ttc outage shuttle bus

Subway outage at height of storm leaves crowds of TTC passengers waiting in snow

The rush hour commute was bad enough on Wednesday amid a brutal snowstorm, out-of-service TTC routes, a stabbing aboard a bus, stuck vehicles, and, to top it all off, a major service interruption on the Line 2 subway.

Service was halted on Line 2 from Keele to Ossington on Wednesday due to an injury at track level. The outage came as record-breaking snowfall blanketed the city, leaving thousands of commuters out in the cold waiting for the dreaded, unreliable, overcrowded shuttle buses deployed to fill service gaps.

blogTO reader Isaiah Frazao shared scenes of total chaos all along the TTC network, but perhaps the worst of the bunch was a clip of a vast crowd of snow-frosted commuters waiting outside of Ossington station for their turn to board a shuttle bus.

Crowds also packed onto shuttle buses at stations along the route closure like Dufferin, forced out in the cold for commutes they were hoping would be comfortably underground and out of the harsh winter elements.

Several buses were captured stuck throughout the afternoon and evening hours, including one that was freed rather unconventionally with the help of a good samaritan with a container full of kitty litter.

Line 1 remained in operation, but not without extensive effort on the part of TTC crews, who were spotted out amid the tracks with leaf blowers, melting and blowing away snowfall.

The Line 2 service outage was resolved just before 5 p.m., though many had already embarked home early on their commute, expecting longer-than-normal travel times related to the storm.

As bad as things got during Wednesday's rush hour commute, plowed and salted streets have allowed the TTC to resume pretty much all surface routes, and aside from some very slushy and salty bus and streetcar floors, things were back to normal by the start of the Thursday rush.

Lead photo by

Isaiah Frazao


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