In case you haven’t noticed, today is Labour Day here in North America. That means the younglings are heading back to school tomorrow morning. Please do them, their parents and yourself a favour and keep your eyes peeled for oblivious rugrats that may bolt out in front of you in their quest to beat their friends to the halls of higher learning.

From the first day we’ve published The Garage, it has been an experiment. Could we publish a fun, quality product and generate some real traffic numbers? Like most experiments, The Garage has had it’s ups and downs as we’ve tried different templates, servers, marketing programs and software versions. Even with the staggering loss of all of our images a few weeks back, the new platform version has brought a silver lining: a steady increase in traffic daily.

This morning, for the first time ever, I’ve check and found that we’ve had over 100,000 page views in the last 30 days! Thanks to all of you for dropping into The Garage, we all hope you enjoy our work. There is more new stuff to come down the road, so stay tuned!

The first winter storm, is always the worst. It doesn’t matter how much snow falls, the city always comes to a stop. Yesterday it rained all day until about about 10 pm, when it turned to ice. Early this morning, it turned to snow around 6 am, just in time for rush hour. As you can tell from the shot above, traffic was at a standstill. That’s probably a good thing, as it’s hard to crash when you’re parked! I made it from Whitby to Scarborough, a grand total of 28 kilometers in an hour and 40 minutes.
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For all you folks in small town North America who think you have bad traffic. It just took me 2 hours to travel 48 kilometers. For our American friends, that is roughly 30 miles. This was on a highway that is 6 lanes wide both ways. Because it is raining!

Unbelievable.

Every city has them. The roads that you will go out of your way to avoid for fear of vanishing into a pot hole. Here in Ontario we’ve got more than our fair share of horrible roads and the CAA has a fun way to make those roads a little better.

The CAA is asking Ontario drivers to vote on Ontario’s worst roads. The up side to this is that the winners are the first roads to be attended to next year. In some cases though, the task is so huge that it’s an ongoing process.
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Over at The Truth About Cars the debate rages on about advertising. Does it belong or not? Will it affect the journalistic integrity of the site or it’s writers? Apparently, the TTAC leader, Robert Farago has been deliberating this topic for a very long time. Detractors of advertising point to the drivel that we now read in the monthly print magazines. In fact, TTAC recently had some problems with a major German manufacturer after comparing a Swedish grille to an airborne ham wallet. This when TTAC is not even running any ads.

Blogging is a time consuming activity. If it is undertaken as a hobby and traffic is not a concern, then missing a week or so of posting isn’t an issue. Even as a hobby, blogging takes time. If one cares to put together a professional appearing product, it really becomes a part time job. TTAC is certainly a professional product, put together by a capable team of writers. They deserve to support themselves off of what is obviously more than a hobby.

The beauty of the internet is the fact that a writer can express their opinion without having their magazine moved to the top shelf. When was the last time you saw Motor Trend compare a car to female genitalia? Unfortunately, some of the mainstream marketing people haven’t been able to wrap their heads around the modern media. This worry about political correctness may cost a blog a dollar or two, but a well written blog will draw in other dollars to replace them.

The Garage has become an obsession for me, but that was it’s original intent. Blair Valley Media was formed with the intent of generating enough income for me to quit my job in the retail car industry. Those who earn a living blogging say that you should write about your passion so that you don’t burn out. I took this to heart and The Garage was born as the first Blair Valley blog. With The Garage, the intent was to learn how to generate traffic and then gradually introduce some advertising if we actually did generate a base of readership. The advertising will start appearing over the next couple of weeks here in The Garage, but plans are for the ads to be unobtrusive and automotive related. Will advertisers affect our content? NO. Even once my livelyhood depends on the Blair Valley network, the integrity and flavour of our writing will not change. Is it possible to do this? Of course it is.

Over at TTAC, readers comments have focused on the big guys. Road and Track, Car & Driver, Automobile, Motor Trend. Well, Peter Egan aside, none of the big guys have rowed my boat in years. There is a little Florida based publication called Grassroots Motorsports that truly is a Grassroots car mag. They write about building and racing entry level cars in entry level series. This print mag is written by real car guys & girls for real car guys and girls. They have been so successful over the past couple of decades that they have recently launched a sister mag, Classic Motorsports. These folks have a hell of a lot of fun and continue to stick by their original intent. I think that you might call that having integrity. What does this mean for TTAC or The Garage for that matter? What it means is that you can continue to write what you feel and what your readers have come to expect and still generate the advertising dollars needed to grow your business.

Let’s face it, a well written blog is a part/full time job. To be paid for a job well done is the least that anyone can expect.

In today’s world, it seems there are more and more people who don’t seem capable of accepting responsibility for their own actions. Usually, I blame poor parenting for this. Today’s story however shows that maybe our legal system is also to blame.

Back in July 2004, a 20 year old driver made an illegal left turn that took him into the path of a Calgary motorcycle cop and knocked him from his steed. Yesterday a judge aquitted the kid of the hit & run charge, saying that “I find that he never intended to avoid responsibility”. Yeah right! That’s why he and his buddy went to a neighbouring pub for a cold pop while the officer lay on the street being treated by EMS.

Not surprisingly, the officer chose not to accept the accused’s appology, asking why it took him two years.

source Calgary Sun via Joe Duarte