Queues from the 6
Whether it’s a trendy new restaurant, an art exhibit or the dreaded shuttle bus, Torontonians are always waiting in line for something. Is our patience a virtue?
There’s a long line snaking out from Maha’s, a popular east-end Egyptian brunch spot, despite the biting wind on a bright December Sunday.
At the very back of the line is a group, hoods up, backs hunched against the cold, trying to decide if it’s worth the wait.
Inside, they can see customers digging into mouth-watering dishes such as falafel, foole, and date scramble. But it’s going to be up to an hour and 15 minutes for a spot at one of the cosy tables inside, reports Arzu Chaudhry, who’s visiting from Montreal, after checking in with staff.
“It’s very Toronto,” says her friend Anum Siddiqui who’s trekked there from Roncesvalles and is leaning toward giving up. “I think people just expect lines.”
Anum’s sister Naureen, who’s with her in the queue, recently had a discussion with her husband about whether or not to go to the Toronto Christmas Market in the Distillery District. Now that it’s become so “Instagrammable” there are constant lineups and “it takes away” from the experience, she says.
“The only reason we go to these things now is when we have guests from out of town.”
If there’s one thing that unites the whole city, it’s that Torontonians always seem to be waiting for something.
High-profile lineups, such as the massive one that accompanied the grand opening of Italian food emporium Eataly last month, have made headlines, and the holiday season means long winding lines at malls across the city.
But waiting is also a fact of daily life in Toronto, even if you’re not trying to get in on the latest trends.
According to a 2018 study by U.K.based comparison site Expert Market, Toronto has the worst commute time in North America, at an average of 96 minutes a day. And even more mundane things, such as getting into cityrun programs, take patience.
More than 25,000 people were on the wait list for aquatic programs last year, for example.
But whether it’s by choice or unavoidable, what does it say about us that we’ve become a city permanently biding our time?
At all-night arts festival Nuit Blanche in 2010, Toronto artist Brad Tinmouth, along with Chicago artist Lili Huston-Herterich, aimed to make a statement about lines by creating an experimental art installation.
It consisted of an empty, curtained-off area. Nothing to see there.
But within minutes of setting it up they had a huge line that lasted all night.
“Wait Until You See This,” was a “comment” on waiting and what happens when the line is for its own sake. Some people were “perturbed,” Tinmouth says, with many telling their partners “I told you so.” But many, many waited.
“Toronto loves waiting in lines,” Tinmouth says.
“There’s always the idea, the perception that a line creates, “he adds. “Where there’s 30, 50, 100 people waiting in line, it must be good.”
Tinmouth doesn’t know if there’s “anything in the Torontonian psyche that makes them want to wait in line” and chalks a lot of it up to “simple population density.”
But he does think, “Toronto is a city that likes to sort of have the new trend.”
It’s “usually behind a city like New York but ahead of the rest of Canada,” he adds. “First in Canada to get the Cronut or whatever it is.”
There is a kind of self-imposed order to a Toronto line, Tinmouth notes, even though there aren’t any real consequences to butting in.
“If someone does cut, it’s this sort of quiet, speaking to the air about how ‘that’s not right,’” he says.
“But that’s very Canadian, and I think that you would not get that in New York.”
Line researcher Richard Larson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with the nickname “Dr. Queue,” calls lines that can build buzz “celebratory queues.”
Lines for sports events, concerts and the next iPhone, where people “pitch tents and eat,” would all fall under this category, he said in a phone interview from the Boston area.
But the Toronto experience of waiting is much more than that. Torontonians also wait for everything from Service Ontario, to slow elevators, to needed services such as housing, daycare, court dates, and of course traffic and transit.
Larson estimates, using a “back of the envelope” calculation, that car commuters can spend “two years of their waking lives” waiting if you count the time spent in vehicles.
He notes that in addition to the psychology of lines, there’s a science and math devoted to “figuring out how to configure a queueing system for best performance,” used in institutions such as hospitals.
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s research says people become frustrated as they wait if they’re not making progress. But they feel a bit better every time they see the line moving. This is most extreme when they’re nearing the end.
Feedback on how long they’ll be waiting, for example, an electronic map that shows the location of an approaching train, might make it less awful, Kahneman concluded.
You can always pay to get to the front of the line, for instance by shelling out for priority boarding at an airport, Larson says (a practice he finds pointless because everyone on the plane leaves at the same time). There are even professional line waiters in some countries.
The culture of queueing varies depending on where you are, he says, and Britain is the king of it. The Hungarian-born author George Mikes once wrote “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”
“I don’t know if the Toronto folks like to wait any more than anyone else, but it probably is the British culture there that has helped this,” Larson adds.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. queueing culture is “quite different from place to place.” Larson believes its most pronounced in Washington, D.C., where buttoned up federal workers will make a perfect line on a sidewalk at 4 p.m. waiting for their bus to show up.
Orderly queues are something Torontonians form when waiting to board TTC shuttle buses on days when there are systemlevel meltdowns.
That’s the kind of waiting that really wears on Naureen Siddiqui, back at Maha’s.
“I realize that every October, November, I get really angry because I’m used to biking to work,” she said. The colder weather means she’s forced to rely on the TTC “all of a sudden, and “it’s a rude awakening every year.”
So what does it say about those who are willing to suck it up and wait?
John Eastwood, an associate professor at York University, who specializes in the psychology of boredom, says some people find waiting more difficult than others.
Waiting is generally an “uncomfortable feeling” that can be “more tolerable” if people have a sense of why they’re doing it, he says. It’s also related to the concept of delayed gratification — resisting temptation right away for a greater reward later.
“So you might think of that as involving some self-control or some self-regulation, and those qualities are associated with being a high-functioning person in other areas, “he says.
“Maybe that says something good about Torontonians.”
You can “wait well” without being bored, occupying yourself by daydreaming or talking to other people in line, he says.
The group back at Maha’s, who have inched a few spots ahead as they’re chatting, seems to be doing this.
“Sunk costs,” says Anum’s husband, Gino Di Censo, with a laugh.
“I’m kind of tempted to stay.”