False Exit

One time recently, me and Lee-Anne were leaving an ION light rail station, and we were flagged down by a security guard. She told us that the direction we were taking was "emergency only", and that we had to exit from the other side. This felt a little perplexing, but at least she wasn't singling us out. As we walked in the direction she requested, we saw her approaching person after person and giving them the same warning.

She was not out of her right to do so. It's easy to overlook, but in the direction we were walking was a little sign that says "emergency only".

Still, while she was technically playing by the book as she ushered people away from the false exit, she was really tackling her role with a ferver that made me question her motivation. People are constantly leaving and entering from there and we saw her camping pretty hard, taking lots of initiative to correct passengers. It seemed like she had taken it on as her personal mission to correct this societal trend.

It just feels like a weird hill to die on, because there is barely a difference between the two exit points. At both sides there is a payment podium. If people are only supposed to enter it during an emergency, would they even worry about train fare?

Even curiouser, I wonder what kind of emergency there might be that exiting that way would be helpful. It's in the open air. If the train were on fire or if there were an active shooter, I would run in any direction that would take me further from the crisis. I wouldn't file into a line labeled as the emergency exit, placed at an arbitrary point in the outdoors.

That might be unfair. It isn't totally arbitrary as there is a ramp... onto the tracks, but not off. This means that if you use a mobility device, you can be assisted off the platform, but not past the railway which has a curb facing the road.

My guess is that the payment podium was placed there due to the cookie-cutter design of the ION stations. Most of them have one on each side, so they did it here even though one of the exits is technically not viable.  Other than the half-deconstructed curb, I guess the one thing stopping it from being considered legitimate is that there isn't a crosswalk.

But perhaps one day there will be, because we just got a new one in our neighbourhood. There's a corner near where we live intersecting how I get to work and between our home and the nearest grocery. It has a very annoying level of traffic. During the pandemic, Lee-Anne put in a request to the city to install a crosswalk and got a response that they'd look into it, but that everything was backlogged due to COVID. Well, some three years later we got some paint on pavement. 

It doesn't do much. The cars don't really acknowledge it, and when they do you have to worry that traffic moving the other way won't be on the same wavelength. This can cause some awkwardness as you either have to reject the offer of the person that stopped due to the lack of hospitality shown by other drivers, or you have to feel a bit guilty for the car that feels pressured to stop because someone else did. 

Maybe the addition of a crosswalk to the false ION exit wouldn't help much.