The easiest to validate information are the color, date, and route. There is also a tear-off portion at the very top that lets TTC staff check if the transfer was issued during the day or “night” hours. No back-to-back days ever use the same color.
When you climb onto a bus, you often see a bunch of transfers in a holder above the fare box. That holder has metal clips that can slide up and down and cause notches on the transfer when the driver removes one from the holder. In addition to the small notches, the holder also allows the driver to tear the transfer to a specific length.
Along the side of the transfer, you see two columns of numbers. On the left column, you’ll see numbers 5 though 12 and then from 1 though 4. When the driver issues a transfer, it is torn to a specific length. The last number shown at the bottom of the transfer indicates the hour the transfer was issued.
On the right column, there are two digit numbers and the letters U and D. These indicate the minute of the hour the transfer was issued and if the bus/streetcar was going up or down the route.
“U” or “D” refers to “up” or “down”. This represents the direction of travel. Up means north or west and down means south or east. When a driver grabs a transfer, in addition to tearing it to a specific length, these notches indicate the time and direction you were traveling when it was issued.
<%= image_tag "articles/transfer/transfer2.gif" %>
Using the example picture on the above, this transfer was issued at 11:15. Since the “night” strip is torn off, it means the ticket was issued at 11:15am. The notch over the D means I was travelling southbound.
The transfers have also been designed so that a person cannot pretend to have the transfer look like it was issued at a later time. This why the hour and minute numbers are ordered in the way they are.
For example, a transfer issued at 7am could not be re-torn to make it look like it was issued at 2pm since the number 7 would have been torn off. Similarly, a 5am transfer could look like one issued at 6pm because at 5pm, the transfers must have the “night” strip on top.
<%= render :partial => “article/article_footer”, :locals => { :tags => [‘fun’, ‘ttc’], :date=>’January 10, 2011′} %>