Yeah, I slept in this morning after attending Brendan’s New Year’s Eve party in Toronto. It was a nice party, although we had our traditional problems with the wine (Bren has terrible luck in the particular bottles of wine he opens when I visit). As I was driving, I only sampled the wine anyway…
Driving through downtown Toronto at two in the morning is rarely as entertaining as it is on New Year’s: between the staggering celebrants on the sidewalk stumbling into traffic and the overly-cautious-drivers trying to get past them safely, it can be frustratingly slow. Last night’s worst drivers were the cabbies — but not for the usual excessive speed/random lane change reasons. Last night, it seemed like half the cabbies were drunk or stoned … and were driving too slowly and weaving in the lane even as they were going too slowly. That, combined with their seemingly random stops to pick up and drop off customers, made the taxis even more of a hazard than they usually are.
Even more remarkable was that we saw only a single marked police car over the entire drive (no RIDE checkpoints, either). I’m sure they were out at full strength, but aside from one SUV that pulled a fast U-turn at Yonge & Carleton, they were clearly patrolling different routes than the one we took.
