other frontline TTC workers, is a fallout of what urban planner David Cooper calls an increase in “societal complexity” colliding with public transit systems across North America. In other words, a series of social challenges have left many public urban spaces—such as libraries, parks, and transit systems—serving as unofficial shelter for people who simply have nowhere else to go.

On the TTC, this looks like an increase in substance use on transit properties, riders experiencing mental health crises, and people using subways and streetcars for shelter. According to its own data, last year designated TTC employees administered naloxone, the drug used to reverse opioid overdoses, to riders on 62 separate occasions, up from just seven reports of drug overdoses in 2021. Special constables made 96 apprehensions under the Mental Health Act in 2020, steadily increasing to 215 in 2024. A joint investigation between CBC and the Investigative Journalism Foundation last month found a dramatic jump in reported assaults and violent crime between 2016 and 2024.

All of this means expanding responsibilities for frontline transit workers like Allison, many of whom feel pressure to act more like social workers. Once tasked with driving buses or sweeping subway station floors, they now find themselves tending to passengers’ mental health crises, struggling to connect unhoused riders with shelter support, diffusing outbursts, or, at worst, reporting someone who’s unconscious. As the city faces unprecedented rates of homelessness, a crippling budget deficit, and more vulnerable riders seeking shelter on transit property than ever, it must ask itself: How much can the TTC be expected to fill the gaps of a rapidly dissolving social safety net?

In April, Cooper, who consults on transit planning issues through his firm Leading Mobility, presented a report to the TTC board about these challenges—and the potential solutions transit agencies have implemented, or at least tried to implement, in response.

“Transit agencies are experiencing mission creep as they take on complex public health and outreach responsibilities beyond their original scope,” Cooper told the TTC board.

The TTC has tried various approaches to handling these social challenges, mostly through the lens of passenger safety. Since 2021, the TTC has hired at least 32 additional special constables, part of a safety approach focused on “enhancing high-visibility presence on [the TTC],” a decision not everyone supports. The Ontario Human Rights Commission penned a letter to then-TTC chief executive officer Rick Leary, expressing concern that increased law enforcement presence on TTC property would result in over-policing and discrimination against already-marginalized communities riding the network. But the hiring went ahead, following a number of high-profile incidents in 2022 and early 2023, including several stabbings and a woman who died in hospital after being set on fire aboard a bus.

In 2023, the City of Toronto, TTC, and LOFT Community Services launched a pilot program designed to train transit staff in de-escalation tactics and provide “brochures” to vulnerable riders, listing various social service facilities and their offerings. The TTC also added more security cameras, which now total more than 32,000 across the system. Last month the City hired crisis workers through its social development division, who will be stationed 24/7 at Spadina, Union, and Bloor-Yonge Stations as part of a new safety strategy.

It’s too early to tell which, if any, of these strategies have been effective, said the TTC’s chief safety officer Betty Hasserjian, as she delivered a presentation of her own at the April TTC board meeting. The TTC is still in the process of evaluating its “social supports response,” in response to these challenges.

The TTC is not the only transit agency in North America throwing various strategies at the wall to see what works, and what doesn’t. New York, Edmonton, and Calgary have also increased the number of law enforcement officers in stations and on board transit vehicles. Other agencies, like the Los Angeles Metro and Vancouver’s TransLink, have tried to prevent crime through environmental design, making changes to the flow, lighting, and sightlines within transit properties to deter trespassers. In Philadelphia, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) created a warming centre inside one of its subway stations, which is staffed full-time and provides food, shower facilities, and primary medical care to approximately 3,000 visitors annually.

But there’s little consensus about which of these strategies work best—mostly because of poorly-collected data, Cooper told The Local in a follow-up interview. “We hastily and very quickly mobilized to do partnerships,” he says. “But it’s hard to assess them when we don’t have clear objectives.”

For Sam, a train driver for more than two decades, it seems clear that many of these solutions, especially the social service partnerships, are just “smoke and mirrors.” (Sam is using a pseudonym in order to speak freely about his job).

“It’s only a few people to cover 50 stations and 100 bus routes,” he says. “They’re fighting a battle they can’t win. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on it to say, ‘Look at us, we’re doing something good.’ But it’s not enough.”

Sam remembers how the job used to be, when he felt comfortable driving the train with his compartment door open and chatting to curious kids about his work, when he didn’t dread doing a final walk down the aisle, fearful of possibly finding a body.

“It’s actually kind of sad. It used to be so fun and amazing driving the train,” he says. “Now, a lot of people don’t feel safe. I mean like operators and the public. So we’re losing all these good interactions with people every day.”

Sam isn’t the only one feeling that precarity and sense of responsibility toward his vulnerable riders. In 2021, a petition signed by more than 230 TTC operators demanded more mental health workers, outreach specialists, and overdose response teams in response to what they called a growing crisis of unhoused and disorderly riders.

“The TTC has basically become a homeless shelter. I say that in the kindest possible way,” says Sam. “Obviously I would love everybody to get the support and the help they need, but as operators, it puts us in a precarious position.”

The business of transit, says Sam, is to move passengers safely between destinations, not to provide housing or crisis care. Not only does this added complexity impact operations at a functional level—in July, 51 percent of subway delays were caused by external factors, such as disorderly patrons or unauthorized persons at track level—but it leaves frontline workers anxious, distracted, and in some cases, feeling uncertain about how to ethically tackle their new tasks.

“I only have two options. I either internalize this, and every day I just keep piling on and eventually I go nuts. Or I go home and I tell my family, and that’s unfair because I don’t want to desensitize them or make them afraid,” says Sam. “It’s kind of sad because a lot of us end up becoming desensitized to society because we’re literally living this every day.”

The challenges outlined by the TTC’s workers are part of a much larger problem, one unlikely to be solved by any transit agency alone. In the midst of a housing crisis, and in the wake of homelessness encampment sweeps, the Ford government’s closure of safe consumption sites, and underfunding for daytime mental health and addiction support programs, public spaces face increasing pressure. Toronto’s most recent Street Needs Assessment, released in July, found the number of unhoused people in Toronto has more than doubled since 2021, reaching 15,400 in 2024. (The premier’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment).

“We have a situation where we don’t have enough health [supports], we don’t have enough social care, we don’t have enough supportive housing, and we have a lot of people under a lot of stress,” says Kwame McKenzie, chief executive officer of the Wellesley Institute. “So who is going to have to deal with that? At the moment it looks like the TTC.” [Ed note: The Wellesley Institute is one of the funders of The Local. This story was produced independently].

And though the TTC may be scrambling to address these changes on its own property, without more funding and support that addresses the root causes, public spaces will continue to bear the brunt of these social challenges in ways they are not equipped to, McKenzie says. “If the TTC was dealing with lots of people who had cardiac arrests…we’d be saying, ‘Hey, just a second, we’ve got lots of people turning up with cardiac arrests. What do we need to do to make sure this doesn’t happen?’ Not, ‘How do we scale up TTC workers to deal with cardiac arrests?’”

The TTC itself seems to agree with this sentiment. At the April TTC board meeting, local councillor Josh Matlow posed a rhetorical question to chief safety officer Hasserjian.

“Until every level of government more adequately addresses shelter capacity, access to shelter for asylum seekers, the safe and hospitable environment in the shelters, access to housing…access to addiction and mental health care, all of which every government has collectively failed on…are we ever going to be fully able to address this adequately, given that often the subway is the only place to go?”

The short answer is no, Hasserjian told him. Addressing the issue will be difficult, if not impossible, without the support of government partners, she said.

“The TTC is a microcosm of society. So whatever is happening out there in the city is happening on the TTC.”