Toronto really IS New York, only cleaned up.
If you lived in New York in the 90s, and you had a bike, it would get stolen regularly, and so you'd have to go down to Alphabet City and "buy" it back from a sidewalk used bike seller. It was just the city's way of reminding you, $20-40 at a time, that you should keep your bike inside.
So then I read about Lindsay Taylor, Toronto's most famous stroller vigilante dad, who tracked down his jacked Phil & Teds double on Craigslist within a couple of hours, and then, armed with just with a camera and a Gandhi-esque wingman ["We're both very non-violent people,"] managed to retrieve it.
And it's not the use of craigslist, or the existence of an apparently well-organized stroller theft operation--hell, can you imagine explaining even the concept of stroller theft to someone parenting in the pre-Bugaboo era?--that blows my mind. It's that people in Toronto are apparently comfortable leaving their expensive strollers on the street, unattended, for hours at a time. That's not New York, people, that's Copenhagen.
Father retrieves stolen stroller in Craigslist sting [thestar.com via dt reader, advertiser, monte design impresario, and Canadian, Ralph]
2 words: bike lock.
Sorry, Canada has a five-word minimum: bike lock/ serrure de velo
Or don't leave your overpriced stroller on the front porch.
I know, right??