Do you suffer from optimism? We can cure you. One trip on the streets of Toronto and any belief that all is for the best will be erased from your mind forever.
For residents, traffic is a nightmare to which they awake each morning. But what if your nightmare has a nightmare? Such was the case for me earlier this week, when I allocated two and a half hours to drive to the airport from the east end of the city and almost didn’t make it. Often, we opt to take the Pearson Express Train, but my son was travelling with many bags and so we chose to drive.
Let’s put my estimate into context. According to Google Maps:
- Toronto Pearson Airport Terminal 3 is 33.3 kilometres from my starting point.
- It should take an average of 51 minutes to drive there during rush hour.
- The City of Belleville, Ontario is 187 kilometres away.
- It should take 2.2 hours to drive there during rush hour.
My estimate was realistic. In Toronto if you want to drive 33 kilometres, you allow yourself enough time to drive to a small city 187 kilometres away. The normal horrible amount of time to the airport was an hour. I had allowed for twice this. Surely, I had accounted for all variables?
“But …” as Second World War Canadian soldiers used to say of the ambitious strategies their officers planned, “Somebody forgot to tell the Germans.”
I mention the Germans not only to make a gratuitous reference to the Second World War but because the German language is so wonderfully expressive, with an incredible facility for creating words that sum up unique situations. German has a word for comfort eating following a break-up “Kummerspeck.” It has a word for a comeback that occurs to you after the fact – “Treppenwitz” (staircase joke). It has a word for rush-hour traffic – “Berufsverkehrs.” People of Germany, we need a word for when you are thrown down into a fiery pit of endless automobile-induced torment. How about “Verkehrshölle” (traffic hell)?
That’s where we ended: Verkehrshölle.
As is always the case when driving in Toronto, my first mistake was starting the car (we left at 5 p.m.). My second mistake was taking Lake Shore Boulevard East to the Gardiner Expressway. This is a mistake. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. They are wrong. The road to hell is Lakeshore Boulevard East between Sherbourne Avenue and York Street. In Dante’s Inferno, heretics in the sixth circle of hell are trapped in flaming tombs. This would be preferable to driving Lakeshore Boulevard East between Sherbourne Avenue and York Street.
Imagine if you locked human beings into steel cages and placed them underneath a crumbling structure that looks like something Kevin Costner turned down for use in his postapocalyptic 1995 film Waterworld because it was too depressing. Scatter tent-abiding people suffering every kind of torture and deprivation throughout the scene and stick a lone police officer at the intersection of Jarvis and Lake Shore to play the role of an ineffectual clown. Now, don’t let anyone move. Finally, stick a sign above the scene that reads: “Diciamo No alle Strade a Pedaggio!” (Say No to Toll Roads!”) and you’ve got it.
When I say we barely moved, I am not exaggerating. It took almost 40 minutes to travel the block between Yonge and Bay Street. All the while, the damned honked their horns and screamed their screams. Pedestrians hopped through the melee like frightened bunnies. It began to snow. This exacerbated the torment. Torontonians cannot drive in snow. Snow triggers a lemming reflex. The slightest dusting sets their collective brains on “fry.”
We gave up hope of making the Gardiner. It was after 6 p.m. We had travelled 6.7 kilometres in one hour. Surely, any other route would be better. I gave up trying to merge onto the Gardiner and continued along Lake Shore Boulevard West. It got worse. Traffic stood still. When it occasionally eased, drivers sped as fast as they could for 10 or 20 metres and then slammed on their brakes. More snow. Less hope. Dante-wise, we were in the “Seventh Circle,” akin to being condemned to a desert of blazing sand and constant rain and fire.
It was time to consult our artificial intelligence overlords. Google suggested circling back, rejoining the herd and merging onto Gardiner. I did not like that option and chose to do a U-turn on Lake Shore, drive west, make a left, cut back east across to Exhibition Place and south back on to Lake Shore going east. In essence, performing a horseshoe manoeuvre to leap ahead of the congestion. It worked. Not that we were that much faster, but we were able to eventually get onto the Gardiner, which crawled along, and then onto Highway 427 which inched to the airport.
The entire journey took two hours and six minutes. My son made his flight. I had allowed us three hours just in case.
Look, I failed “functions” in “Grade 13″ twice and then dropped it in favour of a course in American literature, so any mathematical calculations I make should be taken with a grain of salt the size of the Rock of Gibraltar, but by my estimations that means we travelled an average speed of 16.5 kilometres an hour.
In comparison, a horse trots an average of 13 kilometres an hour. A horse can canter at between 16 and 27 and can do so for around seven hours.
It would have been faster for us to ride horses to the airport. If we had cantered at 25 kilometres an hour, we would have arrived in one hour and 19 minutes.
Well, I guess that’s why they call it Verkehrshölle.