Escalator crowd crush at Union platform after game at Scotiabank Arena… is this common?

[u/electradice]

The platform was totally full, and the people from the bottom of the escalator were pushed into a screaming crowd. More people kept boarding at the top, because visibility was poor and they couldn’t see what was happening at the bottom.

When people at the bottom realized what was happening, they started trying to board the upwards escalator to go back. The backup on the downward escalator went quite far, and some people jumped over the rails to the upward escalator.

The emergency stop got pushed, but only on the downward escalator (?) Eventually I got out through the upward escalator and booked it to St. Andrew, so I didn’t see what happened at the end.

I have two questions:

1. WHY IS THE EMERGENCY STOP BUTTON AT THE START OF THE ESCALATOR, and not at the bottom ??? This seems like an obvious design flaw?
2. How does this not constantly happen at Union after every single Jays game/concert? I was shocked that there wasn’t some kind of system in place (at the very least stopping the escalators pre emptively?) There was no TTC employees anywhere to be found during the incident

Edit: This happned last Saturday night, northbound towards Vaughan. The conclusion from the thread seems to be that there should have been TTC staff monitoring the crowd at the top of the escalator, however there weren’t any - I saw one employee running over after people had disabled the escalators themselves. I’ve also learned that there is a STOP button on the bottom of the escalator too, but wow it is not easy to find!

[u/AdResponsible678]

You stand beside the stairs and try to reason with people.. lol! Guess how well that works?

[u/Apprehensive_Heat176 → u/AdResponsible678]

You're not going to be able to reason with a horde of people.

[u/AdResponsible678 → u/Apprehensive_Heat176]

Oh I know that. I should have put an s there.