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It was a catastrophic failure that exposed an outlandish weakness at the Toronto Transit Commission. It mucked up mornings and stranded thousands, leaving the frustrated and confused to wander in the rain, shaking their fists at whatever transit god has so cursed this gridlocked town.

And yet, for all that, the massive shutdown of the Toronto subway system early Monday — a complete closure of all four lines that lasted 95 minutes — didn’t come as much of a surprise.

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The details were a little odd, sure. But the result — a chaos-inducing, commute-extending crush in the middle of a hammering rainstorm — was just par for the Toronto course.

That is the remarkable thing about public transit in this city in 2015. Delays, overcrowding, even disaster are not just expected, they’re almost taken as the norm. The news is never so much that they occur, in other words, as it is in the novel reasons why.

There was the great mystery sludge debacle of March, when an unknown ooze seeped into the Yonge-University line, forcing a morning-long shutdown. There are the ever-present signal problems, the fire investigations and, every once in a while, a flood.