It's Sunday night, which statistically, over the past year, is my biggest blogging night. My well-rested self can never get to sleep with all the thoughts of the upcoming week crowding my brain. I can't complain, really, that right now I'm just thinking about the route to work. It could be worse.
The dilemma is this: I live in a great neighbourhood in a great apartment now that happens to stand across a good part of the city. In between lies not much that I want to visit daily. It takes me about an hour and fifteen minutes to and/or from work every day. That doesn't pose a huge problem for me in itself. But, compared to every single place I've lived (this is the sixth in as many years) this is the worst pedestrian commute possible. There is no other viable option; just this desolate, boring, monotonous, congested stretch.
The map above shows my trip to work. The straight purple lines are provided by Google. It has correctly identified the most logical pedestrian route to my office. I've taken the liberty of adding some detail to that route with numbered segments. Working FROM my office, segment one (1) is intolerable after a day sitting still at a desk all day. Approximately 25 minutes of the beginning of my walk is taken up by crowded sidewalks full of people heading to restaurants or shopping in the area and it's impossible to maintain a particular pace. The only people who seem to want to move at a speed that would make sense to me (a person who is trying to travel a fair number of kilometers after work) are (gross, yet startlingly accurate generalization) smokers. Smokers are always tooling right along right in front of me right at the same speed as me thereby providing me a second-hand stream of smoke for the entire duration of their cigarette. Don't ask me to explain this phenomenon. I'm only reporting on it.
I usually am breathing a little easier by the time I get to Bathurst Street (2). The crowd on the sidewalk thins out a little bit and I know that by Christie it will be a guaranteed lane set aside just for me. So, a bit of frustration with meandering pedestrians in Little Korea will usually end up with a quiet, dark walk up the hill to Ossington. From here (3), I don't have to worry too much about weaving in and out of shoppers. Now, I have to worry about how loud my headphones are turned up because I want to be able to hear people around me. I hate to tell all those who say that this area is the next big culture neighbourhood, who've even gone to the trouble of dubbing it "Bloorcourt Village", but I wouldn't want my girlfriend walking through there on her own. I'll leave it at that.
The view in this stretch is the worst. It consists entirely of wind tunnels, dilapidated discount shops, and cheque-cashing outlets. There's even a strip club attached to an evangelical Christian church across the parking lot from a Value Village. Nice, right? This takes about half an hour to get through. Then I'm in the home stretch, basically in my own neighbourhood, and all is good with the world.
I took the liberty of creating alternate routes to show you the extent of my dilemma. The red line snaking its way through the city represents my ideal walk into work in the morning taking into consideration the sun in my eyes, traffic, smells, trees, residential streets and parks. The pink line represents my ideal walk home. This takes into consideration: time, view, sun in my eyes, residential streets and quiet. You'll notice that the walk into work in the morning would take me approximately 2 and a half hours and the trip home would probably be an hour and a half or so.
This city really has no intention of letting me avoid the TTC.
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