So the TTC thinks strollers might indeed be taking up too much space on buses, streetcars and trains. It says it will study the matter.

I think adults may be taking up too much space on buses, streetcars and trains. I will stake my claim.

I assume Toronto adults — former infants in a new, less attractive configuration — were regularly slapped as children, raised indoors, breast-fed in construction site porta-potties and taken to playgrounds only on public holidays, at night. They grew like mushrooms in the dark, drawing nutrition from a bed of tasteless substrate.

Fast forward to modern times. Toronto toddlers are now allowed out of the house, onto buses and streetcars even, grinning gormlessly at fellow travellers and gasping with delight when they’re given an orange Freezie. For this, they pay a pittance while grown-ups have to squeeze their bulk in at great expense.

It’s hardly fair, said a passenger called Elsa La Rosa, who complained to the TTC about strollers taking up space. It’s space that would normally be reserved for legs, gym bags, backpacks, shopping, bicycles and those devices used by the elderly. Walkers? Wheelchairs? Can’t these people just stay home and let La Rosa ride regally and alone?

La Rosa, 61, suggested a $2 fee per stroller and added that the cost of a Metropass should be lowered for anyone on a pension. This is odd. Surely if costs were lowered, it should be for anyone without a pension.

It gets worse. Bus drivers have complained about strollers. The Star’s Tess Kalinowski talked to another retiree who said strollers should be banned at rush hour and that parents should plan their day better. They didn’t call children “varmints” or “bloodsuckers” but there was definitely an icy tone, the kind of thing you find in Alice Munro stories when matrons discuss girls who stay out late and sashay.

What we have here is not the simmering Occupy class war, or the Toronto suburban-downtown war, but a whole new thing, a generational battle in which childless adults turn a hairy eyeball on the monstrous regiment of offspring.

What puzzles me is that people in their 60s regularly live into their 90s, which means that today’s travellin’ toddler will be well into his workspan supporting the very people who wanted to boot him off the bus 30 years ago. Children don’t remember much before age four, which is useful for them when it comes to forgetting abuse, and also hateful remarks made at TTC hearings by what my children used to call “oldie-mouldies.”

This same week, the Federal Court ruled that parents of twins cannot each receive 35 weeks of paid parental leave. The implication was that it’s just as easy to raise twins as it is singles. If this were true, it would be just as easy to sterilize two milk bottles as it is one. But it is not. It’s just as easy to melt them or boil the milk or curse the spouse you married so hastily in a time when your body was slick and filled with sexual fire. Mmmmm, baby, those days are gone.

The thing about children is that once you have them, there they are. They expand alarmingly, they break the bank and they demand to be taken places, loud lurid places with tedious slides and rides that reek of chicken grease. Children have no taste. To get to these places, you must get on vehicles filled with wrinkled people who hate you.

I say twins are twice the work. I say we should make way for strollers. I say that “public” means putting up with the annoying habits of strangers, just as “private” means putting up with the annoying habits of loved ones. A stroller intruding on your personal space is the equivalent of losing the nightly battle for the duvet. Defeated, you still get points.

Give me a choice between a button-nosed gurgling little person entranced by my nail art and a maladjusted senior with a face like a shelled walnut and a personality to match, and the kid’s going to win every time.