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| Garbage begets garbage |
Hard-headed realists like to scratch out the term computer glitch where they see it and insert human error. It’s a truth that is older than the home computing revolution of the 1980s. The first recorded use of the term garbage-in-garbage-out was noted in April 1963. It describes the way humans make mistakes that computers can’t fix. And so it is that the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way, that multi-million dollar disaster imposed on Toronto by our transportation betters, is suffering from a massive case of garbage-in-garbage-out. Somewhere along the line, the system that regulates the transit traffic signals (the streetcars have their very own lights of course) was fouled up with garbage data. It was done by a human, or maybe several humans. As a result, it now takes eight minutes longer than it should for the 512 St. Clair streetcar to make the round trip from the west end to Yonge Street. As the scriptures might say, garbage begets garbage.
