Quality of Life !?!?!
Why have a community where it is easy to get around in a bicycle and transit? Cars provide a very personal mode of transportation. It is customizable to one’s own timetable while being selfishly polluting and heightening the dependency on one type of natural resource. I have serious problems of living in a community where all other options of transit are discouraged, maybe unintentionally but surely foolishly. Jacksonville is one such city.
Living in the southside area is of extreme inconvenience. It is a horrifying experience to ride my bicycle around town trying to do normal things. The majority of the people do not see bicycling as a mode of commute. It is purely a mode of recreation. First Coast MPO is the organization for diverting federal funds towards improving the bicycling infrastructure and they are concentrating on building trails and green ways that are outside the city where a normal person would not go. By a normal person I am referring to a non-lycra wearing bicycle commuter. Commuting is shit. Recreation is gold. That is where the money is. The city like most of the country seems to be lost in a tidal wave of consumerism by encouraging it and creating more opportunities to do more of it. I thought that the American dream was that everyone can make it. It is actually everyone consumes…a lot of shit, and by doing that, you can show that you have made it.
I use the coarse language to startle people because it is way past the time to give that gentle wake up call. People have lost the meaning of quality of life and have equated it with standard of living. Hence they perceive more quality with a higher standard of living such as owning that single family home and that car. The fact is that quality is dead because people don’t care. They don’t care about the environment and about fellow citizens in their quest of that lofty standard of living. Care is quality and it is in complete absence. Therefore, people are living in a faux sense of quality which verifies their standard of living whereas the absence of quality totally neutralizes any standard of living there is.
I was consuming a lot of gas to be able live in this city till I decided to get on my bike and live car-lite and soon to be car-free. Now, I am consuming a lot of patience to live in this city…and it is peaking just like oil is (see peak oil in sidebar).
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