‘A Toronto issue’: Ipsos poll shows some TTC riders changing habits after violent incidents | 24CA News
People dwelling in Toronto really feel much less protected on public transit than different Canadians, based on a brand new Ipsos ballot performed completely for Global News.
The ballot suggests 44 per cent of Toronto residents really feel unsafe driving transit alone. That compares to 35 per cent of riders within the 905 area round Toronto and 27 per cent throughout the nation.
“In general people do feel safe riding transit. There’s a quarter of the population that doesn’t really feel safe, regardless of where you go,” Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos, instructed Global News.
“What we’re seeing in the data is that this really seems to be a Toronto issue, and particularly a downtown Toronto issue in the 416 area, where people have been seeing a lot of reporting on various incidents on the public transit system, and it spooked them.”
This new polling comes after a collection of high-profile and violent assaults on Toronto’s transit system. It features a deadly stabbing on the High Park subway station, a reported sexual assault on a bus, a driver allegedly shot within the face with a BB gun and an incident through which a gaggle of youngsters allegedly swarmed a TTC employee.
Read extra:
Woman killed in stabbing onboard Toronto subway practice recognized, wasn’t recognized to suspect: police
While the variety of incidents stays low in comparison with the general ridership figures, Toronto has seen a current uptick, one professional stated.
“It has been generally trending downwards across Canada, but we have seen an uptick in Toronto,” David Cooper, principal at Leading Mobility Consulting, instructed Global News of assaults on transit. “There’s about 2.1 million passengers boarding per day and about five incidents.”
He stated the TTC, particularly, had seen quite a lot of high-profile, extreme incidents.
The Ipsos polling urged that — even accompanied by mates or household — riders in Toronto felt much less protected than different elements of the nation. Twenty-five per cent of respondents stated they nonetheless felt unsafe travelling with mates or household, in comparison with a nationwide charge of 15 per cent.
Speaking at an occasion hosted by the Toronto Region Board of Trade in February, Rick Leary, the TTC’s CEO, stated the service had confronted “some real challenging times of late” relating to violence and rider security.
“Our front-line operators, our customers, have real concerns about the high profile of incidents that have occurred on the TTC,” he stated, referencing a rise in police, TTC enforcement and social staff concerned in transit. “We know that these are challenging social issues, not just public transit issues.”
Those high-profile incidents might have affected how individuals in Toronto behave when taking transit, the Ipsos polling suggests.
Only 21 per cent of Toronto residents polled stated that they had not modified their behaviour in any respect in terms of transit after reporting on current occasions.
At a nationwide stage, round 19 per cent of respondents stated they averted travelling at night time, whereas 17 per cent had taken further precautions akin to not turning their again on individuals or carrying a pepper spray. Around 13 per cent have began to take transit much less typically and 14 per cent stated that they had stopped utilizing it totally.
The majority of Ontarians polled — 57 per cent — stated they felt very protected or considerably protected when utilizing transit.
METHODOLOGY: This Ipsos ballot was performed between Feb. 15 and 17 on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a pattern of n=1,350 Canadians aged 18+ was interviewed (together with a pattern of n = 500 GTA residents). Quotas and weighting had been employed to stability demographics to make sure that the pattern’s composition displays that of the inhabitants based on census info. The precision of this Ipsos on-line polls is measured utilizing a credibility interval. In this case, the ballot is correct to inside ± 3.1 proportion factors, 19 occasions out of 20, of what the outcomes could be, had all Canadians aged 18+ been polled. All pattern surveys and polls could also be topic to different sources of error, together with, however not restricted to protection error, and measurement error.
— With information from Global News’ Erica Vella
© 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
