Do people really live that far away from shops and work in Canada then?

I appreciate that a road trip will involve vast distances, but day to day travel.

I had a 2 litre sedan in England. I drive a 5.7 litre behemoth over here. Each day in England I drove 6 miles to and from the car park of the train station (total 12 miles). Here, I roll down the hill to the c-train and chug like buggery back at night. I probably drive 6 kms a day.

In England I didn't have air con. Both our vehicles here do.

Living in Canada doesn't necessarily mean that huge distances are travelled on a day to day basis.

My round trip commute is over 50km, but thats my choice, I could have bought a place in town I suppose. If we want a "big store" other than the local grocery and hardware places then its a drive to Trenton or Belleville again. There is a lot of driving kids all over hells half acre for skating, piano etc. I drove 540km at the weekend to go pick up a keyboard I bought "locally". I would never have done that in a million years in the UK.

In england you dont need air con Here you need it, even if you dont need it on all the time

life with a 12 year old Buick Century

downhills are sweet tho

I do.

I appreciate that That's your choice though.

I find the whole, the distances are huge, a false statement for day to day living. In one lived in rural Wales, but commuted each by vehicle day to London, the same vastness would be encountered.

I think what it comes down to is if you want to go check something out in the next town (shops, theater whatever), you are looking at 50-100km between places in much of canada, not 5-10 miles or less like the UK, where one town almost touches on its neighbour. Outside the GTA that doesnt really happen.

Also the UK is more easy to get around on foot or by transit, all year round. Here few cities have comprehensive transit systems, and it must be pretty miserable waiting for a bus on a windy Febraury day anyway, so the place just feels more spread out even when its not.

Also the way canada is set up as strip malls as islands among the housing areas spreads the shops out, but concentrates them together, so the idea is there again that you drive to the "local" store or you drive further to the mall or big box store area of town...

On the whole cities here seem more sprawling, which can add to the travel distance factor. Taking Kamloops as an example, city limits cover 25kms east to west. An equivalent sized (population) city in England is Cheltenham, which barely covers 5kms north/south. It used to take me up to 30 minutes to commute through traffic in Cheltenham, whereas here I can cover over 5x the distance in 20 minutes.

25kms isn't a vast distance by any stretch of the imagination, but it's far easier to cover that sort of commuting distance across a city here than it is in the UK. Several colleagues of mine commute 60kms each way to work daily which takes them 35 to 40 minutes.

OK, I don't know of anyone that shopped at, say, Tesco, and they walked home with their shopping.

Likewise, I would suggest that the difference between the stores one would find in, say, Reading, would be the same that one would find in Brackley. I appreciate that they may only be one store in the whole of England that one would find a particular type of fishing reel. But I cannot imagine that one would drive from Calgary to Edmonton, just because the shops are different. Day to day, I would suggest that most drive a similar distance in England and Canada.

LOL, I did! Was morrisons, but same difference.

Things are more spread out here, I think RICH has basically said what I was going to.

As this is a petrol thread i thought i would just share that i paid £1.21.9 a litre at Tesco this morning, and that was for the cheap stuff, do you think having the roof down makes a difference to petrol consumption ?

Yes it does, even having a sun roof open can after a certain speed...

My conversion shows this to be about $1.86/litre...where I live regular grade petrol self serve (actually full serve is pretty hard to get these days) is about $0.97/litre. You are paying not quite double.