A recent TTC social media and poster campaign focused on making connections while riding transit is causing some to raise questions about its efficacy and rider safety.
“At a time when riders want us, all Torontonians want us, to be focused solely and entirely on our main priorities such as safety, along with affordability, reliability and great service, these videos come across as tone-deaf and don’t reflect those priorities, but most importantly it’s around safety,” Coun. Josh Matlow said during a TTC board meeting Wednesday afternoon.
Called Between Stations: The Connection Series, TTC officials described the campaign online as “a place for chance encounters and spontaneous moments, and we’re leaning into that: helping Torontonians find real connections in our new social series.” In four videos, several younger adults are featured on a streetcar moving on the streets of Toronto.
“Welcome to Between Stations where we connect real Torontonians off dating apps and in person on the TTC. Let’s see if there’s a spark,” a narrator said at the beginning of a Valentine’s Day video.
A second video entitled City of Love was also focused on romance while the third and fourth instalments, entitled Streetcar Social and BFF Express respectively, were focused on people looking to make new friends.
Posters with the message “they meet, they connect” along with the TTC’s Instagram handle were installed at stations as well as on subway trains.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the four videos had more than 3,300 views on the transit agency’s YouTube account. The videos were also posted on the TTC Instagram account.
A review of the comments left on video posts showed many positive comments left in response as some called the segments “cute” while others said they “love(d)” the videos.
However, other users took issue with the campaign. Some shared concerns about safety while others wondered about focusing on this type of campaign amid ongoing operational issues.
“… the last thing any of us want is to be approached by strange men looking for love when we’re just trying to mind our own business and get places. Do better,” one user wrote.
“For many women, public transit is not a neutral space. It’s a place where we’re constantly calculating our safety,” Chloe Bow, a TTC rider and social media influencer, said in a widely viewed video on TikTok.
Bow told CityNews many women “have had pretty negative interactions with maybe unwanted conversations with men on the TTC.”
“I’ve received a lot of support from women in the community and also women outside of Toronto, which has been amazing,” she said.
“We’re looking for safe and accessible transportation.”
It’s a message Matlow reiterated at the board meeting.
“I’ve heard from many women that they feel generally unsafe on the TTC, certainly (at) different times of the day and night and they certainly don’t want random men approaching them,” he said.
Josh Colle, a former councillor and TTC chair who is now the agency’s chief strategy and customer experience officer, said the aim of Between Stations and other campaigns is part of an effort to show the TTC is more “hospitable” and to change the perception of the system.
“I know there’s an urgency to increase our ridership, to enhance our brand,” he told board members in response to Matlow’s comments.
“In no way at all (is it) encouraging people to approach people in the TTC, but certainly a response to speak to a very different demographic in a different language and tone and on a different platform, and one that’s actually received really good response.”
Nancy Ortenburg, the TTC’s head of marketing and customer experience, said they wanted to convey “moments of friendship, acts of kindness, moments of reflections, chance encounters.” She added the campaign was inspired by real-life stories where people made different types of connections on the TTC.
“We’ve had about 350,000 views with about an 87 per cent positive sentiment reading across the series,” Ortenburg said.
She went on to describe how TTC staff framed the Between Stations campaign after an “abundance” of research on Gen-Z residents (people born between 1997 and 2012).
“The Gen-Z market is our growth opportunity for ridership on the TTC,” Ortenburg said.
“So after some very extensive research that we conducted from last summer through to last fall and research that we did generally about the Canadian experience and the lived experience of Gen-Z living in cities, the idea came up for this series to talk about what it’s like to be a Gen-Z living in the city of Toronto and finding meaningful connections.
“As we position the TTC as the thread that makes living in the community possible, we took that opportunity to speak to Gen-Z in a way that they want to be reached — which is through digital and social media. They average about five hours a day on social media.”
The comments sparked a rebuttal from Matlow later on in the meeting.
“What I hear in general from the public is that they want us to focus on our priorities, especially we’ve got to when we’ve got a cash-strapped transit system. We are struggling to keep it affordable,” he said.
“Even though I know it’s not the intention, women don’t want random guys coming up to them, chatting them up on the TTC, and I think we need to reconsider whether we want to continue doing this.
“When I hear that we’re doing focus groups on Gen-Zers to find out if they love this stuff or not, it sends a message to a lot of people like why are we spending money on stuff like that when we are struggling to keep the whole system maintained?”
Matlow encouraged a change of focus when it comes to social media.
“We will succeed when people feel like we are succeeding, and the best thing we can do if we’re going to use a social media campaign is to focus on people’s priorities, reflect those priorities and demonstrate that we are addressing them directly,” he said.
Meanwhile, Colle said the posters are set to be removed from circulation as the campaign comes to an end.
With files from Melissa Nakhavoly
