Almost every regular streetcar patron has a story of an exiting rider and an unobservant driver.

Last winter, I saw a kid getting off at College on the Bathurst car. When I glanced up the road, I saw a car barreling up the street without slowing down. Fortunately, a rider standing behind the kid also noticed the car and pulled him back to safety by his backpack. The car only grazed a trumpet case the kid was carrying. The driver hit the brakes a few feet ahead, paused for a second, and sped off.

And that was only a close call. One person every month gets it much worse by being hit while leaving a streetcar! A one-week TTC blitz started this Monday is reminding drivers that going past an open streetcar door (you know, that door with a STOP sign on it!) can get a $100 fine and 3 demerit points.

I hope the blitz does some good but my guess is we're not going to see any reduction in the over 100 drivers that daily pass streetcars illegally. I'm a pretty hard-core pedestrian and I'm all for laying the blame on certain moron motorists, but ever since I moved here the idea of getting off of a streetcar in the middle of a busy street seemed a bit risky and not that logical for both transit riders and motorists.

With the largest streetcar system in North America, the idea of having a safe island platform for every stop, or some other more permanent solution, is probably not happening just yet.

Photo: sjgardiner from the blogTO Flickr pool