If you ever avail of the services of the TTC - I pity you if you have to and I advise against it if you don't - you will see advertisements on the inside of the streetcars and subway trains. One of these advertisements urges anyone who will care to look to keep the TTC public. Now, whether public transport should be run by the government or by private companies is a debate for other people - people who have studied the issues, who have spent time considering all angles and, importantly, who give a shit. What I have an issue with is this: As examples of privatized failures the TTC has chosen the systems in the following three cities:
1. London
2. Vancouver
3. Melbourne
Now, I have never been to Melbourne. I have, however lived in the other two for fairly long stretches of time. And in terms of the quality of service provided, their public transport systems beats seven shades of shit out of the TTC's pathetic offerings. In fact, I have lived in a few different cities - Bombay, Hafr-Al-Batin, Jubail, Guildford, London, Gloucester, Vancouver and, now, Toronto. And I can safely say that, among all the aforementioned cities that so much as pretend to have a public transport system (and the two Arabian cities don't), Toronto has the very worst. Listen, Toronto, I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong in principle. But if you want to point to a model and call it shit, at least make sure your offering is better. And relative merits apart, you want to make sure your system isn't outright rubbish. When your system compares unfavourably to that of an overcrowded, poor city like Bombay, you really shouldn't be so snottily smug and arrogant in your defence of it.
Why the TTC is bad enough to deserve the above rant is a matter for another blogpost. Suffice it to say that it is. A practical consequence of this was that last Saturday, having left home early-ish to get to work - and hence leave - equally early, I spent about half an hour in the cold March wind waiting for a streetcar.
That would have been unremarkably bad. However, in that half hour, I was subjected to one of the most terrifying (and at the same time the most amazing) spectacles I have witnessed personally. Near the bus stop was a mouse, searching for scraps in the nearly melted slush. On a tree about 20 metres away, was a crow, watching it. As I looked, the crow swooped for the mouse. Missed. There was a mad scramble which ended in the mouse finding a hole to hide in, just out of reach of the crow. The crow went back to its perch and waited for the mouse to re-emerge. When it did, the crow went for it again, with the same result. Back to perch, wait, swoop - but this time it swooped so as to land between the mouse and the hole. The mouse, in utter panic scrambled all over the place and when it was farther away from the hole, the crow went after it. And missed again. The mouse somehow evaded it and finding the hole unguarded, ran into it again. The crow, once again, went back to its perch. Time passed. The mouse came back out and went about its scrounging.
But this time the crow did not come after the mouse. Oh no. It flew across the street, picked up a stone and returned to its vantage point. Then, it swooped again - again to land between the mouse and the hole. And this time, it plugged the hole with the stone. Fucking hell. And then, it actually sauntered, lazily, after the utterly, utterly terrified mouse as if to say, "Your move, you little shit!"
I really wouldn't have thought any animal other than a human could plan like that. It wasn't a million monkeys at a million typewriters scenario - the crow wasn't randomly trying different things and hoping one of them would work. It was cold, calculated planning. I have to say, I felt for that mouse. A small part of me really wanted to shoo the crow away. But another part felt that that kind of foresight and planning deserved a reward. Besides, fucking hell, I did not want to make an enemy of something that formidable. I have seen "The Birds".
