From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2004-11-04T03:21:02+09:00 Subject: Re: [OT] (Biking To Work? Was US Presidential Election) On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 02:17:01 +0900, Ben Giddings wrote: > Yeah, I know Oakville. Public transportation outside downtown > Toronto is pretty poor. My former 8ish mile ride was from Queen > and University to Yonge and Bloor. In the winter I could always > take the subway if the weather was bad. Yeah. I usually went from where I live (Swansea, south of the Jane station) to St Andrew (King & University) until I quit that job a few years back. (For some of the time I was there, I was actually at Ossington and Bloor.) > I guess your commute avoids the major highways, because, unless > everything has changed, they're parking lots every day. Actually, my commute uses the major highway (Gardiner/QEW), but I'm going against traffic. I'm literally going from Lakeshore to Winston Churchill. > If you live a 5-7 minute drive from the nearest TTC stop, you must > live pretty far from the downtown core. If you had chosen a home > closer to public transportation you would have had more options. > But that doesn't help with the Oakville endpoint. Mmm. Not TTC, but Go. TTC connections to Oakville would be a nightmare (as I said, I'm just south of Jane & Bloor). I actually have great transit options into the core (although for my weekly squash trips into the core, I still usually drive -- this is both a matter of time and convenience, as I generally combine it with a grocery shopping trip). I'll admit that I don't use transit as often as I should, but this also has to do with relative cost. If I'm going to see a movie at the cheap theatre, I'm usually doing so with two or three other people -- and it costs us between $0 and $3 to park (with a 10 minute drive either way) vs. $2.25 *each* (with a 25+ minute transit trip either way). The first run theatres are even worse (45+ minute transit trip vs. 12 minute drive -- different locations, though). I want a better solution, but I also can't afford to give up the freedom that the car gives me at this point -- I can't afford the fact that it would add two or more hours to my workday to take transit, and it probably wouldn't save me any money at all (I still need the car for other purposes). Maybe a SmartCar, but they're horrendously expensive for their size, and they're very passenger-unfriendly (e.g., not at all). I have the car mostly for the purpose of being able to drive others around, but have needed it now that I work 24km from home with no viable transit options. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca