Now, I work in an industrial park on the edge of the suburbs. Another two exits on the freeway and it's farmland. There isn't much within walking distance. Within a mile there is a slew of fast food joints and a grocery store, but they still require walking almost 2 miles round trip and eating all on my one-hour lunch break, which gets tricky. Forget about trying to run errands on lunch without a car. Even if I were to take my bike to the bank, a mere three miles away, it would be on busy streets with high speed limits and I would have to cross the freeway. It is just not conducive to any transportation other than a car. It's depressing.
I grew up in the suburbs where you didn't walk anywhere. You needed a car because that's the way everything was set up – they didn't give you another option. And then you get into that mindset and find yourself driving the car to the other side of the parking lot in the strip center instead of just walking. I like that where I live now everything is set up the other way around. Hardly anyplace has a parking lot; they have store fronts that are set up for passing pedestrians, not passing cars. When you go out there are people walking everywhere. The streets are small and speed limits are low. Most of the time it makes more sense to walk or bike than drive a car. It slows things down a little and makes people nicer. They get more fresh air and have to see you face to face, not through the tinted barrier and anonymity of an auto.
I'm pretty bummed that I have to spend most of my time back in the suburban land now. It's a stressful place to be. I'm really going to have to make the most of my weekends and slow down the pace of my life at every opportunity. This weekend I have some fall gardening to do. Putting out garlic, shallots, onions and I think one more row of arugula. Tomorrow I'm canning apples and I might make a pie.
That sounds just awful :( When I moved back to Austin from NYC I worked at this place way out on Bee Cave and 360, and lived downtown. It would be an 8 mile bike ride to get there (on 360 = hills!) but then because of the way the exits were, it was 12 miles to get home. There was this strip mall with some food ostensibly right across the street but the one time I tried to walk there it took 40 minutes roundtrip and you can't bike there because it's across a highway. I just ended up bringing my lunch all the time.
ReplyDeleteI only worked there 6 months. I hope you find a way to deal with your situation. It is so weird to me that businesses are locating themselves out in the suburbs (like Dell did). There's all this research about how that is so hard on poorer people because transit systems aren't set up to get people from suburb to suburb, they're in a hub, so people without cars either can't apply for these jobs or they spend 3+ hours commuting downtown and then back out to the burbs on a bus :(
I did the public transit commute the first week, it was 3 hours round trip, 7 bike miles and about a half hour train ride each way. If I took the bus the whole way it would push it over 4 hours total. They do, thankfully, have a coordinated vanpool for us poor folk. It's a company filled with young, creative professionals in Portland; I'm pretty sure there is a large contingent who are like me and don't have their own car. I'm starting that this week, which cuts me down to 2 hours total commute, which is still ridiculously long, but falls within the realm of normal American freeway commute time.
ReplyDeleteI'm a commute snob. Anything over 15 minutes (preferably walking) makes me mad. Right now I have about a 20 minute train ride and 20 minute walk, and I get annoyed even by that!
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