Suburbia is made of two parts. There are the bones and the flesh. The bones are the infrastructure that has existed prior to it becoming suburbia. There are the roads that have been there before it became suburbia. In Little Smoke they have names like First Line through Ninth Line, referring to North South lines that people used to service farms and villages years ago. Some of these have been renamed over the years and the locals don't even think of them as what they so clearly are to me, an outsider. First line is now called Burloak, Second is called Bronte, fifth line is called Dorval and seventh line is called Trafalgar. There are others that are east-west called Dundas, Upper Middle Road, Lower Middle Road, Rebecca, and Lakeshore. There was a road called Middle Road but it got turned into a highway called Queen Elizabeth Way seventy years ago, so long that there are people looking for Middle Road and driving on it every day. There are other Highways, the 403 and the 407. These are the bones of Little Smoke. They form a grid work frame that the flesh that is the town grown city hangs from.
The Brain, the Old Towne, built up a century ago, is a grid work of streets of shops and residences in a dense central area. Getting to know this area I know it as a bunch of houses that share a few features. They are older homes, they are on properties that are much bigger than the house that squats on it and they are expensive for their size. The smaller ones are getting bought up and gentrified. That word means torn down and replaced with high value modern homes with landscaped backyards and tight gardens. The lakeshore is filled with Mansions. And the lakeshore increasingly means anything that is a few streets north of the actual lakeshore.
The Muscle. Little Smoke has just shy of 200k people in it and most of these people hang of the bones out away from the old town. These suburban wastelands typically hang between four major bone streets and have demoted one or two bone streets into more minor streets that allow movement within the center of the muscle, but are now not used to move people through the organism. There are two sorts of Muscles too. There is the older muscle, that was built after WWII, and features smaller houses, one or two stories at most, typically only one. They are located to the north or south of the first major artery, the QEW, but only right above the Brain. The other muscles are more recent within the past twenty-five years, most of those in the past fifteen years. They were built on 150 year old orchards, proof that people are collectively short sighted. I know a lot of people that bemoan this practice, but who vote for people whose policies make it happen, WTF?
Each of these muscles are placed in groups and in the center of these groups are planned nodes. Like the Gangular masses in birds, these are like little brains filled with commerce and shopping. In the old muscles they are enclosed malls, but in the new muscles they are plazas or destination malls. People come to these place looking for one thing then they leave. They feature huge parking lots that are never full except at lunch time, when the many restaurants fill up. Mostly the restaurants are not sit down affairs but feedbag type where feed bags are tied on and people go away afterwards like a cafeteria and fast food places.
The new muscles invent their own infrastructure streets, arterial roads that wind through the layout of the area much like true arteries in a living creature, the little roads peel off of them and then others peel of them. The bone streets, the Dundases and the QEWs have no homes on them, but they do have these arterial roads. The arterial roads have a few homes off them but it is their feeder streets that the people live on. If you get to know the winding arterial roads through the muscles you know that you are only a couple of minutes from them to 95% of all the houses.
These homes are all new. They have trees in them that are small and are placed artificially by the builder and look like they were. Each has an example right in front and it is the same species as every other tree on the street, what ever tree was on special when that street was planted. Each house looks alike, even when there is some thought to make the design different, they look alike: the same bricks, the the same style, the same features just combined differently, they all have a garage, but half the garages are filled with their stuff and no cars. The houses are two to three stories, they all sit on the the property with the minimal amount of space between each other, they all have a minimal front yard, big enough to say that it is one, but too small to hold anything but a landscaping accent to make it your front yard. The backyard is yours and is larger, but rather than a garden, most people, even those with children put in pools or massive stone patios. Sometimes there are landscaped with grass and shrubs. More often this is the case if they are too small to contain a pool. It is rare, but some people think that their children might want to play in their own back yard and not just in the local park.
The reason why they are Suburbs is because they don't do anything anymore. They are just places where people sleep. Most people travel to Big Smoke daily they drive along the big bones, the QEW, the 403, the 401 and the 407. They park at the various train stations, Little Smoke has two (I forgot to mention these) and each station has two huge parking lots and is serviced by many bus routes that treat them as hubs. I would bet that 70-80% of all jobs are outside the suburb, of the rest 90% serve the population with stuff and the other 10% make things. Things are brought into the place and people leave the place to go elsewhere. It is a city built on cheap gas and rampant thoughtless consumerism. As I say this I sit in a local food hub called Tim Hortons. In the space I write this, it has served a hundred cars, or more. through drive through, half that number of walk ins, most of whom walked out again into the car that brought them here, maybe three sat down and consumed.
Yesterday I was on the QEW and all the lanes were clogged with single passenger drivers and the carpool lane was empty. Literally three lanes of traffic jam and one lane empty. I zoomed by, with five people, all of them; you need to have two people in your car to use the carpool lane.
This place is extremely messed up.
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