My Adventures on the Bus
There isn’t really a better way for me to start this piece off than to say that I was born to explore. I was poring over my collection of paper maps well before I could properly read the words on them, and memorizing my school bus routes and the layout of my neighbourhood well before I was allowed to explore it — let alone drive. If one were to look at what I consider my hobbies — going on walks, biking, skateboarding, open-world video games — the common theme among them would be exploration. It should come as no surprise, then, that I would have no choice but to go nuts upon having gotten my first taste of freedom in my early teens.
In high school, any time there was a French class I didn’t feel like going to, a Chem quiz I hadn’t prepared for, or really any other reason for me to skip school,[1] I’d stay on the number 3 a for a little while after it passed Fieldgate Drive — often pretending to have dozed off just as the bus’s automated voice announced that I had arrived at what was supposed to be my intended destination. My morning would instead start at Islington Station, from which I would head towards a seemingly different destination each time; the only constraint usually being that I usually liked to be back at school by the end of lunch (usually).[2] Anyone keen enough to have noticed that I wasn’t in my first class of the day about 20 minutes or so after the anthem and morning announcements had finished — just enough time for them to conclude that my absence was not mere tardiness — knew where I was headed; or at the very least, what I was doing.
In many ways, my adolescence was defined by these days; by the all-too-familiar door-closing chime of the City’s subways, the screech of streetcar wheels rounding sharp corners on rusty tracks, and the feeling of stepping out of a crammed downtown subway station and being immediately surrounded by a concrete jungle. Though the subway and streetcars were — as far as transit goes — what separated downtown from the suburbs (and what one would expect an uncultured suburbanite l0$er like myself to gravitate towards), I always found myself more intrigued by my experiences on the bus; its window becoming, in quite a literal sense, the lens through which I was afforded what I would contend is the rawest possible view of the City.[3]
Only the bus — not being confined to tunnels, or a fairly limited network of rails generally concentrated in the City’s core — could truly capture the essence of its surroundings as it zigzagged off of Ossington Avenue, west along Davenport, and took a right to go north once again on Oakwood; abruptly veering off to the side of the narrow, bumpy collector road every few blocks to pick up passengers. Only the bus could take me to the concrete towers of Thorncliffe Park, past the Victorian architecture of the Annex,[4] into the core of the City’s many ethnic enclaves, and through its emerging neighbourhoods — both on the urban fringe and in its former industrial heart. And only on the bus was I in the company of what amounts, in my view, to a true cross-section of the City’s residents — its real people who face real everyday challenges — exposing me to that which the postcard-like perspective provided by the streetcar window simply could not: the unvarnished reality of life in the City I had come to love. It wasn’t always pretty, but it sure was real. I couldn’t help but reflect on what the City was, where it was going, and how I wanted it to develop.
Riding the bus, I saw first-hand the increasing contrast between neighbourhoods; which despite proximity, often could not be more different from one another. A similar contrast was even sometimes present within a neighbourhood, with some of the seemingly infinite number of bay-and-gables that lined its streets adorned by murals, but more often covered in graffiti; some of them on their last legs, and others undergoing rehabilitation or reconstruction — often a sign of what was to come for the area’s current residents (ya know, gentrification). This was, after all — for better or for worse — the eternally-beating heart of the City.
A City — I might add — which was, and still is, growing and changing at a pace unrivalled by any other on the continent. One thing I often like to rave about to anyone willing to listen — especially those who are either not from Toronto, or who are from Toronto, but don’t get out enough — is the amount of development underway around here. All you have to do is go Downtown and walk in just about any direction for a couple blocks until you encounter a crane (or several cranes) to see what I mean. And frankly, you don’t even need to be Downtown if you’re willing to substitute driving for walking.
The City is largely changing for the better. A short stroll along Queens Quay East will — if you can handle the noise, dust and overall nastiness of construction — take you past the emerging East Bayfront to a handful of neighbourhoods in development (namely Quayside, the Lower Don Lands, East Harbour, and the Port Lands too I guess, but at that point you’re no longer taking a short stroll) which, if they were in another similarly-sized North American metro area like Philadelphia or San Francisco, would be the chief source of optimism for its community of urbanists, the crown jewel of its planning and development scene. In Toronto, however, these kinds of projects — as impressive as each of them is in its own right — are better described as par for the course; and one would find plenty more of them throughout the region if they were to look beyond the eastern waterfront.
There’s honestly too much to keep up with nowadays. The parking lots of seemingly every major shopping mall in the City are slated to undergo transformation into high-rise infill communities in the coming decades, and dramatic intensification is being planned adjacent to numerous major transit stations — both present and future.[5] I’ve been following this stuff for quite a while now, and it’s starting to get to a point at which the development projects both proposed and underway bear a closer resemblance to fantasy than to anything I could have viewed as being realistic just a few short years ago — the public and private sectors of the industry are simply way more ambitious than they used to be.[6] The gap which once existed between how I wished the City could develop, and how it actually was developing, is still — to be sure — present (although sometimes reality manages to exceed my wildest dreams); but it is significantly smaller than it was back when I was exploring the City as a teen.
I guess you can say I sort of envy this generation of adolescents with too much time on their hands. Although the carefree high school version of me who had no problem spending the whole day on a trip to nowhere in particular has since been replaced by a hardass on a mission (yay?), I still find myself reflecting on similar kinds of things whenever I manage to come up with an excuse to take the bus to those same parts of the City I explored years ago. At some point, I hope (plan) to be too rich to be sharing a condo with a roommate, and it’s been a couple years since I checked “too rich to be eating Kraft Dinner everyday” off my list. But I’ll never be too rich to take the bus. The bus was — and is — my main source of optimism for what I love about the City, and what it can become. The seemingly meaningless trips I took on it, the places I went, the observations I made, all played a role in informing my eventual decision to pursue the whole “making the City better” thing as a career. To do what I love, but call it work. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
NOTES
[1] Oddly enough, I’ve since become a huge proponent of the whole showing up to class thing — especially after the pandemic. I’ll never take in-person interaction at school and on the job for granted again.
[2] Usually.
[3] This was long before I cared about optimizing my schedule or how much time I was wasting on transit. There was no book to read, no podcast or lecture to listen to, and no exhaustion at the end of a long day to put me to sleep. Just myself, the roar of the engine at the back of the bus, and whatever I was looking at from inside its window.
[4] I know you can get there on the subway, but the subway is stuck in a tunnel. Let me live.
[5] On that note, Toronto is building like four subway extensions as we speak, and is undertaking a massive transformation of its commuter rail network.
[6] Whether this is chiefly a result of an exploding population, a favourable political/policy environment, or macroeconomic factors such as interest rates is beyond the scope of this piece. I’m supposed to be having fun here.
