Small Cars

As I make my way through the parking lot to school, or at the station, or through the streets, it would be hard not to notice the difference in personal vehicles. I have written before about the number of bicycles, this morning I left the house a bit later than usual because I did not have a first block class and got caught in bicycle rush hour as students made their way to the local Gymnasium (closest equivalent to high school), but the difference in cars is quite obvious too.

Yes the makes are different (though there are plenty of Toyotas), Citroen, Peugeot, Skoda, but they are also considerably smaller. One does not see pick-up trucks; they seem not to exist. On the weekend I pointed this out to Jesse, imagine the middle of the road downtown Masset and what sorts of vehicles do you see? Oh yeah, there’ll all huge. Obviously a difference in lifestyle has much to do with the different vehicles, we simply have different needs, but at times I have felt like I was walking through a parking lot filled with miniature cars, even the minivans are squished down to a miniature scale.

Of course the only vehicles I have been in over the past month are public transit vehicles, trains and buses. I ride the bus to work, about 35 minutes ride and have settled into the routine, I enjoy reading a magazine on the way there and back. My old routine of reading at the kitchen table in the morning while listening to the CBC is gone for now. So too is that quiet time when I am awake and everyone else is sleeping, school starts earlier for the boys this year, and if I don’t have class first block they leave before I do. So the routine has become a bike ride to the station (which on tired mornings feels like the tour de France but is really a short ride), followed by a bus ride of magazine reading to inform what things I might ramble about in class. This morning I have added a bit about public transportation at the front of the lesson (which contains a doozy of a powerpoint on The Canadian Rockies, we are researching topics taken from Redbird’s “I am a Canadian”). This morning I read (in Harpers and quoted from Loelia Lindsay, former duchess of Westminster) “Anybody seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life.” I looked around to see how many other failures were on the bus, but everyone looked normal. Later in the same article the bus was referred to as the ‘loser cruiser’ and I remembered a time when I worked early mornings in Toronto and took the ‘vomit comet’ down Yonge street.

A quick conversation at the beginning of class revealed that no students thought poorly of those who took public transportation, or no-one was willing to say so, on the contrary many thought it was a smart choice both economically and environmentally, and then I thought of the small cars, and of my truck. My truck is under a tarp in Alberta – zero emissions, for now.