> > In Canada, we take this one step further. [...] Canada has very low population density, and most of our population lives very close to the US border [...] If you need to travel between cities, though, public transit loses its appeal. The first issue is distance-- With those sorts of distances, the concept of commuter trains is almost completely infeasible because of economics. [...]
>
> > [...] I used to take the Greyhound to get home for holidays and such, and when I finished and got a job, I bought a car. With Greyhound, I would pay about $100 to get to Medicine Hat and back; with the car, the gas costs me about $20 (maybe as much as $30 with the present inflated gasoline prices). [...] by car, you take whatever you want to bring. For me, that has even included my cat--litterbox in the trunk with a seat folded down, food and water on the floor in the passenger side.
> >
>
> Wow. You can actually transport Mocha for distances of 285 km *without* a pet carrier box????????
> I'd be afraid of having my cat get underneath the pedals at a crucial time, which has already happened with Pixel. Dave and Graham can drive their 8-yr-old cat Fluffy around in the back seat without a cat crate (Fluffy thinks she's a dog and is really earnest about it), but if Mocha is calm enough to actually want to eat, drink and USE the litterbox while inside the car... then she really MUST be the Ultimate Kittay of teh World!

Well, actually, I don't think she ever used the litterbox or ate or drank. I just put those things there for her in case she wanted (or needed) them. And she doesn't much like driving, but she tends to stay out of trouble. She did get up on the dashboard once or twice, but she couldn't fit under the pedals, and I'm pretty sure she wouldn't want to. The only time she ever got down low was an attempt to fit under the seat--another place she couldn't fit.

> > Such an arrangement would be out of the question on the bus. Anyway, the point here is that if one ever wants to travel outside one's own city in Canada, it is almost necessary to have a car. The economics alone make that the case.
> >
>
> You must mean the economics of convenience, not of cost. If you ever sat down and worked out the total time and cost of properly maintaining a car (in purchase payments, registration and license fees, liability insurance, tune-ups, and parts and labour and two sets of good tires on rims for our Canadian winters, as well as the gas), then after tallying the score, you might very well decide to call up taxis -- or even stretch limosines -- for the rest of your life whenever you want to go to work or to the grocery store.
>
> Other than a mortgage and having children, I don't know anything that eats into a household budget more than owning a car. It's even more pathetic in that by using your car daily in Canada, the relentless road salt and winter conditions effectively limit the car's lifetime to eight to ten years. At that point a car may become more expensive to maintain than buying a new car, and you're back in a cycle of transportation debt again.

Yes, that's true. :-) Although my cars tend to be very low maintenance--I take good care of them and do some basic stuff myself, so it's really just purchase cost and insurance. And my family has had high-use vehicles that have lasted about fifteen years out here (most of that in northern Alberta with the harsher winters). With how little I use my car, I have a feeling it will last longer than that if I want it to. In the long run, it might be cheaper, convenience or no convenience--but in the short run, you are correct. Paying $490 a month in loan payments and insurance certainly does not make it cheaper than bussing everywhere, even if I went home every weekend. :-)

> > sprawling nature of my city. Public transit to the downtown core is fine, since we have a lot of people and businesses there, but getting around from suburb to suburb is very difficult.
> >
>
> What's with the @#$! tendancy in BC and Alberta to have streets that are broken up in multiple places? In Vancouver for example, not only might you have a street called "Douglas," you have FIVE streets side by side called "Douglas" which are entirely disconnected and not easy to switch to, should one happen to drive into the wrong "Douglas" segment. In Alberta it's a little better -- each segment might be further qualified as Douglas Drive, Douglas Crescent, Douglas Blvd, Douglas Place, etc. Even so, we grew to loathe the numerically strict N/S street and E/W avenue topography, arranged by city quadrant (NE, SE, SW, NW). We'd be looking for 20 Av (right-left) SW and end up chasing 20 St (up-down) SE on the map instead, only to find that 20 Avenue SW is on the wrong side of the highway divider. This numeric street designation is the sector cartography method used in both Calgary and Edmonton. Dave's great-grandfather developed it when he was major of Edmonton. I wish I had a time-travel loop so I could hop back and tell him how it was a nice and noble idea, but it's still confusing when the streets fan out all over like curly amoebic scrawl.

The funny thing is, it's the older parts of town that are good about such things. The street numbering system does take some getting used to, but once you're used to it, it is fine. The multiple similarly (or identically) named streets thing is horrid, though. As for the roads that do not connect--I have heard that this is done in newer suburbs so that there is no through traffic and so the neighbourhoods are nicer and quieter. Also, the roads in those suburbs are twisty and curvy to slow traffic down. The similar naming helps to identify regions of the city--each subdivision has the same first letter for all its streets. This does help if you're scanning a map and instead of finding one street named "Douglas" you're looking for an entire community of streets starting with "D". The problem is, in a city as big as Calgary, some letters get repeated, and you can't really just scan the map anymore--it's just too big. Personally, I would have preferred it if they just stuck to straight lines and numbers. After all, with numbered streets, you never NEED to scan the map--the location is made plain simply by the street number, the quadrant, and the address. In older parts of town, I can find any place immediately. In newer parts, details directions are almost a necessity.

If you want to see the absolute WORST example of city planning that I have ever seen, check out the community of Ross Glen in Medicine Hat. I lived in that community for a year, and STILL get lost if I go for a walk there. I'm not kidding. The link below shows where I used to live. Every little road off of a "Ross something" is another "Ross something". I could rant for hours about this place. But I won't.

> > There is a lot more I could say on this subject, but I think I've said enough to make my point about Canada--or at least, the sprawling cities of western Canada. Maybe some other time, I'll talk about how terrains like farmland, forests, and tundra have affected our city placement.
>
> I'd like to hear about that sometime, if you have time.

Not just now. It took me long enough to get around to posting THIS. :-)

> Wolf "whirlwind tour through geo economics.... meow" spirit

Don "It would be a brief tour anyway--I only know about a few cities and it's a shallow knowledge" Monkey