Wednesday’s
hostage-taking incident outside Union Station forced commuters to
deal with delays and detours due to closed exits, yet somehow the
train terminal continued to function. As a man held a passerby at
gunpoint near the end of morning rush hour, police surrounded him
and closed off Front Street as well as nearby exits from Union
Station. The GO bus terminal at Bay and Front Streets was
temporarily shut down, and passengers disembarking from trains were
unable to leave through most regular station exits.
GO
Transit managing director Gary McNeil tells In Transit that in an
emergency situation, regular protocol is to move people out of the
building as quickly as possible. In this case, Toronto police wanted
to keep commuters from leaving the station and into the midst of an
armed stand-off. Crowd control fell to a combination of GO staff,
Toronto police and security officers for the Toronto Terminal
Railways, the agency that operates Union Station on behalf of the
City of Toronto. “Although (GO is) not responsible for security,
we’re actually making the announcements in the station.” says the
transit official.
While the Bay
Street exit was the principal way out of the train depot, McNeil
says there were other outlets. “When the train comes into the
station, people could still go out the York Street steps, (plus) we
have the stairs down to the bus terminal, we have stairs down to the
Bay Street ‘East Teamway’, so some people got out that way. But
other people, being creatures of habit, want to go the way they
always go.”
The
incident tied up Union from 8:30 a.m. to about 9:15 a.m., just after
the peak volume of passengers had already passed through. During
this 45 minute period, some 22 GO trains entered the station,
reports McNeil. He says that “because police told us that it was
safe to bring the trains into the station, and that the passengers
would not be at risk, then we continued to bring the trains into the
station. We could have held all the trains back, which probably
would have meant that everyone could have been two hours late
getting to work, instead of 10 minutes.”
A difficulty
that has plagued GO is getting timely messages to passengers on
board trains. Unlike TTC subway announcements, which are heard all
over the system, GO relies on individual conductors to relay
information to riders. Train crews were not asked to make a
particular announcement about the hostage-taking, or even to
describe it as a ‘police investigation’. Says McNeil, “We really
didn’t know for sure if the conductors would actually repeat that
message. Again, I think we made the right decision in bringing the
people into the station as though it was a regular day, and then
dealing with the crowd in a more controlled environment.”
Once
disembarking passengers entered the GO concourse area, some
reportedly had trouble making out public address announcements. The
GO official says, “It was hard to hear” but adds that 26,000 people
were passing through “the basement of the oldest building in Toronto
-- you’re in a very confined, crowded place and everyone’s yelling
and talking. Some people heard the PA system, other people didn’t.
So it performed as well as it could perform, under the
circumstances, but most people tended to follow the crowd.” GO is
also in the process of adding changeable information signs
throughout Union Station.
McNeil
expects meetings to be held between GO staff and representatives of
Toronto Terminal Railways and the police, to establish clearer
communication protocols between the organizations, and to
passengers. This is in addition to ongoing negotiations with police
that are intended to speed up delays after trains collide with
vehicles or pedestrians.
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