You're east, I'm west. We can't be friends

Relationships, family gatherings and softball games are falling victim to city's gridlock

- FRANCINE KOPUN

Richelle lerulli, left, and Lesley Maidens pose with a picture, left, from their childhood together in Scarborough. With lerulli now living in the city's west end and Maidens in the Beach area, their friendship has only survived because they work close by. Toronto traffic deters home visits.

Tammy Sherwood of Scarborough plans her trips to visit her boyfriend, Parth Shah of Parkdale, the way other people plan a weekend in Prince Edward County.

She packs a novel, a nutrition bar, a playlist, a podcast and water.

“I think of it as a road trip,” says the health-care administrator, 29, who does not drive.

She walks, takes the subway or GO, a streetcar, and walks again — a journey that takes as long as two hours if she misses a bus by one minute, or construction is blocking traffic, or if the subway stops for reasons ranging from Someonepulled-the-emergency-brake to Something-mumbled-over-thepublic-address-system-that-noone-understood.

The average length of her voyage is 90 to 105 minutes.

She and Shah have taken to meeting somewhere in between, gradually becoming experts on the sites and culinary delights around Yonge and Bloor.

“We joke that it’s a long-distance relationship,” says Shah.

Others, who wish to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, are using gridlock as an excuse for being late to a date or not showing up at all. They’re blaming it for ending things.

“To be fair, it was an excuse to get out of a relationship that I was bored of anyway,” confessed one woman, an east-ender who found herself dating someone in a western suburb. When they started closing down Gardiner Expressway lanes for repairs this spring, she was out.