This is, I must confess, largely due to the dominant duty of helping my aged parents.
Nonetheless, the lack of public transport alone is enough to make any sort of comfortable social comings and goings unimaginable for me. I want to live on a smaller scale--without speedy thirty minute journeys in a climate-destroying individually piloted monstrosity. I don't like anything about driving.
As I've noted before on this blog, whatever you say about the so-called communists who once ran Czechoslovakia, it is my impression (to judge from what i saw of Bratislava when I lived there) that they got one thing right: they very much wanted every neighborhood to have everything you needed--a cultural center, shops, doctors, a post office, etc. --And, in practice, that meant that it was all either within an easy walk or a short tram ride....And that idea seems to me to be intensely civilized--and wholly opposed to and opposite of the crap I must endure in El Paso Texas where even the nearest local library cannot be easily reached via public transport.......The post office is a walkable distance, but the actual walk is just so god damn unpleasant, what with the local police constantly cruising the neighborhood (evidently bored and looking for something to do) and streets not designed for comfortable pedestrian traffic, but primarily for the enormous trucks, and the unfriendly dogs that I have written about, and the overall ugliness of the entire environment--not to mention the fact that if you walk down the street, nine times out of ten, you are the only pedestrian, which puts a little fear in my heart. After all, this is the only place I've ever lived where it seems a common practice to shout obscenities at pedestrians from a speeding truck.....No, even if I know a few people now, this place is utterly intolerable.
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