A Sea of SUV

Regular readers may recall that I spoke at the annual meeting of the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market about the possibilities for encouraging customers to get to the market by means other than automobile. Judging by the state of the parking lot on Saturday morning, my work has been a complete success:

This is not to say that the Market folks haven’t taken steps to improve things: they’ve made pedestrian and bicycle access from the Confederation Trail a lot easier by mowing the path at the back of the parking lot that joins the trail, they’ve installed a new bicycle rack (they old one was stolen), and they’ve posted public transit maps.

The sad irony in all of this for me is that one of the anchors of my talk was the fact that a city bus stopped several times every Saturday morning right at the front door of the Market. Alas when the bus schedule was reworked in May, that bus was a casualty, and so the closest you can get by bus from downtown Charlottetown is either the Atlantic Superstore plaza or the UPEI student centre.

That said, [[Oliver]] and I did manage to get to the Market, out to Owl’s Hollow, and back, all by public transit on Saturday morning. We had to walk some, and the schedule wasn’t exactly “frequent,” but it worked, and it’s certainly easily possible for almost anyone.