Navigating the University of Toronto’s sprawling downtown campus can be difficult at the best of times. Recent attacks taking place on the city’s transit system, bad weather, delays, and an impossible number of subway stops named for saints provide entry barriers for many students — especially for first-years.
Laurie Preston is a first-year humanities student from Thunder Bay, Ontario. She spoke to The Boundary about one recent expedition: “I had a class at Sid Smith, and I'm all the way over at Vic. So, I was going to go from Museum to St. George, but somehow got totally lost along the way. I was like ‘have I gone through a wormhole? What's a Line 2?’ It was crazy.”
A leaked internal UofT dossier revealed some “worrying” statistics. According to the report, two in five UofT students were unaware how many subway lines Toronto had. A further 75% admitted to having to borrow a Presto card to use transit. The report concludes that “without serious education initiatives, the UofT student body will continue failing the most routine of subway trips and to be a drag on the transit system as a whole.”