On this mainly sunny Friday afternoon, July 24th, 2009, at precisely 12:14pm and 28 seconds, there were a lot of unusual things on Cecil’s list of things-to-do. Not unusual in the sense of being strange, but unusual in the sense that they just weren’t usually there. Today his list included such things as “8:52am - check suitcases” and “9:04am - get on the bus” and “10:32am - get off the bus”, whereas a typical day would include much more mundane items such as “7:04am - wake up” and “7:12am - eat porridge”.

    One of the things that was definitely not on his list today, or any other day, was “12:15pm - get eaten by a tiger”. Unfortunately this appeared to be what was about to happen right now, regardless of the plan on paper. Sitting with his back pressed up against a tree, wondering how the whole agenda had gone so terribly awry, he stared into the cold eyes of this giant killer feline. The tigers mouth watered at the thought of some delicious human meat for a change. It was feeding time for the tiger, which one should note carefully is a very bad time to get between a hungry tiger and his food. However, this is precisely what Cecil had managed to do. So the tiger was thinking about eating Cecil instead. The only thing Cecil was thinking was “Great, now I’m fifteen minutes behind schedule. This is all Edna’s fault.”
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I’ve been lax in getting up the cell phone pics, so these ones go back a few months.
Cell Phone Pics - 12/29/08

Party: (% of popular vote) seats under FPP - seats under PR

Conservatives: (38%) 143 - 117
Liberals: (26%) 76 - 81
NDP: (18%) 37 - 57
Bloc: (10%) 50 - 28
Green: (7%) 0 - 23

(data from fairvote.ca)

Greater Toronto Area

Population: 2,503,281
Avg Riders Per Weekday: 1.2 million
Number of Subway Stops: 69 (1/km)
Length of System: 68.3 km

(Ref: Wikipedia)

Greater London (England)

Population: 7,355,400
Avg Riders Per Weekday: 4.25 million
Number of Subway Stops: 268 (1.5/km)
Length of System: 400 km

(Ref: Wikipedia)

To do some math on this, London has 2.9x Toronto’s population, 3.5x our average daily ridership, 3.8x as many stops, and 5.8x the length. Those numbers seem reasonably close, yet somehow our system seems… not quite epic enough. When you factor in London’s area of 1,577.3 km² versus Greater Toronto’s 7,125 km² (That’s 4.5x more area for us) ours seems a bit small.