Welcome Aboard

This Ride Guide will help you navigate through the city. Inside, you will find important information on the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) streetcars, buses, subway trains and stations.

The TTC is planning its new, low-floor streetcars to replace its current streetcars. The streetcars entered service in 2018 on 510 Spadina line. These new vehicles are large, fully-accessible, air-conditioned, and more comfortable with no internal steps.

The TTC operates express or limited-stop rocket services on 25 bus routes. All of the services operate during peak periods from Monday to Friday, and some of the services also operate at off-peak times. Five of the routes are premium-fare Downtown Express routes. Customers travelling on these routes pay a premium (额外费用) fare that is double the regular TTC fare. All other express and rocket routes charge regular TTC fares.

TTC subways operate weekdays and Saturdays from approximately 6 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. Sunday service operates from approximately 9 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. Holiday start times vary. Trains are fast and frequent running every two to six minutes at all times of the week. Convenient connections are made at stations with TTC buses and streetcars.

McCoy was looking for a safe place to do drugs when something clearly out of place caught his eye: a luxurious brown leather handbag.

McCoy, 36, could relate all too well. One of his few possessions, the sleeping bag he used in an abandoned house, had recently been stolen. Remembering how angered he’d been by his own loss, he resolved to return the purse to its owner. After traveling much of the day and finally approaching the address on the bill, he was stopped by a woman, who asked whether she could buy the purse found in the handbag. McCoy refused, saying he was searching for its owner. “But I am the owner,” the woman said. “That’s my purse.”

A month earlier, Kaitlyn Smith, had woken up to find her apartment broken into and her purse stolen. Now she came across a tall, messy-looking man holding it tightly. She could instantly tell he wasn’t in good shape. Smith, amazed this stranger had gone to such great lengths to return her bag, asked whether there was anything she could do to help. “I’m a drug addict,” McCoy warned. “I don’t want to disturb your life.” Unafraid, Smith gave him her phone number, saying, “If you want to go to rehab (戒毒所), call me.” She then drove him back to his neighborhood and left, thinking that would be the end of it. Two days later, she got a call.

Smith realized that McCoy was serious about getting better, so she dug into her savings account and bought McCoy a plane ticket to Florida. While there, he would call her to let her know how he was doing. After 28 days at a rehab program at Johns Hopkins Hospital, McCoy is drug-free. He lives at a residential recovery center in Baltimore, and a GoFundMe page set up by Smith has covered his rent, groceries, and incidentals.

TOM RACHMAN’S latest novel records the life and legend of Bear Bavinsky, a painter of enormous appetites and all-consuming ego (自我), largely through the eyes of his son, Charles (known as Pinch). Pinch shrinks, unable to escape the giant’s shadow, hoping only to avoid being stepped underfoot.

Pinch is far from the only victim of the Bavinsky legend. Speaking to Natty, his current wife—Pinch’s mother, and a potter whose insecurities provide the ripe target for his bossy (专横的) personality—Bavinsky states,“You are a talent, my Natty, if you want to be. All it takes is a bit more charm.” Bear charms and bullies (霸凌), occupying physical and psychic space. Even his encouragement turns out to be another way to exercise control, proving how far those close to him have fallen short of his own achievement.

“The Italian Teacher” unfolds a story over more than 60 years and across two continents. One of Mr Rachman’s gifts is his ability to describe a time and place in a few skillful strokes. He describes the social and economic shifts of Italy in the 1950s through the Bavinskys’ downstairs neighbors, “a family of workers who, for generations, carved traditional decorations but whose sons are now selling West German electrical devices”.

Though Bear features in the novel, it is Pinch who commands the readers’ respect. Admittedly, he is wanting in confidence, filled with self-hatred, incapable of standing up to his bullying father. Like Natty, he is all damage and insecurity, a victim of Bear’s endless needs. Yet he turns out to be far more than the sum of his failures. He is compensated by his integrity and intelligence. His struggle to find meaning in the mess holds readers’ interest to the end. For all his faults, Pinch is gifted with wisdom, as is the author of this sad, funny and moving novel.

For adventurous travellers, it is merely an embarrassing and annoying experience. But among poor people diarrhoea is a killer. So it is delightful to report that one of Asia’s poorest countries, Bangladesh, is making huge progress against this disease. Deaths from diarrhoea have fallen by 90% in the past two decades. Along with a far-reaching vaccination programme and steady economic growth, that has helped drive down the number of childhood deaths.

In a country with more than 160m inhabitants, this represents a vast decline in human misery. And Bangladesh’s success holds lessons for other poor countries that are trying to beat back disease.

The first is that cheap, simple, imperfect solutions are often good enough. In an ideal world, with limitless cash and universally good governance, everybody would drink chlorinated water out of taps and flush their sewage through pipes into treatment plants. In the real world, however, you can go a long way with half-measures. Bangladeshi villages are equipped with small pit latrines and tube wells for water. Most are built by the householders themselves, or by laborers whom they pay out of their own pockets. Although the tube wells are often alarmingly close to the latrines, that seems to be fine. Researchers have found that germs do not travel far underground.

A second lesson is that hardware is not enough—the software of human behavior is just as important. Bangladesh’s neighbor, India, has funded and built a great many latrines. Despite that effort, many Indians continue to defecate in the open. Bangladesh’s government and charities have built latrines, too, but they have worked harder to stigmatize open defecation. Often they provide latrines for the poor and then persuade richer folk into following their example. A new, surprising, finding is that this works better than expecting people to copy their social superiors.