From time beyond reckoning, humankind has thirsted for new experience.

What would happen, say, if one licked a frozen pole? Or poked a bobby-pin into an electrical outlet? Or shoved a crayon up one’s nose?

It’s irredeemably human to want to know what lies around the next corner or over the next hill. Or, as the Toronto Transit Commission knows only too well, down the next hole.

Understandably, however, the TTC has had enough of some of our more intrepid citizens. Gates are finally to be installed on the streetcar tunnel that leads from Queen’s Quay to Union Station.

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More than 25 times since 2014, a costly recovery operation has been required to remove cars driven into the tunnel and trapped.

No amount of TTC effort to alert motorists to the imminent peril has solved the problem. Signs were mounted. They were enlarged. More were added. Flashing lights were tried. Rumble strips.

And still the autos – driven by motorists of Olympian obliviousness – plunged in. Not infrequently – and not surprisingly, given the after-hours and weekend frequency of these ill-advised explorations – alcohol was involved.

Some were so persistent in their subterranean quest that they defy the imagination of average folk.

This past weekend, for instance, a 24-year-old Toronto man was still giving gas to his blue BMW, even as his rear wheels were hung up off the ground 300 metres into the tunnel.

It was the second such case in a week, prompting the TTC to announce it is now looking at a gate of some sort. “Enough is enough,” tweeted spokesman Brad Ross tweeted.

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If it all seems inexplicable, perhaps it’s worth recalling the explanation given by George Mallory as to why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. “Because it’s there,” he reportedly said.

Not so, for much longer, easy access to Toronto’s tunnel of no return.

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