Article content continued

Eventually, he just gave up. He found an exit and walked the rest of the way above ground.

Vancouver lawyer Christine Duhaime spent this past summer working in Toronto. She described her PATH experience as “pretty hellish.” One time, while trying to make her way from the Air Canada Centre to Brookfield Place — about a block’s walk above ground — she got completely turned around in Union Station and had to turn back. “It’s not like the signs are adequate,” she said. And “following the arrows never works.”

On a recent weekday afternoon, a reporter for the National Post attempted to make his way from the PATH’s southern edge, at RBC Waterpark Place on Queens Quay West, north all the way to Yonge and Dundas Square.

It was, it must be said, not all that bad. The main problem for anyone trying to navigate the PATH is that, inside the buildings, what signs there are rarely point out anything more than one building ahead. So if you want to get from Union Station, say, to City Hall, you need to know in advance every building along the way.

That’s less of a problem now, in the smartphone era, than it once was; the city has a comprehensive map available for download. But if you’re a tourist, or just didn’t think about preplanning your route, it’s easy to see how you could still become lost.

The strangest thing about the PATH now, though, isn’t its signage. It’s the fact it exists at all.

In Wanderlust, her acclaimed history of walking, Rebecca Solnit described walking public streets as “the beginning of citizenship.” It’s “what links up reading the map with living ones’ life, the personal microcosm with the public macrocosm; it makes sense of the maze all around.”

But though it is a street system — buried and labyrinthine, though it may — the PATH isn’t public.

It’s massive and to some degree functional. But it’s still private — an odd collection of interests offering the most basic public service of all: a way to walk from A to B.

National Post

• Email: rwarnica@nationalpost.com | Twitter: richardwarnica