Inside the weird world of Toronto’s transit seat upholstery

When Rujuta Kumthekar rides the TTC, she doesn’t take a seat.

“I just moved here like a year ago and pretty much everyone I asked told me to not sit, so I don’t sit.”

Kumthekar blames the weird stains she’s seen on the TTC’s red fabric seats. She would reconsider sitting — if the seats were plastic.

“Plastic works just because it’s easier to clean,” she said.

Other transit systems, most recently in Seattle, have shifted away from fabric seats, citing complaints about cleanliness. Toronto transit is in the midst of its own seat debate.

As it orders new buses, the TTC says they will now have plastic seats, instead of fabric ones. Currently, only 100 or so of the city’s roughly 2,000 buses have plastic seats.

“They are certainly easier to maintain and keep clean,” said TTC spokesperson Stuart Green.

A pair of red plastic empty transit seats on board a TTC bus — About 100 buses in the TTC’s fleet are already outfitted with plastic seats, with more to come as new buses arrive. You can spot them on the TTC’s electric buses. (Laura Pedersen/CBC)

Metrolinx, however, opted for fabric onboard the new Eglinton and Finch light rail vehicles.

“The advantages of the fabric seats are that they offer more comfort, warmth and friction [preventing sliding],” said Metrolinx spokesperson Lyndsay Miller in an email.

“The fabric was chosen because it is extremely durable and easy to clean,” she said.

Reimagining Toronto’s dull seat designs

The fabric is actually a wool material called a moquette. Sure, it’s prone to mystery stains. But in cities like London, it’s become an iconic symbol. You can buy its eye-popping patterns on shirts, doormats, pillows, armchairs, even a three-seat sofa.

The Instagram account @idontgiveaseat documents even more far-out patterns.

Toronto’s current transit seat design is much less memorable — on the TTC, the seat fabric is plain red, or blue for priority seating.

A woman texts on her phone beside a row of empty red fabric seats on a subway car along Toronto's Line 2. — Toronto’s Line 2 subway has fabric seats. But as the transit agency is in the midst of replacing its trains on the line, it’s considering ditching the fabric for a harder surface. (Laura Pedersen/CBC)

Helen Kerr was tasked with designing Eglinton’s fabric seat pattern — and she wanted it to stand out. A sign of just how long Eglinton took to open, Kerr’s design was finalized more than a decade ago.

She landed on a busy, moving pattern with lines of blue, green, yellow, a touch of red, and some turquoise too, representing the colours of the GTA’s different transit agencies and “the long-term and larger goal of transit system harmonization.” The pattern is also being used on the Finch LRT.

“There’s an aesthetic piece, but there’s also truly a functional piece as well,” said Kerr, co-president of KerrSmith Design.

That means the seats are ready to handle everything from messy food spills to bodily fluids.

Four sheets with very colourful mockup designs for potential Eglinton seat patterns. — Kerr had a box of samples and mockups of ideas floated for the Eglinton seat design, though she admits they were probably too much for early morning commuters. (Haydn Watters/CBC)

“We’ve done a lot of investigation into camouflage as well because it’s used to hide things, hide people, usually,” Kerr said. “But this is used to hide dirt,” she added, pointing at one of the busy seat patterns.

“If you spill mustard here, it’s not going to show as much.”

What’s more hygienic: plastic or fabric?

Geneticist Christopher Mason swabs subway surfaces around the world, searching for microbial ecosystems, including on fabric and plastic seats.

He started swabbing more than a decade ago, when his daughter licked a subway pole and he panicked. But his findings have “quantifiably soothed” him.

A row of brightly coloured fabric seats on board a vehicle on the Eglinton LRT line. — Vehicles on both the Finch and Eglinton LRT feature fabric seats, despite some transit systems shifting away from the material. (Laura Pedersen/CBC)

“Almost everything we find are bacteria and viruses related to plants, related to what you would find on human skin,” said Mason, a professor of systems and computational biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.

“Most of them are already around you to begin with.”

While Mason has found more kinds of microbes on fabric than plastic, he doesn’t think sitting on one type of seat is worse than the other.

“If an environment is too clean, it’s actually bad. Part of your immune system is you need training,” he said. “Plastic often has less diversity. So if anything, I’d probably want more of these diverse surfaces on the subway.”

Christopher Mason, right, swabs a bench at a subway station in New York City, something he started doing more than a decade ago. (Thos Robinson/Getty Images for Weill Cornell Medicine)

Mason says it’s still vital the seats get cleaned though.

The TTC said it cleans its vehicle’s seats at the end of their daily shift, plus the seats get an annual deep cleaning. But that doesn’t stop every seat from getting gross.

While TTC buses are gradually switching to plastic seats, there are no plans to retrofit the entire system. Though, plastic seats could end up on the subway eventually. The transit agency is considering them as it replaces its aging Line 2 trains with new ones.

“More than likely they will have some kind of harder surface and won’t be the upholstery seats,” said Green, the TTC spokesperson.

For commuters like Shea Hamblin, that can’t come soon enough.

“I’d rather be sitting on something clean than something ultra comfy,” Hamblin said.

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