— Feature, Musings —12.04.2025 04:53 PM
Going underground
LONDON – This city’s subway system – the Underground or the Tube, they variously call it – is simply enormous. Millions of people use it every day.
In all, it is 250 miles in length – ten times the length of the City of Toronto, essentially, from East to West. It serves nearly 300 stations, across more than a dozen lines – while Toronto has four, connecting with just 75 or so stations.
London’s underground dwarfs Toronto’s subway system. Depending on how you measure it, it is 400 to 500 per cent bigger.
And in all of 2025, so far, for every million rides taken on London’s Underground? There were just 20.7 crimes committed. The majority of them are thefts and “anti-social behaviour.”
Toronto? Between 2016 and 2024, the number of crimes happening on Toronto’s transit system – serious crimes, like attempted murders and extreme violence and sexual assaults – surged by more than 160 per cent. In Toronto, a person is taken into custody under the Mental Health Act once every four times a TTC constable reports to work to patrol the subway, a July Toronto Sun analysis found.
As our Justin Holmes reported on 1,150 incidents in just a few months in 2020: “[The events in the TTC database include] petty crime and individual instances of aggravated assault, attempted murder, robbery.”
Added Holmes: “At St. George Station on Dec. 14, 2023, a person was said to have been apprehended three times under the Mental Health Act in a span of 24 hours, twice by TTC constables and once by Toronto cops. Meanwhile, on April 18 at Dundas Station, a person was seen smoking a cigarette in the tunnel. ‘Victim mentioned being suicidal and the hospital keeps releasing them,’ the entry says.”
In multiple cases, Holmes noted, there are repeated references to narcotics use – and several entries “contain the words ‘urine’ or ‘urinate,’” he wrote. The crimes happened at every single Toronto subway station. Since the pandemic, too, the crime numbers in Toronto have gotten dramatically worse.
Toronto councillor Brad Bradford – who, full disclosure, this writer will be supporting if he is on next year’s mayoral ballot – is one of the few municipal politicians addressing the issue. “Transit safety is a major issue in Toronto,” says Bradford. “Riders deserve real protection — and enforcement that will actually keep them safe.”
Toronto is not alone. Transit-related violent crime has exploded across Canada. Between 2015 and 2024, violent crime has nearly tripled in Winnipeg, and more than doubled in Edmonton, Montreal, Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto.
So how does London do it? How can a system that dwarfs any transit system in Canada do so much better?
If one uses the Underground, as this writer has many times in the past few days, some of the reasons become evident. For starters, the London Underground has an extensive closed-circuit television system – there seems to be hardly an inch of public space that is not monitored.
In addition, Transport for London and the British Transport Police are seen virtually everywhere, as are regular transit staff – and commuter-assistance “help points,” some 500 of them, are found throughout the Underground. Travellers need only push a button to get connected instantly to a staff person or a central control room.
There are crowd-management people at busy times. There are anti-suicide measures in effect everywhere. And, throughout the day, commuters are urged to report any suspicious activity, ranging from petty crime to terrorism. “See it, say it, sort it,” announcers chime on public address systems, while providing a text number to do so.
And, across British capital’s system, that is what one sees, everywhere: people connected to the Internet on their devices. Some still are old-fashioned, and read books, but most are online – which likely serves to deter plenty of would-be criminals.
“The biggest crime here is phone thefts,” says one former Calgarian who has lived in London for years. “Mainly teenagers.”
Toronto and other cities have many of the anti-crime measures described above. So why does London do so much better, by virtually every measure?
Throughout London’s Underground, visitors are struck by how courteous and efficient the whole system seems to be: there’s tended plants at the Embankment at High Street Kensington Station, requests that travels “please” hold hand rails and stay to the right on escalators, announcers apologizing for the rain causing some surfaces to be slippery, and signage politely cautioning against staff abuse, sexual harassment and hate crimes – all “have consequences,” the signs note.
And the people using London’s Underground seem to be uniformly…decent. Few pan-handlers, for example, are to be seen – and, when they were present outside a Tube entrance, someone was talking to them to offer them something to eat or simply say “good luck.”
London’s transit system is better than our systems in Canada because everyone here has seemingly made a decision to treat everyone else with this:
Civility.
This piece is fascinating – and I say that as a regular transit user in several major cities.
A lot of this is cultural and multi generational.
Canada’s cultural history is naturally much more rural and spread out than many other Western countries. It’s simple geography. For that reason, public transit in big urban centers has never been seen with the same level of respect that it is in places such as London or Manhattan. The attitude in Canada – particularly if you don’t have multigenerational life experience in a big city – is that transit is only for losers and desperate people. As an example I’m often floored by my rural friends who insist on driving all the way to the center of downtown Toronto rather than parking at the GO and taking the train. The thought of public transit is like an admission of failure and I’ve never really understood it.
Another thing to remember about the tube in London…. While very subtle… it is part of the national identity. It is forever and always associated with the Blitz. The Tube isn’t just a cheap way home for blue collar suckers after a long days work. That’s how we see it in Toronto. It is a refuge, a temple, a museum, the backbone of an entire nation in a time of catastrophic desperation that will never be forgotten.
So, how do we make Toronto more like London? I don’t know, but I think it starts with changing cultural attitudes about what we expect from our public transit experience.
This attitude about public transit only being for the downtrodden exists where I live too – and I sort of prescribed to that belief until I got cancer, lost my income and had to park the car – my first experience using transit as a regular was my first trip to chemo – I agree that it’s a cultural attitude that gives transit a bad rap.
Curious,
You have to be a first-class moron to think that public transit is only for the so-called UnderClassTM.
I would argue there is one other major difference. In Canada, our “civility” seems mainly focused on the criminals themselves. Boy, do we make a lot of excuses and give lots of second chances (and third, and fourth, etc..) to convicted criminals.
Here in Winnipeg, the pathetic crime capital of Canada, we see this regularly. If you read the crime briefs in the daily newspaper, most often the perps have a prior rap sheet, and the list of new charges includes something like “failure to comply with a release order”. In other words, they have done this before, and don’t really care if they do it again.
This is particularly problematic with respect to violent crimes. If we want safety in our streets – and in our transit – we need to crack down much much harder on convicted criminals. Never mind bail reform; let’s get tough on those who actually have been convicted.
Yes, this will require building more jails and hiring more judges and prosecutors. I imagine most law-abiding Canadians would prefer that use of their taxpayer dollars, versus the “hug a thug” social programs for criminals which have proven an utter failure since they were introduced a few decades ago.
Steve,
This is another topic where shades of grey are de rigueur in the name of jurisdictional fiscal sanity. Building jails until the cows come home only leads to jurisdictional bankruptcy. That’s why many American states are moving away from that model.
The get tough on crime manta should deal principally with capital, violent and sex offenders. There should be only a one-chance policy after release if they proceeded to commit the same type of crime after release.
As for the others, no one should be locked up for non-violent crimes unless they’re serial in nature. Once a pattern is established then tough sanctions have to kick in, including prison. Point being that one size fits all is no longer credible as a quote rehabilitation method. People forget that if we had a trades and apprenticeship program in jail, repeat offenders would then be statistically rare rather than increasingly prevalent. But as usual, government can rarely do anything right and our prison system is a perfect example of that. People have to have the skills needed to work when they get out otherwise they’ll have no other choice than to keep committing offenses in order to survive. For the stupid politicians, duh, this isn’t rocket science.
I wonder how they deal with homelessness, disability, mental health crisis, and addiction – my guess is if you take a look at their social safety net it’s likely better. The dangers we see on the streets and at public transit centers are to a large extent a glaring failure of our social safety net – expect more crime and danger until they figure out that investing in the social safety net benefits everybody.