What if TTC workers stopped enforcing fare collection?

I've only had two outright negative TTC experiences, and in both cases it was getting very loudly and publicly yelled at by a TTC worker trying to enforce fare collection when I had just made an honest mistake. In one case, I boarded a bus on the first day of the month, confidently waving my previous month's Metropass (i.e. the same one I used just the day before) at the driver. I did have the right one in my purse, I just grabbed the wrong one of the two. In the other case, just a few days after moving to Toronto and my first time ever in Eglinton station, I misunderstood how the choreography of how the (now defunct) bus bays worked and walked somewhere I wasn't supposed to. In both cases, the bus drivers yelled at me, in public, in front of people, without even taking a moment to calmly explain to me what I had done wrong, so I had literally no idea why I was being yelled at. In both cases, it made me cry (in public, to the extent that I couldn't see well enough to walk around) and broke me for the day.

In my time working customer service, every time I provided suboptimal customer service, it was because I was trying to meet corporate goals. For example, when I worked fast food, we had a timer measuring how long cars were in our drive-thru window. The average time at the window was supposed to be under a minute. The problem was that many customers didn't want to be out of there in under one minute. They wanted to find exact change to pay me with. They wanted to get themselves settled, put a straw in their drink and ketchup on their fries. This generally took over a minute, and then I'd get in trouble for not meeting service time goals. I once even snapped at a customer who had a habit of order food that needed to be cooked to order and then waiting at the window for it to be done (instead of pulling forward to the waiting space). His refusal to pull forward when I asked him to had him at the window for three minutes, which made it absolutely impossible for us to meet or even approach our service time goals for the rest of the day, and got me in trouble. I wasn't even able to start thinking of it in terms of his convenience, because I was going to get in trouble for the number on the clock. The things I got yelled at and nagged about and evaluated on by management were service time goals and upselling, with no thought to customer experience unless a customer complained. When I started that job I didn't upsell because as a customer I didn't appreciate it, but my manager marked me down for it in my performance review, specifically telling me to do it even though I didn't think it was good customer service, because it was corporate policy. How can you provide good customer service in that context?

Another bad TTC experience happened when boarding a Spadina streetcar at Spadina station. The driver started telling people over the PA to get off the stairs so he could close the doors, getting more and more frustrated that people were on the stairs. When he finally pulled out of the station, he said all snarky "Thanks for making me late!" But you know why the people were on the stairs? Because they were in the process of boarding the streetcar! More and more people kept coming from the subway to the streetcar and boarding the streetcar (standing on the stairs in the process) because that's what happens at Spadina station.

Obviously the Spadina streetcar driver had been handed down word from on high that he'd damn well better stay on schedule. And obviously the drivers who yelled at me for accidentally showing the wrong metropass and for entering the bus bay wrong had been instructed to prioritize fare enforcement. And obviously they were getting static from management when these things didn't work out, even when it wasn't entirely the driver's fault. But the result is bad customer service. People get yelled at by a streetcar driver for boarding a streetcar. A passenger gets treated like a criminal for grabbing the previous day's pass out of her purse. A newly-arrived teenage girl just learning to navigate the city gets publicly humiliated for not being fluent in the choreography of a subway station she's at for the first time in her life.

In my food service days, my performance was measured almost entirely quantitatively, by service times and by average price per order on my receipts. Despite all the pretty words in our policies about customer service, actual customer service only came into play if there was a complaint. Otherwise, it was all about the numbers.

With the TTC's new focus on customer service, they need to make sure they aren't creating a similar situation. Don't manage things in a way that gives drivers more motivation to prioritize things other than customer service. Tell them "Your primary mission is to get people where they need to go, and help people who need help. You are empowered to do that." Yes, your route should be on time, but not at the expense of pulling away from someone running for the bus. Yes, you should enforce fares, but not at the expense of holding up the whole bus for someone who boarded with yesterday's metropass. Make sure they aren't creating a culture that favours performance indicators over actual customer needs, and just focus on customer needs for a while.