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Setting aside the more cabbage-brained concerns, what I find most peculiar is the ease with which everyone, including the media, seems to accept the basic assumption that children have to be dropped off and picked up by automobile. It’s obviously not true. According to the 2018 Transportation Tomorrow Survey, in 2016 some 28 per cent of Toronto households were carless. In downtown wards it’s over 50 per cent. And if there’s any daycare clientele you would expect not to be auto-beholden, it would surely be this one’s. It would be surrounded by some of the densest areas of the city — and MPCs hate cars on principle. It would be a 15-minute walk from Castle Frank subway, seven minutes to the College streetcar, four and three minutes to the Wellesley and Parliament buses, respectively.

There’s a widely accepted subsidiary assumption, too, which is that parents must park directly outside the day care to effect their drop-offs and pick-ups. Again: Not true! There is plenty of parking on Parliament Street — the aforementioned three-minute walk away. There is parking for Riverdale Farm roughly seven minutes’ walk away on the far-eastern end of Carlton Street. Perhaps the local Catholic school, 190 metres away, or the local public school, 500 metres away, might be willing to offer their parking lots for parents’ use after school hours.

Can we really not figure out how to enforce a no-parking zone such that a daycare can open in a residential area that by all accounts sorely needs it?

There seems to be a profound failure of imagination at play here. So it would be great to just say this is a wholly invented problem: Open the damn daycare, everything will be fine. Yet there’s every reason to believe the traffic would, in fact, end up being an enormous problem. You would only need a fraction of the 80 kids’ parents to show up on their Mercedes tractors before you had a problem. I’ve never witnessed it firsthand, but parents speak of school drop-off zones as barely civilized battles royal in which kids could very easily get hurt (not least since Torontonians have no idea how to drive).