I’ve lived in Anglesey in Wales for almost four years now. It isn’t a big island and the first thing I noticed was how easy it was to travel around. The concept of leaving home and driving to a destination is a simple one. Yet for so many it isn’t. Now I calculate my journey by when I want to be there and if it’s twenty minutes away, I set off to arrive in twenty minutes, and there is rarely an issue.
When I lived in Manchester and my journey was twenty minutes, I would have to add at least an hour for travel time. City driving is worse than ever and in the three and half years I’ve been away, it’s got worse. I find it a nightmare when I need to travel back there and my stress levels increase rapidly.
When I was in my late teens, we lived a fifteen minute drive from the town centre where I worked. I would walk to the bus stop, catch the bus and it would travel through reletively car free roads. It stopped at other stops and arrived at its destination on time. That same journey now takes over an an hour due to nose to tail traffic all the way. Not to mention buses are always late.
Rush hour is a thing of the past for me now. It’s not something I think about anymore. I know I am luckily.
I hated it, wanted out, and did something about it. So I felt such empathy with this blog post by author Julia Blake. It’s not always the toll of travelling, it’s the stress and ultimatly the arguments with other people that all add to the problem. What do you think?
Read Road Closures and Rats by Julia Blake to see what inspired my comments!
Karen J. Mossman 
Luckily, I don’t live in a city; I live on the outskirts of a small (but growing) town, yet, even so, it is one I rarely venture into unless I absolutely must, as parking is an expensive nightmare and the traffic horrific.
They built a brand new shopping centre on the far side a few years ago, I have been there once in all that time. The large ‘brand’ stores and cafes, which I don’t use anyway, simply moved from the old high street to the new centre, so nothing new or exciting to attract me.
All that happened is, with the delivery and support vehicles, the hotel, cinema, pub, restaurant, coffee shops and such, is they encouraged more and new traffic to clog up the arteries of a previously lesser-used section of the town.
Amazing planning… not.
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I know what you mean. I lived near to Manchester’s Trafford Centre. Many of the local shops closed and relocated or just couldn’t compete. I once spent four hours trying to get out of the carpark!
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