Once upon a time there was a controversy over a proposed Spadina Expressway. Power to the people, the concrete disaster that would have messed up so many beautiful neighbourhoods in Hogtown was voted down, plans thrown out and all.

Then there used to be something called the Spadina bus. It was number 77, I think. It would carry people up and down Spadina Ave., through U. of T. territory and the heart of Chinatown. Spadina was really, really wide then. It even had parking spaces that were long-ways rather than parallel -- if you know what I mean. Anyway. It was cool and the Shuffle Demons wrote a song about it.

And then they got rid of the Spadina bus and revamped the Spadina subway station and put in a Spadina streetcar route. I guess they still needed to do something with the wicked-wide street that carried so many folks down to Hogtown. So they built streetcar tracks and gave us a state-of-the-art-world-class streetcar experience. And that's when the real disaster began.

The Spadina subway station is the biggest joke in the world. More often than not the streetcar platform is packed with more people than can physically fit on it (sorry about ending that sentence with two prepositions.) The lines of folks waiting for the always late car have to spiral around support beams, sometimes interweaving with each other in a chaotic fashion; and too often, the lines even wend their way down towards the moving sidewalk around the corner and over the next frickin' block just about!

And the really dumb thing is that when the 510 streetcar finally arrives, it's packed with people who have to bust through all these spiral lines of people to make their way to the exits or the subway. You want chaos? You want a transit disaster waiting to happen? Come down to the Spadina station streetcar platform at rush hour (which of course in Hogtown is from 6:30 AM to 8:00 PM.)

But wait, there's more. Remember that wicked-wide street I mentioned? Well, they've dumped it full of concrete down the centre for the special streetcar lane. Six or seven little platforms with nice potted tree plants here and there all the way down the avenue. And none of the frickin' stops actually stop at a real intersection! You have to get off in the middle of busy Spadina (you see the streetcar lane takes up so much room that drivers drive like kamikazes) and take a deep breathe as you walk off the skinny platform (that might hold more people if there weren't those spindly little trees on it) and hope to heaven that some clown in an SUV doesn't knock you down as you jay-walk between Queen and Adelaide hoping to get to work in one piece.

There is not a more badly designed transit system on the planet. Of that I am sure. Okay, maybe some third world countries run scarier bus routes, but they don't pretend to be world class. I want something done about it but it shouldn't cost us any more money -- it already cost us money to build this stupid thing. And clearly they built it without realizing that there would be people involved. Imagine, people actually taking the streetcar.

That is all for now.

Thanks and good luck.