I recently read a clickbait article on how you can tell you’re from the Bay Area, or how you know Northern California is your true home, I don’t remember exactly.

One of the points in the article was that people from the Bay Area were environmentally conscious. The example the author gave was that the Bay Area composts. Even though I know the article was just appealing to the pride Northern Californians feel, the article, and especially that point triggered a series of outcries at the falsity of the point and I remembered a great deal of things I’ve seen in these 4 years that I’ve lived here which illuminate a sharp dichotomy between the mindset here and the reality.

On the environmentalism point; Yes, the Bay Area composts and social justice warriors wage their war on non-recyclers in Berkeley and whatnot. Yes, this is better than a lot of the country. However, that is mainly the extent to which I’ve seen people cooperate with the environmentally-friendly ways. When, for example, we were in the worst of the drought (a drought we are still in by the way), neighbours, and people from all over the suburbs near where I live watered their plants in the middle of the day. Some in Menlo Park and Palo Alto kept their fountains on and their pools full. This is despite all the warnings and the efforts from the government to cut back water usage.

Though the Bay Area is the number one place in the country where electric vehicles are sold, only 4 million hybrid vehicles have been sold in the US since 1999. To put that number in perspective, there are about 253 million cars on US roads today. I tallied the numbers I could find (mind you, they’re not up to date) and there are an estimated 222,000 hybrid cars in the Bay Area. There’s a total of 223,000 plug-in electric vehicles in all of California. So, even though California is the largest electric vehicle market, I calculated with a generous donation of electric vehicles that about 3% of the Bay Area’s 7.15 million people own an electric or hybrid vehicle.

I then looked at the Bay Area census (which you can all look at yourselves here), and I found that about 80% of commuters drive to work, with about 68% of that population driving alone. Now I’m relatively new to the area, you could say. Four years might not be enough time to be able to fully criticize the situation. I also don’t know where everyone is commuting from.

However, I’ve seen there is more than one way to get to work. There is an adequate, albeit inconvenient train system and an adequate and inconvenient bus system. Yet, less than 10% of people take public transit. Coming from the city of Montreal, which prides itself on its fabulous public transit, it’s not hard to see why many choose not to take the public transit here. The train comes infrequently and it seems to break down rather frequently. Having only one line to and from the city makes it inconvenient when a train breaks down.

Yet I don’t see any cries for more sustainable infrastructure.

A quick survey of the people I know (a biased pool, yes) shows that mainly all of them are content with the current system. But I still hear cries of passion for the Bay Area and pride for its environmentalism.

You can also get to work and be eco-friendly by using your bike. Well, from 2006 to 2010, only 1.4% of the Bay Area biked to work. That’s 47 thousand people. The number of workers in the Bay is above 3 million. There’s another good reason for this; bike routes aren’t safe here.

Let’s put some more numbers in perspective (sorry, it gets the point across): In Denmark, where the bike routes are much safer, biking accounts for 20% of all commuter trips. 33 bikers were killed in Denmark in 2013. From 2005 to 2009, the Bay Area witnessed 14,113 bike accidents. That’s a full 30% of cyclists who have been in a bike accident. Montreal, which, like Denmark, has proportionally many more bikers than the Bay, experienced 3742 accidents from 2006 to 2010. I don’t hear people calling for safer biking infrastructure around here. Yet I still hear people scream other people’s ears off around here about how eco-friendly they are.

Granted, the environmental conscience of people around here is only one of the many hypocrisies I see around here. It really frustrates me sometimes how unwilling people are to change their viewpoints about the world around them. They live in a perfect bubble, where everything is great, they’re saving the planet, saving the people, and clearly saving themselves. People need to wake up. They need to get their noses out of their phones and demand change.

Here’s an anecdote I always love; In Quebec, in 2012, the government wanted to raise university tuition by a thousand dollars to 3,793 dollars per year. Students were up in arms. They took to the streets and successfully protested the would-be tuition rise. I like that kind of anger and motivation. All I see around here is apathy and acceptance about so many important things (environmentalism being only the tip of the iceberg here). I would honestly love an eco-friendly Bay Area. But someone needs to step up first and show me that they’re more than just what they say.