the joys of public transit

Yesterday night I was coming home on the streetcar (after waiting for at least 15 minutes for it), going north on Bathurst (I know these street names will probably mean nothing to most of you), desperately hoping to catch the subway before it closed at 1:50am.

If you miss the subway, there are buses that run the same route as the subway, but they are not-so-affectionately called "the drunk buses" because you ride them with the people who were kicked out of the bars at last call. Anyway, I've had a few bad experiences on the drunk bus, so I like to avoid it if at all possible.

So here I am, in the streetcar, a block away from the subway station, minding my own business, when suddenly we stop. In the middle of an intersection. Right in the middle. Blocking all traffic going both ways. So I'm a little curious, but not worried. But we don't move for a minute or two, and now I get annoyed. Why are we stopped?? I hate the drunk bus!!

Well, I hear the guy behind me call his friend on his cell phone and tell him that he's going to be late because there is a homeless man standing directly in the path of the streetcar waving around his transfer. Huh?? I look out the front of the streetcar. Sure enough, there he is, a middle-aged man who looks a little ragged, and he is standing facing the streetcar, wildly waving his transfer. The driver, obviously not the confrontational type, simply puts on his flashers, picks up a newspaper, and sits there reading. There wasn't really anything he could do, anyway, short of physically removing the guy--it's not like he could go around him! After five or ten minutes, a cop shows up and escorts the man away from the streetcar tracks. The driver sighed and put down his newspaper, as if he were disappointed that he had such a short break.

I made it to the subway station just in time to catch the very last train of the night.

Phew.