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TTC spokesman Brad Ross seems to have spent his entire Tuesday on Twitter, calmly defusing volley after volley of ignorant fury. Are we going to charge people in walkers? No. What about fat people? No. How dare we impose upon low-income single mothers, was one common trope, as if low-income mothers somehow enjoy the chaos.

I have no idea whence this angst derives. You would think it was only the latest salvo in a vicious ongoing campaign against urban parents, instead of an opportunity to make the system run a little bit smoother for everyone. Two ideas come immediately to mind:

– If you complain that many strollers today are much bigger than they used to be, you will be told that for various reasons, they need to be that big. But they do not need to be that big. The proof is that they were not always that big, and humanity survived. Also, some people still use small strollers. They cause less of a problem than people with big strollers. As part of its etiquette campaign, the TTC could delicately suggest that transit-riding parents consider using the smallest (and especially narrowest) stroller that suits their needs, for everyone’s benefit.

– Seating in the ground-level portion of kneeling buses, and in some portion of other vehicles (especially once Presto enables rear-door boarding), could be converted to a single side-facing row on each side, some or all of which could be flipped up for stroller space as needed. This would increase the capacity of buses when there aren’t strollers, of course, which would also be for the good. And it would provide more wheelchair capacity in accessible vehicles (the kneeling buses and new streetcars).

No doubt the latter idea would enrage the pro-comfort crowd. But a public transit system has only one goal: To move as many people around a given area as quickly and efficiently as humanly possible. Studying stroller dynamics on TTC vehicles could result in some small but welcome improvements on that front, and encourage more people with (hopefully reasonably sized) strollers to get out of their cars to boot. But we’re going to have to stop pulling our hair out first.

National Post