The Blog of Harald

Our new office location is going to be 901 King Street West, at Strachan Avenue (just north of the Exhibition grounds). I’ve been spoiled by working within the downtown core for the last 8 years, so this is coming as a bit of a shock for me :-)

I live at Leslie and Sheppard. My current commute is about an hour, whether I take the GO train, the subway, or drive in with my wife. The GO train is the most pleasant; it is quieter, and doesn’t stop/start constantly like the subway does.

My new commute, on the other hand, is ugly. Add an extra 30 minutes each way for the TTC solution, because I have to take a streetcar across. The GO solution is no longer practical. There’s a train that leaves Union for Exhibition in the morning, but the Richmond Hill train is _always_ late, so I’d probably never catch it. That leaves the train to Union, then a streetcar, which is expensive, and doesn’t save any time.

Currently, I can leave home a bit early, leave a car at the GO station, leave work early, and go pick up the kids from school before 6PM; that plan (and variations on it) goes out the window with my new office location.

So that leaves driving. It’s apparently about $5/day to park, and the drive takes less than an hour (even at rush hour). I dislike driving to work; it’s completely wasted time for me. At least on the subway I can read, and on the trains I can read or work on my laptop. About the only thing I can accomplish in the car is Books On Tape :-)

Still, an extra _hour_ commuting each day doesn’t work for me; I simply don’t have an extra hour in my day right now. So I guess I get to start driving. That probably means getting a replacement for my 12-year-old beater…

Still, it could always be worse :-)