contemplativeOne of the things you adopt, living in the big city, is a sense of environmental responsibility. When I lived on Prince Edward Island, I thought nothing of driving places. Not that you had a choice or anything, but it was completely reasonable and common. Even in the towns there are few pedestrians; you drive down the street even for short distances. The traffic in Charlottetown on a sunny summertime day is usually worse than anything you'd encounter in a Halifax rush hour, and your progress will be quite slow. On the other hand, driving between towns is ridiculously fast. Most of the roads are straight, and there are enough passing opportunities in most regions. Or you can just get on a back road and roar along at 180 km/h (111 mph) and hope your tires don't blow out. I speak as someone who has done this driving to work late.
Anyway, I'm just making a point that people on PEI drive. Everywhere. The irony is that the price of gasoline there is the lowest east of Québec, thanks to regulated prices. Apparently it was someone's bright idea to deregulate gas prices, in the hopes of spurring competition. This was a mistake, to put it mildly. Virtually all the prices in this city, for instance, are about 81¢ a litre. And by about I mean exactly 81-point-something, at every single station. Meanwhile, in PEI the numbers can shift a significant (5 or more) number of cents between stations in the same area. What gives? And doesn't it cost more to deliver gas to PEI just because of geography?
At any rate, I'm here in Halifax (by far the biggest city east of Québec (City) and northeast of Boston) and as a sophisticated city dweller I care about things like the Kyoto protocol. So, I don't drive even when I can - in the name of environmental responsibility, I use the transit system.
Unfortunately, my residence at the moment is about twenty-five-foot-minutes removed from the nearest bus stop. Don't get me wrong; I don't mind walking, and I need the exercise. But sidewalks or something would be nice. And that brings me to the thing I like least about walking, next to the fact that I smell like a locker room by the time I reach the bus stop (I walk fast) if I don't wear scented deodorant (shower or no!): my pantlegs get covered in mud and salt. It causes me to like subzero temperatues because that way everything on the shoulder is frozen.
My jeans are a mess. I pretreated the pantlegs with the liquid detergent before putting them in the *super* wash. So maybe they'll be clean again, if I get lucky. Then they can just get dirtied again by those assholes in the Lexus sport-utes. I cringe every time I see one. The only sport-utes I respect are Jeeps and Hummers because people sometimes actually use those off-road. Let's just say I haven't seen any Mercedes ML320s frequenting the local trail clubs.
But I have faith that things will get straightened out eventually. Soon we won't see people driving their cars and burning up valuable hydrocarbons just to get booze. We'll be able to get booze at the corner stores. Of course, there are no corner stores in my "neighbourhood," just lots of wolverines.