Last year I was in New York City with my family, and it provided a great opportunity to teach my daughter an important lesson about how we build our cities.
We were in Times Square, once one of the busiest automobile intersections on the continent and — thanks to some tremendous ambition and political will — now a pedestrian mall where you can sit in the middle of the street, have a coffee and, OK, take a selfie with a weird guy dressed as a Care Bear.
I asked my daughter to think, quite simply, about what streets are for, and she gave the obvious answer: cars. So we talked about how humans built roads for millennia that were for carriages and horses and especially pedestrians. All you have to do is look at pictures of New York’s Lower East Side or our own Kensington Market in the early 1900s to see streets filled with people. It’s only in the past 100 years of human existence we’ve made streets car-first, often car-only spaces.
I know it's more of a planning buzzword than something that comes up in everyday conversation, but “complete streets” have really been in the news recently.
My family had the same conversation last month down in Toronto, on the newly renovated Queen’s Quay, with its spacious bike lanes, pedestrian walkways, streetcar lanes and, yes, room for cars, too.
The long-awaited new plaza in front of Union Station similarly creates a new kind of public space where pedestrians and cars share the right-of-way.
Up here, the change is slower, but it is coming.
If you’ve driven along Highway 7, you’ve seen the attractive Viva lanes (and perhaps a bus or two passing you in traffic) alongside well-designed bike lanes.
Dufferin Street was one of the region’s first experiments in building a “complete street” with an HOV/bus lane and attractive streetscaping.
More than a few times I’ve biked in the designated lane on Dufferin, passing the cars stuck in rush hour traffic and counting the driver-only vehicles illegally using the HOV lane, too. You can’t cure being a jerk, but you can build more streets that give everyone the space they need to move along.
It’s true that these new bike lanes aren’t exactly highly trafficked, yet. They’re also not all connected in a cohesive network, so getting to the local bike lane or trail can be a death-defying act. But it’s not surprising it will take time to add a bit more diversity to our car culture.
During last year’s municipal elections, I was disappointed when a local candidate explained his opposition to bus lanes by saying effectively that our communities were built for cars and it’s counter-productive to introduce transit now. It might be too much for us to expect our politicians to be visionaries, but we can at least hope they’re not espousing ideas that went out of style with acid-washed jeans and 8-tracks.
Of course our communities are built around cars, but since the first Thornhill and Richmond Hill neighbourhoods were built, we've learned there are side effects to that. (Or rather the first modern neighbourhoods — Thornhill and Richmond Hill both predate the automobile by over a century.) Sure, there’s all the obvious stuff about emissions and increased commutes, but there’s also the simple things, like our kids being unable to walk safely to school or even to a nearby corner store for a Popsicle. Beyond that, there are many social ramifications to building places you can’t live in unless you can afford a car or two alongside your mortgage.
What we can do is retrofit what we already have and provide more options. We don’t need retrograde attitudes or rhetoric about a “war on the car.” We know we live in suburban communities and they’re pretty great places. But there’s certainly room for improvement, and creating a safe way for you to bike to the local library — or (gasp!) maybe even to work — is a good place to start.
Watching the recent hyperbolic Gardiner Expressway debates in Toronto or hearing would-be council candidates fight progress takes me right back to that day in a packed, vibrant Times Square and makes me wonder why we can’t accomplish something so bold.
Maybe we just have to start with the little things: putting on some sneakers or hopping on a bike and reclaiming a little piece of what our neighbourhoods can be.
