Notes from suburbia

Today, I went for a job interview that took me north of the city, and I wound up having lunch at the Steeles and 404 mall (known, grandly, as The Shops) and then walking south. I noticed three things:

1. The men's washroom at The Shops featured a sign that warned me that this facility was monitored 24 hours a day. This leads me to wonder: who on earth would want a job staring at a men's washroom all day long? Do they put out "help wanted" ads for that? And who would be given the thankless task of monitoring the washroom in the middle of the night?
   
   There's something kind of weird about having someone electronically watch you while you, erm, do your business. (I suppose they probably don't actually have a human being staring at a screen - it's probably a computer that has been programmed to detect unusual behaviour. Still... whoa.) Is the women's washroom monitored as well? If so, do they have one monitor of each sex to prevent cross-gender monitoring and all that that entails?
   
   
2. It will be very difficult to transform some of the newer suburbs into denser, more greenhouse gas-friendly urban environments. For one thing, most arterial roads in new suburbs are designed exclusively for the efficient movement of cars: there are no houses, apartments, condos, small stores, parks or anything connecting to them other than feeder streets. There's literally nothing there.
   
   
3. Buses belonging to suburban transit systems are inevitably larger, newer and nicer than the equivalent TTC buses. This isn't knocking the TTC: the suburban systems can afford better buses because they receive greater per-user subsidies than the downtown system.