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Originally Posted by Mister F
I find that the quality of the food has a lot to do with how walkable a community is. When you make a near daily stop at a neighbourhood bakery on your way home from a transit stop, superior bread is going to be more common. But when you take a weekly drive to a supermarket then you need bread that lasts a week, which is how we ended up with Wonderbread. That's why green grocers, butchers and small bakeries are more common in walkable areas than car dependent suburbs. And Canada is mostly made up of the latter.
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Not Just Bikes made an exact video about this. It is actually bizarre that grocery shopping is an insane ordeal here and that we turn our homes into convenience stores to save a few bucks.
• Video Link
And I agree, quality is crap. It has to be. You can only do so much, when your primary customer wants you to serve them in 30s inside their car. That kind of setup doesn't lend itself to many fresh, decent options.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mister F
There are two opposing demographics that kill attempts to bury power lines in Canadian cities. On one hand you have the Ford Nation types who want the whole country to look like Milton. They oppose spending on aesthetics, especially in walkable neighbourhoods they consider to be elitist. On the other hand you have hipster leftists who think that exposed power lines somehow add character, and that burying them will make an area generic. They prefer a city to be grubby and cluttered. It's a bizarre confluence of two groups who unwittingly work together to make our cities uglier.
In most other developed countries power lines being buried is just the norm, and there's no relationship between a decent public realm and lack of charm.
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I've heard of and come across people who are always opposed to any expenditure on aesthetic grounds. But I've really never come across anyone that opposes buying power lines because they like the cluttered look. Either way, this is an aesthetic, for me, that I routinely associate with the developing world. So it always strikes me when I see it in Canada.
But more than aesthetic, most developed countries bury their power lines for other reasons. It vastly improves reliability and safety. And at least in urban areas, you're gaining sidewalk space. It's insane to me that we'll spend tens or even hundreds of millions rebuilding major avenues and then not bury power lines.