Article content continued

The traffic restrictions will be in place for the duration of the event, since police can’t up and decide to loosen them on an as-needed basis. And to combat the potential for traffic nightmares, the Ontario government has for weeks been advising people to take precautionary measures like not going to work. Or working from home. Or working by phone. Or leaving the country. OK, not that last one, but most of the advice has been greeted with the following response, or something similar: If I didn’t have to sit in traffic on the Gardiner Expressway every day, don’t you think I wouldn’t, you know, do it? There are also plans for temporary road closures, the schedules of which sometimes won’t be announced until the evening before, which doesn’t sound all that convenient. However, there’s an app! People like apps, yes?

It’s true that these kinds of special restrictions have worked to great effect for events such as the London and Vancouver Olympics. But those are events of a totally different scale in the public mind: the world is watching, and you put your city on display and take the weeks off or rent out your house for a mint and go stay with your uncle. There is precious little of that anticipation happening for these Games, as evidenced by the fact that public officials would really like to stop talking about how many people are not planning to attend them. A few weeks ago, Pan Am people disclosed that about a million tickets of the available 1.4 million tickets had yet to be purchased. This seemed rather disconcerting, but there were assurances that they never really expected ticket sales to pick up until the torch relay began. (I do not know why there is a Pan Am torch.) So, the torch relay is now in full swing, and there are, the Pan Am boss said this week, about 850,000 tickets still unsold. But this is all fine, see, because they never really expected ticket sales to spike until the last minute.