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A week in the Lower Mainland amidst this current record-breaking heat wave was enough to remind me that although there is plenty to gripe about up here in Prince George, at least it's not the Fraser Valley. Even with air conditioning and satellite radio or an iPod, I realized again that my lifestyle could simply no longer tolerate the kinds of traffic congestion that have become the continually worsening norm in the GVRD. As numerous regular contributors to the Citizen have pointed out, our local roads are almost always in such a sorry state that I liken them to how Pompei must have looked after Vesuvius blew its top. But craters and cracks aside, at least we can MOVE on them. Carefully, yes, but relatively mobile nonetheless. Staring at the long weekend traffic jams that stretched east & west from Chilliwack to the Port Mann Bridge made dodging a few potholes an option that those motorists could only dream of (and would only have been too happy to do, given the opportunity to put more than 5 miles behind them each hour). Considering that mess, you would think nobody in their right mind would possibly want to commute in it on a regular basis. Yet flipping through a Chilliwack real estate guide...it was obvious that even with the recent real estate downturn across the board people are still happy to pay ridiculous money for an average single family home there and suffer the 4-5 hours of commuting each day (assuming a return trip to downtown Vancouver in rush hour). Homes on decent-sized lots that would sell for around $275-300K in Prince George are still around $450K there...and that's before you add a grotesque am0unt of commuting fuel at $1.50/litre to your monthly budget. To say nothing of giving up 80 to 100 hours of your life each month literally stuck in your automobile, inching along with the rest of the corporate cattle. When I think of how much idling was going on there, it makes you appreciate that when strictly applied to gasoline for our cars...the new carbon tax is definitely sticking it to the average Lower Mainland Joe/Jane far worse than us PG folk. Not to mention that (unless I've forgotten how to work my abacus) a 2.4 cent-per-litre tax should not have taken pump prices from 1.42.9 to 152.0 overnight. On the other hand, these 30+ degree days of summer will be over before we know it, and we will feel the pinch when the furnace kicks in again. But until that happens let's try to enjoy the fact that here in PG, even in the worst of traffic, we can still get home from work at 5:30, run out for some cold beer and sandwiches, and be sitting waterside at our lake of choice before 7pm. The same poor sap in GVRD rush-hour traffic wouldn't even get home until 7pm, and likely not be at Cultus or Alouette Lake until the sun had gone down.
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