Maria is reporting that the TTC is on strike. Hopefully they can avoid the 3 month+ strike transit Vancouverites endured in 2001. I've never had a car while in Vancouver (since 1996), so that meant 3 months of making sure I had a ride to work. (Luckily I lived near an arterial route, at the time a route that my co-worker took to work.) While in Toronto, I took the subway and streetcars, which I thought were the neatest things, because unlike Vancouver's automated SkyTrain, they each had operators. Crossing a lane of traffic to board a streetcar, and then make sure that traffic had stopped behind the streetcar (as required by law) when alighting took some getting used to. The streetcars aren't as neat as Portland's, which stop snug up to a curb and have a newer fleet, and Toronto's transfer system—which as I understand it means you can keep riding for a reasonable amount of time as long as you're going one way taking the most direct route. In Vancouver transfers are limited by time and "zone", but not by direction or amount of trips.