Silician Sketchbook

Apparently, light snow soils pants. Imagine what will happen when we get our first snow storm.

I mean, come on, we haven’t even had a snow storm this fall/winter season, and people drive like 10 cm is already on the ground and quickly accumulating.

Let’s make one thing clear: the roads were not icy, they were not slushy, they were and are wet. When it rains I still see people doing 10-15 km/h above the limit, i.e. PRO DRIVER coming through. I guess they’re not so PRO if they curl up into a fetal position when they see snow that melts on contact with the pavement.

I had to take side roads, it was so bad. And the funny thing was, the side roads were very lightly traveled. I guess panicking drivers like to herd together and crawl together. When the snow really hits the fan, I’d like to see how they handle the local hill feature at their paltry 2 km/h and truly poor traction conditions.

This is the second or third time we’ve seen snow in the past few weeks.  Maybe people’s attention spans are short.

Even people in a Skype channel are treating this like it’s A Big Deal. Snow tires means driving like it’s summer? Seriously? I drove around like it’s summer in my all-seasons today. Puhleaze. I refrained from comment except to note that my winter tires continue to reside in the basement, where they have sat for the past two winters.

Maybe I ignore common sense at my own peril, but my winter tires and I don’t really get along. For one, they’re heavy, and it shows every time I have to accelerate from a stop or even take my foot off the accelerator for a moment. Mileage takes a hit as a result. Perhaps newer winter tires drive better, but the ones I have certainly do not turn a winter wonderland into a sun-kissed summer.

Most importantly, they don’t help me. They could help you, but they certainly don’t help me. I have narrowly avoided close calls in slushy to icy conditions not by coming to a stop, but by pulling quickly to the shoulder. These tires stand no chance with black ice, absolutely none. I’d rather drive my sub-optimal all-seasons and know what I’m getting into rather than think I’m king of the road with winter tires.

For those who drive around the city anyway, it’s not hard to stay out of trouble with all-seasons. Proper tire pressure, slow application of throttle, low torque/gearing for starts and stops, is that’s required from an operational standpoint. Good visibility and safe following distance are needed whether you have winter tires or not.

And if the weather is really bad, or if you know that it’s going to get really bad, then stay home. Call in sick. If you really have to be somewhere that’s not the airport, take the bus, a vehicle that’s guaranteed to have more traction than you’ll ever get out of your winter tires.

I was late in getting home last night, like pretty much everyone else. I was one of those thousands of people that crowded Yonge and Bloor, although I wasn’t so silly as to step into the middle of the street and block traffic and shuttle buses.

Times like these, it’s good to not have tunnel vision (the irony). I was entertaining the idea of slipping back into the station, doubling back to the Spadina line via the Bloor-Danforth trains, and going north to Lawrence West station. I could then head east to Lawrence station where the subway was still operating northbound. A lot of people did wind up doing something similar, and it’s a shame that more didn’t.

I, on the other hand, took the Bloor line east instead, because east was where I needed to be anyway. I haven’t been on the Bloor line in a while, and the sad truth is I’ve been spoiled by the Yonge-University line’s speed and longer inter-station distances. I’m not sure how anyone could be spoiled by Yonge-University, but there you go.

As I stepped out of the subway station the other day, I think I saw a bike theft in progress. The thief was riding in the middle of the road, and narrowly missed an oncoming (blue) University Health Network bus. The victim ran past me on the sidewalk shouting.

I’m not sure how that went over seeing as how a police station is in the direction the bike was traveling, but I didn’t exactly stop to see.

Not that big a fan of bicycles myself; bike lanes here can safely accommodate only one, while sidewalks can be 4 persons wide along main avenues. Plus there’s the bonus of not having a bicycle to safeguard, although grad students get to store their bicycles in the grad common area, or potentially their lab/office.

Opinions vary, but a TTC subway extension northbound was needed yesterday, or 5+ years ago (and don’t get people started about the extension to York University).  If we’re lucky, we’ll see an extension to the Yonge line north to Highway 7 in eight years (see second last page), of which only five are actual construction.

And if you look at page 7, you’ll notice that this extension is only 6.5 kilometers. So 6.5 km in 8 years. If you believe in Wikipedia, this is something amounting to an improvement over the last extension — the Sheppard line — which was 5.5 km in 8 years.

I don’t know about you, but this seems downright atrocious. To put things in a bit of perspective, construction on the Chunnel was completed in 6 years. So in the time it takes to extend the Yonge line 6.5 km, plus one more year, others have built roughly 50 km of track underwater. Should we, perhaps, be embarrassed?

Okay, so maybe that was a bit of an apple to oranges comparison (and only because the Chunnel is way cooler than a middling subway extension). Comparing subways to subways, in the time it would take to construct our subway extension, the Chinese built an entire line. Line 5 of the Beijing Subway, to be exact, spanning 23 stations and 27.6 km.

In 5 years, the Chinese have also built the first phase of Line 10, and this phase alone is 22 stations and 24.68 km in length.

I mean, come on.

But if there’s a silver lining to all this, is that in their latest expansion, the STM took 5 years to extend their Orange Line 4 km and build 3 new stations. So I guess we can laugh at them for being slow?

And add to that the worst New Year’s eve to boot, and I might as well begin with it. I left for home later than I should have. Make that a lot later, 1.5 hours later. There was blowing snow although not too much accumulation downtown, and there wasn’t even too much of the stuff (from what I could see) at Finch station. But it was coming down hard, and one of the worst routes out of Finch station was made increasingly terrible as a result.

There was such a backlog that I eventually got onto the second bus that came along, and the driver initially refused to pull away unless some people got off and stopped blocking his mirror. Over an hour in, things at the back got a bit tense as words were exchanged between a standing woman who wanted to open the window to get a bit of air, and a man sitting down that didn’t snow being blown onto him. I think the consensus is, if you’re standing for over an hour on a bus while sandwiched in on all sides, you’re going to want some air too. And there were a lot of sandwiched people yesterday.

Over twenty minutes was spent sitting on a hill, not because the bus couldn’t make it up the hill, but because pretty much everyone else couldn’t make it and clogged the road. Eventually an opening appeared and the bus weaved in and out of the lanes dodging stuck vehicles. It wasn’t even a particularly steep hill, but given stop-and-go traffic conditions, it’s a lot easier to get stuck on a slushy and somewhat icy hill.

But speaking of sandwiched people, there was a lot of that today, too. What boggles the mind is if anything, the roads were worse this morning than they were yesterday morning. Sure, the snowplows came, when the storm still had 5 cm left in it. I waited a solid half hour more than usual for a bus, and buses did arrive, except they were so packed that a few people were able to squeeze in at best each time. My number eventually came up on the third.

It was an absolute slog until everyone got kicked off at Bayview. The bus was ordered to turn around and we all piled into the bus behind it. And then it was a slog to Yonge, but the road was actually clear in both directions so there was no hold up to get Finch station afterwards.

I think that all this being sandwiched on a bus for an hour plus two trips in a row got to me, and I was so out of it that I woke up just as the subway doors were closing, at Museum. And so I had to wait at St. George and head back south two stops. At least I got to see how the renovation (or “rejuvenation”) of Museum station was going. While it doesn’t blow me away, its purple paneling is a bit warmer than the unadorned concrete walls of stations along the Sheppard line, and it’s a lot less dated than the bathroom tiles at other Yonge/University/Spadina line stations.

I think it goes without saying that I missed my first class. The university should have closed today, like they did when the city got nailed last week.

Last night on the way home, the bus driver parked the bus and ran into the Country Style on Yonge for a coffee. First time that’s happened, so it was amusing. After the fifth time, I wouldn’t be so sure.

The driver of 7117 on route 53 is either a hero, or an asshat. It depends on whether you’re on the bus or trying to get on, and I was lucky to get in early. Past some unspecified point, the bus became a quasi-limited stop route like 53E, not picking up any more passengers despite the bus not being too packed. But unlike a 53E, people could leave at off at local stops along the way, provided they got to the doors fast enough.

Instead of staring in shock and confusion as the bus drove by, one guy made an attempt to knock on the door and run after the bus during a congested stretch of road. It wasn’t nearly as packed as when I got on, but the driver didn’t open the door. The guy ran to the next stop over, actually, to no avail.

Those who got the short end of the stick should file a complaint. Bus number 7117 on route 53, got to Bayview Avenue at 8:30 am today.

As for me, I’ll stick to 53E during rush hour and spare myself the drama.

Ouch. Thursdays are looking kind of grim, with a total of 6 hours of class.

So far the weather is holding up, a pretty bizarre statement to be making in January but there you go. When it gets colder, I don’t think I’ll like the late night walk to the subway station. With a number of buildings along College Street, it boggles my mind to see them unconnected.

I burned through my margin and arrived slightly late for class Wednesday because someone decided to jump in front of a subway train at Union station. It’s kind of surreal how the TTC is diplomatic about it, calling it an “emergency situation caused by a personal injury at track level.” It’s understandable to not talk about suicide attempts for fear of encouraging them, but everyone knows what it means to suffer an emergency track level injury.

I was actually on the subway sitting not too far from an unoccupied driver’s booth, when the radio erupted, although I couldn’t make anything out. At the next station, York Mills or Lawrence, the driver made mention of a delay due to a “power outage” at Union station.  After a bit of digging, I read that when a person contacts a train, the power is cut so that trains cannot enter the scene until after, um, things are cleaned up, I guess.

Does cutting power imply disabling a block spanning St. Andrew station to Wellesley station? Because when the truth came out, we all got kicked off at Bloor, with the requisite train traffic jam three stations beforehand. They ran shuttle buses between stations, but I opted to take the Bloor-Danforth line to St. George station, where I waited about 15 minutes for a southbound train that would get me to Queen’s Park before turning around at Osgoode station.

Being affected by or being around medical emergencies when commuting is still a dubious novelty. I think I’m quickly becoming hardened against such things, though. Someone tried to die, probably did while succeeding in drawing everyone’s attention posthumously.  I’m just looking at my watch wondering whether the professor will have erased the first blackboard by the time I get to class.

There are some things that maybe should be said, but aren’t for fear of being attacked by an emo high school kid.

This afternoon’s bus ride was held up for about 5 tense minutes as this guy argued with the driver, using such creative arguments like flawed logic, false generalizations, and profanity, over why he should be allowed on the bus with a student ticket. The driver parked the bus and radioed TTC security, and waited. The guy simmered throughout the stand-off, finally leaving the bus after failing to argue briefly, swearing as he did so.

That was about the only right move he made, as he would have likely been fined for much more than the cost of an adult fare, once a TTC officer showed up.

I can empathize with his situation, but I draw the line at committing a serious offense like harassing TTC personnel. I once attended summer classes downtown (I hesitate to call anything in the city a camp). I got dropped off at Warden station, and had my block of student fare tickets in hand, and for the first week and half or so, I walked through the turnstiles under the auspices of a smiling old man after I had dropped my ticket into the fare box.

Things changed once the smiling old man was replaced with a stern younger man with glasses, square jaw, and trimmed beard, not unlike this guy. That was entirely coincidental. It’s just what I remembered, and that was a bit of a traumatic experience so I deem my memory more credible than it usually is.

Description aside, he was the one responsible for locking the turnstile, and he ordered me to pay the adult fare because I didn’t have student photo ID. Now here’s where my situation diverges with the guy on the bus. First, I didn’t lose my head. If anything, I was confused, not looking for a confrontation. Second, I had change in my pocket. The guy claimed that he was a student and therefore had no money. I was 11 or 12 at the time, and I had change at least.

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. I could make up the difference between a student ticket and an adult (cash!) fare, but he was now down a student ticket, which was $1.40 before the fare increase, and with no means to make up the difference. I would also be freaking out, no doubt, but is there any point in getting belligerent?

First off, he was obviously in the wrong. What do the rules say? TTC Student Discount Card, or get the heck out. The driver kept pointing to that very sign posted on the bus and said, “I need photo ID.” The guy kept gesturing angrily at his high school student card and claimed that this was somehow valid ID. Learn to read. Never mind that the high school in question isn’t even a Toronto high school, but a York Region high school, neither kind of student card is issued by the TTC. Toronto high school students should, in theory, get a TTC issued discount card themselves. As an aside, the same driver later allowed a Toronto student to board when he showed his student card, so there is some hypocrisy involved.

That he had previously paid a student fare with his non-Toronto high school student card “like a hundred times” (yeah right) and thus it is perfectly legal is fallacy number one. I’m sure people have exceeded the speed limit on hundreds, thousands of occasions throughout their lives, and have never been caught. That doesn’t make it legal, either. The guy was probably capitalizing on the fact that drivers were either nicer than the one he encountered today, were too busy to check his card, or were just ignorant of the rules themselves.

“All you bus drivers are the same.” I don’t understand this. If all previous bus drivers encountered let him get away with breaking the rules, and this one didn’t, they are clearly not all the same because we have found a counter-example. Stop spewing trash already. I wasn’t the only passenger staring at him with a “Need a tissue?” expression.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but it turns out that York Region students can, in fact, get a student discount card. This is progress because way back, I didn’t even go to a high school, let alone a Toronto high school, so I wound up buying tokens. In retrospect, I should have just bought child tickets, even if I did look a little tall for an elementary school kid. Maybe my birth certificate could substitute for photo ID that no elementary school would issue? Who knows. The past is in the past.

What would I do in that situation? If I knew about as much as that guy did, I’d probably try the same argument with the student card, minus the yelling and profanity. Knowing what I know now, I’d have added that York Region students can also pay student fare, and have the driver radio an inquiry if he insisted on TTC issued ID. If the answer was “Nice try”, that’s game and I’d have to leave, minus $1.40. But the ticket was already in the collector box so there was nothing more to lose, except my pride.

Of course, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t even be in that situation. I’d have gone down to Sherbourne station or to the temporary facility in Richmond Hill and gotten my discount card. The $5 fee is recovered in several two-way trips.

(Title from one of the TF2 Soldier’s trash talk lines)