One Reality of Car Culture

It's been a long few weeks. While house hunting on Vancouver Island we've been doing a string of pet-sitting gigs via Trusted Housesitters. The latest of these was in the Victoria suburb of Langford.

Langford is mostly an endless sea of condo and townhouse developments, the latter of which we've heard described as "Take a two bedroom apartment, then turn it onto its side to make a detached two story house." There are any number of dead-end streets with long lines of these homes, all about ten feet apart, and with a teeny-tiny back yard.

Every single one of these has a ground floor taken up largely by a one or two car garage, but for lack of space in the house itself, they are invariably used for storage, workshop space, an office, or occasionally a teenagers' room slash gym.

Langford is also one of those places where pretty much no-one takes transit - largely because it's not very good. Consequently everyone drives, everywhere, and every home has two, or possibly three cars. These park on the driveway outside the garage, or the street outside of the house. Any direction that you look is a sea of cars, SUVs, and monster trucks.

Trucks that are longer than the drive-way, so they block half of the sidewalk.

Or, on occasion, cars in the midst of a multi-year restoration.

And, because monster truck drivers are always this way, cars and trucks parked overnight in front of fire hydrants.

Which immediately reminded me of Ron Howard's 1991 film "Backdraft."

I will note though that since we're now electric car owners, we've been noticing that in Langford probably one car in seven is now an EV. It's a positive sign.

So far we've sat pets in Duncan, then Langford, then back to Duncan, and now we're in Nanaimo until travelling to Vancouver for a week of friends and doctor appointments. Possibly a few days on Gabriola Island, then back to Duncan for one last sit.