Gilnahirk

Continuing on this theme of reduced carbon footprint. If I walk four minutes downhill from the house, I arrive at the Gilnahirk shops:

My silly MacBook camera reversed everything but what you are seeing, right to left, is a barber ("For lads and dads"), a baker, a butcher, a pharmacy, a fruit and veg store, a dry cleaners, and a Chinese take-out.
If I walk another three minutes, I arrive at the Kingsway shopping centre, which has another baker, two coffee shops, a charity shop, doctor's office, two grocery stores (one's a co-op), a bank, a post office, a fish & chip shop, a shoe shop, and a really good restaurant.

The point of all of this is David and I had three cars in the U.S. and we used them to go everywhere because we lived out in the ex-urbs. Here we have one car that we can go days without using. We take the bus to work/school, and we are in walking distance of all of our needs. I'd say the vast majority of people in Ulster and the U.K. live similarly. Housing is either in a village or city. Everything else is farmland. In the U.S., land is not conserved so people end up with long commutes and become car-dependent. That is why U.S. per capita carbon use is more than twice that in the U.K.
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