Different point of view

I'm not sure if this is a story or not, it's written from a different perspective and not so much telling what happened as what could happen. Does it work? I'm not sure.


VEHICLE DEPENDANCE

What distance is considered reasonable to drive instead of walk? It all depends on where you are. In a large metropolitan city, a few blocks, or half an hour might be a completely reasonable walking distance. In the suburbs that distance shrinks considerably, until you have to ask, where would I walk to?

Take Pickering as an example. Would it be reasonable to walk to the mall if you lived in the Amberlea neighbourhoods? Probably not. It’s possible. You could do it in about an hour, but the majority of that time would be spent walking along the side of a highway. Two lanes in each direction, a seventy kilometre per hour speed limit and no sidewalks. Most people drive to the mall.

What about the coffee shop? Tim Horton’s or Second Cup. It would take around half an hour to walk to either of these, something a city dweller would think nothing of. But what if it rains, or you’re in a hurry, you don’t have half an hour to spend walking there and another half hour walking back. It’s better to drive to the coffee shop, got through the drive-thru lane, and continue on your way.

The grocery store. Most people, even in the suburbs, live within a fifteen minute walk of a grocery store. But by going to the grocery store, one expects to pick up groceries, and with our busy lives we usually need to get enough at one time to last at least a week, making the bags many and quite heavy, especially if you happen to purchase a case of pop or cat litter. It’s just easier to take the car.

How about Church. Whether or not you attend regularly, it’s right there, across the street from the grocery store, you pass it every time you got to work, the mall or the coffee shop. If you were going to church, would you walk? It would only take ten minutes, or less, you could use the time to contemplate your faith, or lack thereof. But very few people walk to church, even when the weather is fine. It could be because church usually involves dressing up, and fancy shoes are not comfortable to walk in. Or it could be embarrassment, to be seen walking through the neighbourhood wearing your Sunday best, people would know that you were going to church.

Your friend’s house. They live just down the street and around the corner, or through the pathway and on the other side of the court. But you’re going to watch movies and hang out with some people that you haven’t seen in a long time, the evening might end really late and you don’t want to walk home alone in the dark, even if it would only take five minutes. So you drive.

The mailbox. Most subdivisions in Pickering, built after 1990 don’t have door to door mail delivery, but a box, that is located central to a couple of streets, where everyone’s mail is delivered into cubby lockers, like in an apartment building. It’s very convenient, just at the end of the street. It would take less than five minutes to walk there and back. The reason you don’t walk to the mailbox is simple. You pick up your mail on your way home or on your way out in the car. If there was one time when it was raining, and you had a cold already, so you stayed home from work, but really needed to check if your insurance cheque had come in the mail so you drove the eighty-five meters to the mailbox and back, no one needs to know about that. It was a onetime thing. Under normal circumstances, of course you would have walked.