Slowly But Surely

Here we are in the GTA again. It is wonderful seeing those that we love and catching up on all of the latest gossip. The last trip was a sad occasion, but this will be the celebration of life that all weddings are. Well, not the drunken weddings in Vegas, that is more of a celebration of Jim Beam, Jack Daniels and Captain Morgan. We will be spending time doing touristy things and all of those last minute pre-wedding things that always seem to need doing.  I am excited for Maegan and Ryan beginning their lives together.


One of the things that I have noticed over the years of coming to Toronto area is just how bad the traffic has become. Whenever you get a lot of people together that need to go in the same direction, you are going to have problems. I suspect that moving people is one of those things that define a great civilization. Our civilization was good, but is getting progressively worse as the years go by. We are losing our ability to move people from where they live to where they work and play.

There is an acceptable amount of time for a commute, but here it seems to be pushing the boundaries quite a bit. Thankfully I won't need to drive to work or anywhere else in rush hour traffic this trip. I won't need to "press the flesh" on the buses and subways for an hour at a time. I can stay blissfully unaware of the troubles the average citizen faces every day. Lucky me!

Someone, somewhere needs to address the problem of moving all of these people in an orderly and timely fashion. Some solutions are being looked at and enacted. Mass transit is pretty good at getting people from there to here and the road system is congested but still works to a certain extent. What is needed is a change in the way that we live.

More and more people are finding that they can work from home which allows employers to save money on brick and mortar head offices and allows the employee to still function through the Internet. Not everyone can do this of course, a lot of Jo's need to be hands on and involve physically moving things around.

I think that the only way to find a solution is through a change in expectations and a change in the way we locate our homes and businesses. We will need to go back to the way things were before the automobile enabled us to travel vast distances in rather short periods of time. We will need to live within walking distance of where we work. The stigma of living in an industrial area will have to be forgotten and businesses will have to evaluate if they really "need" to locate themselves in the locations they are in.

During the early part of the twentieth century there was a mass exodus from rural areas to urban locations. This was brought on by the desire. To earn more than farm wages and the development of a more industrialized farming methods. We will need to move back out to the rural areas and find methods to work from home or in businesses that can relocate in. A rural environment. To do this we will need to focus less on the bottom line and more on what is best for our society as a whole.

Unlikely to happen, but we can work to that end slowly but surely.
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