“Traffic” by Alexandr Trubetskoy is licensed under CC BY 2.0

As a lifelong, driver’s licenceless Winnipegger, I’ve become privy to the ways that car culture is deeply embedded in the fabric of our city. In the years I’ve been reading novels, making conversation with strangers, and thanking bus drivers for getting me from points A to B, I’ve encountered a slew of folks who’d rather pay the hefty price tag associated with driving than take advantage of a cheaper public transit alternative.

I love taking the bus—and yet, I’m not naive to the less desirable aspects of public transit as it currently stands. During Winnipeg’s frigid winters, my legs have become frostbitten while watching wait times change from five minutes to 15 to 30 or more.

These aren’t an inherent failure of buses—they’re a failure of political will. A robust, adequately funded, affordable public transit system greatly reduces traffic congestion, drastically reduces emissions, and improves mobility. Most importantly, it affords everyone a right of access to the city, including disabled people, seniors, and low-income residents.

In the face of the climate crisis, electric vehicles have been gaining traction as a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Yet, despite Elon Musk’s ambitions, it’s evident that electric cars won’t solve the myriad of issues that automobiles cause. Reliance on cars has influenced suburban sprawl, the necessitation of parking lots, and, of course, longer commutes.

Cars also take up an insurmountable amount of urban space. In a 2019 study on parking conducted by the City of Edmonton, it was found that, on average, the maximum usage rate was just 41 percent during the middle of the day. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? Public Transit in the Age Google, Uber, and Elon Musk author James Wilt describes the urban transit crisis as fundamentally one of space. “Space in a city is a zero-sum game; every square foot that’s prioritized to one form undermines the possibility of another,” he writes.

A city with fewer people using cars is one where we can begin to imagine what a city built for people, not cars, looks like. Parking lots can be transformed into community gardens and cooperative spaces that spark more joy than storage for cars that aren’t in use 95 percent of the time do. Public transit itself can become a site of solidarity building between drivers and riders—whether it’s fighting a fare increase or expanding access.

Yet, getting there will require more than policy—implementing frequent, fare-free service is just the tip of the iceberg in cities like Winnipeg and in most of North America, where car culture permeates everything from coming-of-age fantasies to city planning. How do we persuade folks who would rather suffer the inconveniences and price tag of driving downtown instead of hopping on a rapid transit line? Convincing these types to make the switch requires a massive shift in the consciousness of a city toward seeing transit as a universal, public good.

In this sense, driving must be rendered not merely inconvenient, but downright dreadful. This will require actions like reducing speed limits and eliminating parking spaces, while simultaneously propping up a robust public transit system—one that is frequent, low-cost or fare-free, and accessible to all. Crucially, public transit must remain under democratic, public ownership.

An investment in public transit is an investment in everyone’s right to access the city. To make a just transition from the private spaces of cars to the public spaces of transit, we must incentivize the latter while rigorously disincentivizing the former. With frequent service, fare elimination and a move away from car-centric urban planning, environment and equity go hand in hand. We only have to make public transit accessible and irresistible to all.

Photos by Todd McLellan.

On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia came apart somewhere over Texas, reminding us that putting people into space is hard to do and very, very dangerous. Engineers determined a piece of foam that broke off during launch had damaged the heat shield on one of the wings. NASA knew about it almost immediately and for the two weeks Columbia was orbiting Earth, they worked overtime with the Boeing Corporation to figure out whether or not they had a real problem on their hands, wedging their findings and analysis into about 28 slides’ worth of PowerPoint. One of those slides included the word “significant” five times, as in “can cause significant damage.” The gist was that yes, this could be a “significant” issue, but it’s also “significantly” outside the test parameters, so there’s no way to be certain. The bit of the slide that emphasized there was good cause for concern was a bullet point nested under a bullet point nested under a bullet point, which is the most PowerPoint-y way to display information.

The interpretation of the deck was that the risk to the craft and its astronauts was minimal. The misunderstanding stemmed from PowerPoint itself—the way we use it and how it inherently shapes content. “How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide?” writes American statistician Edward Tufte in his essay, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” (emphasis his). “Medieval in its preoccupation with hierarchical distinctions, the PowerPoint format signals every bullet’s status in four or five different simultaneous ways: by the order in sequence, extent of indent, size of bullet, style of bullet, and size of type associated with various bullets. This is a lot of insecure formatting for a simple engineering problem.” Presenting the problem in PowerPoint stripped it of gravity, because PowerPoint is an unserious tool. If something is really important, surely it would be presented using words in sentences and paragraphs, in robust reports with nuance and elaboration, not decks with bullets and fun slide transitions. The smartest minds on the planet were thwarted by presentation software. Seven people died.

But blaming the software is unfair. It wasn’t buggy. On the contrary, PowerPoint always works exactly as it’s designed to work. The error was with people. It’s not about the specific people who looked at the slide that said “significant damage” and thought, “I’m sure it’s fine.” It’s about all of us. The problem is who we’ve become in a world where PowerPoint exists.

***

When trying to describe Marshall McLuhan’s ideas in a 1967 Saturday Review article, John Culkin wrote, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” We love to make things, but it is our things that come to define us. We make the thing, then we turn into people who have the thing. We made PowerPoint, then we became people who have PowerPoint.

McLuhan made a career of saying smart and prescient things. But it’s the thing he’s most known for—“the medium is the message”—that keeps impressing in its beautiful, simple brilliance. In his (relatively) famous 1969 Playboy interview, he said, “Man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in.” When technology becomes invisible, so do its effects. Predicting what those effects will be, or even noticing them while they are happening, is basically impossible. Correlations look (and often are) spurious at best. Futurism is a mug’s game. Something is new and scary and amazing, and then all at once it is ubiquitous and ignored. The moment we take a technology for granted is the same moment it goes to work shaping us.

Consider cars. We made cars and then we turned into people who have cars. We changed manufacturing, jobs, and unions because of cars. We carved roads into the landscape and built cities out of pavement. We put garages on houses and red lines on maps. Teenagers got pregnant and Kerouac took a road trip. We created an entire global economy that relies on sucking stuff out of the ground and lighting it on fire while the stink chokes the planet. For a while we “asked for directions,” and then we just put the directions on our phones. Think of the effort required to get real-time directions: A thing in space knows where you are and tells a thing in your pocket to stick a blue dot on a map you can control with your finger. That exists because we are car people, though it’s not something Carl Benz or Henry Ford had in mind.

We made television, but it’s never been just a box in the corner of living rooms. TV changed the way we’re entertained and informed. It changed the way we think and understand. TV gave us TV trays and TV dinners. It gave us six o’clock news, 24-hour news, “infotainment” and “Nintendo warfare”—the sterilization of images from war zones used in popular consumption, so it’s all brave soldiers with guns and no dead bodies or blood. It gave us Jennifer Aniston’s haircut and, somehow, Donald Trump. Now we have bingeing and “TV everywhere” and instant access to what is effectively an infinite amount of video, including movies and shows, vlogs, sports, kids playing video games, live streams, reviews, news, fake news, straight porn, gay porn, fetish porn, amateur porn, and so on. It is just assumed you can take your phone out and watch TV until your eyes dry up and fall out of your head. There is no way that doesn’t do something profound to us— to our society and culture—at a very fundamental level.

How could it not?

***

The smartphone is a perfect little package of personal distraction and cultural disruption. We look at our phones more than we look at each other. We text and tweet and snap more than we talk. We like and fave and heart more than we love. The phone permeates our lives—first it was our work lives, then our home lives, then our sex lives— reducing the complexity of being human to a few simple gestures.

Okay, I’m being hyperbolic. But not by much. The phone has become a synecdoche for all the ills of the modern world. In September, The Atlantic ran a story by psychologist Jean Twenge asking: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” She argues that the one-two punch of phones and social media has left today’s kids miserable and generally unprepared for the world. It was as convincing as it was horrifying. Even beyond the stats and research, it feels accurate. Anecdotally, my two-year-old is a ninja with an iPhone, firing up Peppa Pig faster than you can say, “What the hell is a Peppa Pig?” My five-year-old would swipe a million Poké Balls at a million Pokémon if given the opportunity. My teenager will tap his way through oblivion if not prompted to come up for air. I don’t think of my kids as being miserable (or at least not any more miserable than I was), but I also remember how my parents never seemed in tune with my feelings when I was young (and I definitely watched too much TV).

It’s easy to point out possible solutions to what we mostly see as bad habits. Limit access to screens. Set timers. Keep your phone in your pocket. Take the kids outside and do something—anything—with them. At the very least, it won’t hurt them to get a little more fresh air while fresh air is a thing that still exists. But it is also beside the point. You can take your kids camping every weekend and they’ll still eventually be on Facebook. They’ll still swipe right to date, post selfies, share memes, play Candy Crush. You can do everything to make sure they grow up knowing there’s more to life than a black slab made of glass and magic, but someday they’ll own one just like everybody else. The butterfly has flapped its wings and we’re just waiting to see the effect.

***

In 2001 I met my wife at a student journalism conference while we were living on opposite sides of the country. We spent two-and-a-half years like that, which wasn’t ideal, but it also wasn’t as tough as people assume because we talked to each other a lot. Käthe and I are both very verbal, so I’m not sure our relationship would have worked any earlier in history. To ultimately end up together we needed everything that led to Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone patent, decades of infrastructure development stretching wires from coast to coast, and cordless phones to talk for hours away from our respective roommates. And we needed capitalism—a complicated beast of a thing—to force somebody, somewhere (probably in marketing, certainly a hero) to come up with the brilliant concept of “unlimited evenings and weekends.”

The shape of society owes a lot to the phone. Like the smartphone, the old-school telephone had effects on work and home (and, yes, sex). It made the world smaller and faster. In Understanding Media McLuhan wrote, “The child and the teenager understand the telephone, embracing the cord and the ear-mike as if they were beloved pets.” (He then spends several paragraphs on prostitution and phones.) I’m sure he wasn’t specifically referring to two 21-year-olds meeting at a conference and deciding Nova Scotia and British Columbia weren’t so far apart, just as I’m sure none of the people involved in inventing the phone considered how it might impact our young romance.

So how do you prepare for a future when you don’t know what it is you don’t know? How do you create a car in 1885 or 1908 or 1950 or pretty much any time before 1990—before climate change was a thing we talked about? How do you invent television before Netflix? How do you create the phone before Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and the millions of other things we use our phones for that have nothing to do with phoning people? How do you design PowerPoint so it doesn’t blow up a spaceship?

I suppose you design them exactly the way we did. We make them sort of knowing what they’ll do for us, but never fully comprehending what they’ll do to us.

In writing of McLuhan, Culkin suggested in his Saturday Review article that the results didn’t have to be inevitable “as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

But usually it just feels like we’re fish oblivious to the water.

One green eye
followed my footsteps
thru the parking lot.

I caught it in
a rusted hand,
surprised by my blinking palm.

plucked it dryly,
placed it in the ashtray
so I wouldn’t squish it on
the steering wheel.

It blinked disapproval
at the music squirping
from the speakers

“You’re pretty,
for an eyeball,”
I said, sliding the ashtray shut,
“but it’s my damned
car.”

I’d like to tell you
that I drove it home,
opened some wine,
sliced some brie and
some pear,

discussed mutual affections
for Schwitters, Acker, and Grieg;

debated art and its role
in modern life;

I’d like to tell you
that, in spite of
all scientific and biological
limitations, we managed
to experience explosive
sexual congress,

and that,
yes,
we are expecting
offspring any day now.

I’d like to tell you
that my life’s purpose
was found inside
one little green
eyeball.

Truth is, though
I forgot about it.
It shrivelled and dried out
in my car’s ashtray.

I only saw it again
a year later,
looking for spare toll nickels.
It looked like a
cross between a jalapeno pepper
and those weird styrofoamy
shrimp chips you get
from Thai restaurants.

A simple fragile night,
blown
blinking ever into dust.

Your Money Back

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Alone. Broke
in a damp room.
Spiders encroach on
niceties of
visitor cats.

Rationing out salt
and frozen foods
per days left in this
pretty, quiet town

The stew you gave me
ziplocked and labelled
“lamb stew, May 08”

I heated it up in a saucepan
and added salt.

Thank you
for thinking of me.

Verne Good lives in Toronto, where she writes poetry, and does sound and light design for theatre. Her poems have appeared in Rampike and Peter O’Toole: A Magazine of One-Line Poems.

Wintertime in Canada is sure to mean roads covered in snow, ice and salt. Here’s a look at the country’s de-icer of choice— how it’s good, how it’s bad, and what can be used instead.

Click below to see the PDF full-screen:

In December 2001, Environment Canada officially declared road salt to be damaging to the environment. Since then, a “Code of Practice for the Environmental Management of Road Salts” has been voluntarily implemented by many municipalities and provinces. It explains how to optimize road salt usage, recommends alternatives be adopted when possible, and says that vulnerable sites be spared road salt altogether. Toronto reduced its salt usage by 37,000 tonnes in the two winters following the implementation of its version of this plan in 2001.

Road salt can severely threaten the ability of plants to survive already harsh roadside conditions. One government study found that an average of 1.86 trees per kilometre on the highway are affected by salt and need to be replaced each year, to the tune of $300-$886 per tree. Thanks to aerial dispersion, vulnerable areas can stretch up to hundreds of metres from roadways.

Sodium chloride can seep into roadside runoff and eventually find its way into nearby lakes, where it can sink to the bottom and shut off the oxygen supply to the bottom-feeding organisms that become food for some fish. The end result can be a disrupted ecosystem.

Environment Canada estimates that road salt corrosion costs about $143 every year for each vehicle in the country. Salt also corrodes concrete, steel, and asphalt, causing municipalities and business to have to refurbish 600 parking garages annually and to spend $763 per square metre to repair corroded bridges.

So why do we use this stuff? Because it improves driving conditions immensely. Environment Canada says that road salt usage results in vehicles consuming up to 33 percent less fuel and reduces winter accidents by more than 88 percent.

There are alternatives to road salt out there. Calcium magnesium acetate—or CMA—is used to de-ice planes and is considered to be a greener option. But it’s not cheap. A ton of CMA goes for about US$450, compared to about US $50 for a tonne of road salt. While CMA might be too pricey for local governments, it’s certainly an option for environmentally conscious businesses and homeowners.

Toronto netted more mentions in This Magazine over the last year than the Maritime and Prairie provinces combined. Ontario was mentioned more than all of the other provinces combined.

To prepare for our regular staff meeting earlier this week, we flipped through the last year of This to see what we covered well, and what we’ve missed. The findings clearly showed us the kinds of stories we tend to cover—and pointed to a few things we need to work on.

First a word on the informal nature of this survey: my count was quick and dirty, and may not be 100 per cent reproducible at home. I counted all articles: features, short articles, This & That, graphics, and so on, from our November/December 2008 issue up to, and including, our upcoming issue. I assigned each a topic (environment, books, queer issues, etc) and a location (Japan, Newfoundland, Toronto, etc).

We love the environment—who doesn’t? We love the environment so much that it was our most covered topic in the last year. We brought you articles about learning to live without cars, and people at home and abroad practicing permaculture. We also did well coving Canadian art and government.

This Magazine started out way back in 1966 as This Magazine is About Schools, but somehow we avoided stories about education almost entirely over the last year, with the exception of our cover story about Africentric schools. Race and immigration were two other topics we only touched on. Stories about the economy, the internet, women’s issues, First Nations, and queer issues landed in the middle.

We also seem to love Toronto and Ontario. We focused on people and issues in Ontario (heavy on Toronto) as often as we focused on the all of other provinces combined. British Columbia was the runner up for most covered province. New Brunswick, P.E.I., and the Northwest Territories didn’t even get an honourable mention. Ouch. Rest assured that we’re already working on fixing these gaps.

Here’s a link to view the spreadsheet on Google Docs. If you’d like to slice and dice the spreadsheet yourself, you can download it as a CSV spreadsheet file. (Warning! It hasn’t been spell-checked.)

So here’s where we appeal to you, our readers. What places, people and topics do you want to see in This in 2010? What do you think we did well this year, and what do you want to see covered more often? Comment below or send us an email and tell us what you think. We keep track of data like this because we want to improve and broaden our coverage, to represent every inch of this country and give a voice to people who are underrepresented in mainstream media. Obviously we still have work to do; we hope you’ll help us make This Magazine even better.

[Original creative-commons photo by Ustat ]

[Editor’s note: every month, Eco-Chamber profiles an eco-group from Canada or abroad, called “Eco-Action.” Eco-Action takes a look at both the group and the actions they demonstrate towards their cause.]

Not many see bikes as a symbol for activism. However, that is just what the Toronto Cyclists’ Union is changing. They advocate for a more bike-friendly city to encourage environmental, social and urban sustainability.

“Think of us as the Canadian Automobile Association of bikes. Like CAA, 80% of our work is advocacy. However, instead of advocacy for the automobile, we advocate for bikes,” says Yvonne Bambrick, Executive Director of the Toronto Cyclists Union.

Two wheels are on the rise throughout North America. Portland, Oregon , for instsance, recently outpaced Copenhagen in the #2 spot for “best bike cities.” Toronto is seeing a rapid influx of cyclists in its urban spaces. According to Treehugger, the latest census report shows that from 2001 to 2006, cyclists have increased by 32 percent, while the automobile commuters have decreased by 5.2 percent.

The Toronto Cyclists Union was formed out of a desire to replicate bike advocacy groups found elsewhere in North America. With such a rise of cyclists in Toronto, it is time to build more bike lanes and for cyclists’ voices to be heard in a city where cars have mostly dominated, says Bambrick. In 2008, the group’s launch year, there were 70 members of the Union. Within a year, that number has grown to nearly 600.

“The bike is a powerful tool. It’s a no-emissions means of transportation; a way of battling climate change, smog and city pollution; low-cost for individuals; relieves the overburden city congestion; and promotes better health,” says Bambrick.

But bike advocacy faces challenges: there are city councilors who consistently prioritize parking and traffic issues, instead of issues relevant to cyclists. Some of the city’s infrastructure plans consider pedestrians and greenery over bikes. And then there’s the generalized North American mentality that the automobile rules — and anything else is road-kill.

But the bike union is maneuvering around these barriers this year. Boosted by its members’ dues, the union is an aggressive lobbyist at the municipal, provincial and federal level. Last week, speaking at a Toronto city infrastructure meeting, the union advocated building new bike lanes as part of a redevelopment plan for Jarvis Street, a five-lane road that currently acts as an artery for auto traffic. An amendment was approved and new bike lanes should be included when the plan passes council.

Beyond transforming roads, bike union is attempting to transform minds. From road rage against cyclists — road rage so toxic that a 36-year-old man lost a leg in a confrontation with a taxi last year —  The union wants to restore some respect for cyclists’ rights, and their media efforts are helping to do that.

One shouldn’t have to be ‘Brave-Heart’ to cycle to work every day, threatened by cars and minimal lane space, says Bambrick. Instead, the Toronto Cyclists Union wants to make cycling an activity that every urbanite can do in safety.

As one of our oldest forms of transportation, bikes are also our future. It is a symbol of sustainability and shifting attitudes. In these times, bike advocacy groups are more necessary than ever. They put this back-to-the future two-wheeler in its rightful place in our cities — everywhere.

Creative Commons licensed photo courtesy stevenh

As individuals and as a society, we love our automobiles — even as we hate how they screw up our planet, our cities, and our lives. Environics Research Group, a Toronto based research firm, found that 32 percent of Canadians see their wheels as an extension or reflection of their style and image. For the other 63 percent, it’s an appliance, a tool used to get from A to B. Recreational driving may seem, in an age of climate change, to be a destructive past-time. But the auto collectors and recreational drivers aren’t the problem, just as connoisseurs of fine wine, who prize quality over quantity, aren’t necessarily problem drinkers. It’s the people who drive (or drink) all the time — mindlessly, compulsively, because they can’t help themselves — who do the real damage to themselves and others. That’s addiction — and collectively, we’re pretty close to hitting bottom. The automobile has wasted our time, choked our air, and destroyed many downtowns while spurring sprawl in the suburbs. Obviously, cars aren’t about to go away completely (though we can certainly hope they change dramatically over the next few years). But let’s never forget: the fault, dear drivers, lies not in our cars, but in ourselves.

As with all addictions, change will only occur if we want to change, both individually and collectively. This handy 12-step program for car dependency may help, but in the end only you can decide when it’s best to leave the keys at home and go another way.

Photo by Sergeo Syd

1. Accept that we have a problem

Let’s be honest: cars are cool, sexy, and fun and provide us with speed, power, and freedom. Some of them offer gorgeous styling, luxurious comfort, and advanced engineering (not to mention great sound systems). And then there are the memories. Having suffered through the motion sickness of family road trips, we finally turn 16 and start hanging out in cars with friends, reveling in our first taste of freedom from our parents, and fumbling through early experiments with sex — good times many of us spend the rest of our lives wishing we could recapture. So cars come with a lot of positive baggage. But we’ve gone too far and designed our existence around the automobile. You may hear some dreamers talk about a car-free world (see page 16). Don’t believe them. Fortunately, breaking our addiction doesn’t have to mean never driving our wheels again — a recovering alcoholic may never be able to drink again, and people who’ve given up the cancer sticks may envy the social smokers, but being an occasional driver is nothing to be ashamed about.

2. Educate ourselves about the alternatives

Sometimes the car, a really convenient device, can’t be beat for getting around. In fact, there’s no better way to whisk a gaggle of kids and their oversized hockey bags to a far-flung arena. And while high-speed trains are long overdue in this country, you’ll still want to travel to cottages, campgrounds, and mountains. But if you never go anywhere unless it’s in a car, you need to consider walking, cycling, and public transit. Sure, buses can be crowded, inconvenient, and unreliable — I thought my wife, Carmen, had stood me up on our first date, though to this day she blames Ottawa’s OC Transpo for her tardiness — but they are also economical, encourage reading, and let you feel more virtuous. Of course, these alternatives only work in places where there are stores, restaurants, and other spots worth walking to, where cyclists can travel safely and where the population density is enough to support public transit. /// 3. Start with the moSt baSic Form oF traNSportatioN — walkiNg Aside from being the most pleasant places to live and encouraging other ways of getting around, walkable neighbourhoods create better communities. It’s no coincidence that Calgary is both the most sprawled and the most conservative large city in Canada, while the two densest big cities south of the border — New York and San Francisco — are the most liberal American ones. When we live in sprawl and spend so much time cooped up in our cars, we develop strange notions about life. But when we walk around our neighbourhood we soon discover that other races, religions and socio-economic classes aren’t scary after all. Sprawl stokes fear; density fosters tolerance.

4. Admit the harm our actions have on ourselves

Every year, 1.2 million people die on the world’s roads. But even when we survive our drive, sitting sedentary behind a steering wheel is no way to go through life. Drive-through windows at fast-food joints are just the beginning: there are now drive-through pharmacies, banks, and even libraries. Meanwhile, parenting has become little more than glorified chauffeuring as we raise a generation of kids who never walk anywhere.

5. understand the wrongs of the past

Urban sprawl — dominated by cloned homes, lowslung strip malls, and clogged arterial roads — forces people to drive more and makes no aesthetic, economic, or environmental sense. Among other sins, sprawl encourages drunk driving: partiers will take the car when they live so far from bars, restaurants, and friends’ homes that walking is too daunting, public transit is too incon-venient, and taking a cab is too expensive. Decades of short-sighted urban planning have put us in this mess, and fixing the problem will take time, but we need to start intensifying our neighbourhoods now.

6. Treat others as we would like to be treated

Sure, cruising down an open highway can be a blast, but lurching along in bumper-to-bumper traffic is no fun. A tense commute is, at best, dispiriting and exhausting; at worst, it can lead to road rage, which is an extension of the increase in aggressive driving (including following too closely, travelling at excessive speeds, weaving through traffic, running stop lights) and the decline in civility on the road.

We behave differently (read: more irrationally) when we’re behind the wheel of a car, which — especially if it’s a big SUV — can create a sense of isolation and invincibility. The anonymity of riding in a living room on wheels, an extension of the anonymity of suburban life, can weaken common sense and self-discipline so much that even upstanding citizens can act in ways they never would in a grocery store lineup. “Road-ragers are an unpredictable group,” Sgt. Cam Woolley, who recently retired from the Ontario Provincial Police, told me. “They’ve timed their commute down to the last second, and if anybody goes too slow or doesn’t drive the way they’d like, they go nuts.”

7. Don’t be part of the problem

The typical commute has lengthened substantially — to more than an hour for the average round trip in Canada — as people seek cheaper homes and larger lawns. This is not just bad for air quality, it’s bad for quality of life. You’ve probably heard drivers rationalize that their commute is their only alone time: a chance to think, to listen to their favourite music, or to simply enjoy some rare silence. But if you’re like me, you want to yell, “Get a life, pal.”

8. When you must drive, do it well

Bad driving doesn’t just cause more collisions, it exacerbates congestion and increases commute times. Even a bad lane change can slow down everyone behind you. To Carlos Thomas, who runs Shifters, a school for drivers who want to learn the joys of stick shifts, the two biggest mistakes we make are not looking far enough ahead and following too closely. “The most common crash is the rear-end collision,” according to Thomas, “and it’s the most easily preventable crash.” Paradoxically, the easiest way to avoid smashing into the car in front of you is to look well ahead. When you tailgate you can’t see as far down the road so you miss advance warnings that you need to hit the brakes, and when you don’t look down the road you’re more likely to tailgate because it’s so easy to become fixated on the bumper in front of you. Seeing is crucial: Thomas says weak observation skills lead to poor lane changes, bad turns, loss of control in slippery conditions, and failure to recover after losing control. The other danger of becoming fixated on that bumper ahead is that your mind begins to wander and too often that ends badly.

Most tailgaters are cocky enough to believe they’ll have no trouble stopping in time, but the dynamics of traffic are more complex than most of us realize. In Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), author Tom Vanderbilt explains what happened when seven cars had to stop suddenly on a Minneapolis highway: the seventh car crashed into the sixth because the third car reacted too slowly — it didn’t hit the second car, but it reduced the stopping time available to those behind it. As Vanderbilt points out, tailgaters “increase their risk not only of striking the vehicle they’re following but of being struck by the car following them.”

9. Make amends to the planet

Given that we’ve located planets in distant solar systems, mapped the human genome, and put an iPod in every pocket, the inability of automakers to come up with something better than the internal combustion engine suggests they haven’t tried that hard. They’re paying for it now, but we’re going to have to pony up more than bailout money. For environmental — and geopolitical — reasons, North Americans need a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Aside from being the simplest and fairest way to make the most egregious energy gluttons pay the most, the behavioural changes would be dramatic: we would drive less often, buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, and insist automakers build cleaner vehicles. After the last election, the nation’s punditry pronounced the idea rejected once and for all, but what the voters really balked at was Stéphane Dion. True, there was little enthusiasm for his “Green Shift,” but the hopeless Liberal leader showed he couldn’t sell cheap gas on a long weekend in the summer. If we’re lucky, a more talented politician will prove more adept because the capand-trade schemes favoured by the Obama and Harper regimes are, as Paul Wells, the country’s smartest and funniest pundit (faint praise, I realize), described them, “massively interventionist, cumbersome, harrowingly difficult to design, prone to loopholes and investor confusion, destined to take forever to implement.” While writing about this on Inkless Wells, his blog at macleans.ca, he also asked: “If you believe climate change is real and catastrophic; that human agency can inflect its course; that Canada has something to contribute to the search for a solution; and that dawdling is no longer permissible — then what better idea do you have?”

10. Renounce free parking

When I’m hunting for a place to leave my car — all the while burning fossil fuels and adding to the traffic congestion — it never occurs to me how much space cities devote to parking. But the typical driver has a spot at home, one at work (usually bigger than the cubicle he or she spends all day in), and shared spaces everywhere, including at malls, churches, and fairgrounds. Spoiled by abundant free parking, we resist paying for it, hate looking for it, and, most of all, dread tickets. As Donald Shoup, America’s parking guru, told me, “Everybody thinks parking is a personal problem, not a policy problem.” But everybody is wrong.

A professor at UCLA’s urban planning department and the author of The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup has a growing band of followers who call themselves Shoupistas even though the market-oriented policies he advocates could best be summed up by the battle cry, “Charge whatever the traffic will bear.” Shoup, who rides a bike two miles to campus, is convinced that free parking is unattractive, expensive (subsidizing it costs the U.S. economy more than Medicare), and encourages driving: “Parking is the single biggest land use in almost any city, and almost everybody has ignored it.” California adopted Shoup’s proposal that companies that pay for employees’ parking had to offer the cash equivalent to non-parkers. After the law passed, 13 per cent of workers took the money (most switched to car pools or public transit, though a few started cycling or walking). The harm free parking does feeds on itself: all that land dedicated to parking, which often sits empty for much of the day, increases sprawl, and that sprawl makes alternatives such as public transit and walking less feasible, which forces more people into cars, which increases the need for more parking. And so on.

11. Embrace road pricing

Although all drivers can figure out what they pay for gas, insurance, and other car-related expenses, and some may even put a value on their time, few ever think about the public cost of traffic. London has the world’s most famous congestion charge, a measure introduced by “Red Ken” Livingstone, the now former mayor. Although the aims of road pricing are largely progressive, it still remains a fundamentally market driven policy. Such policies were actually debated, decades ago, by the likes of Alan Walters, who went on to be chief economic advisor to Margaret Thatcher. These thinkers realized that when we travel a crowded road, we don’t consider the price we impose on others when we slow them down. By paying tolls, we face the true cost of our decision, reducing demand and increasing the efficiency of the roads. This makes far more sense than simply building more roads, which just attracts more traffic anyway.

12. Spread the gospel (and practice what we preach)

Although we should push the carmakers — and our politicians, who now own a chunk of them — to come up with more fuel-efficient products, even the cleanest vehicles will do nothing to fix sprawl. So we need to convince developers, politicians, and urban planners that we actually want to live in mixed-use walkable neighbourhoods. We can do that by moving to such places. And we must encourage walking, cycling, public transit, and car sharing, for ourselves and for others. Our credo should be: driving, if necessary, but not necessarily driving.

In cities around the globe, World Carfree Day is a nice little break from the everyday.

Every year on September 22, dozens of large cities shut down some of their main streets to traffic, leaving them open to pedestrians and cyclists for parties, rallies, mass bike rides, and the sort of leisurely ambling rarely seen on the crowded sidewalks of places like Manhattan and Beijing.

Illustration by Sylvia Nickerson

The idea of car-free days has been around since the oil crisis of the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1999 that it was formally organized internationally on a specific date. The number of participating cities has grown steadily every year since then: in Prague last year, 4,000 people joined the largest group bike ride the city has ever seen. In Taipei, a swirling mass of 30,000 cyclists — city officials were expecting 3,000 — took a 16-kilometre route through the normally autothronged city core.

From Kiev, Ukraine, to Florianopolis, Brazil to Sofia, Bulgaria, they left their cars at home and revelled in the freedom of a city that was, for a day, pedestrian-friendly. “It’s a unique experience for people in car-heavy cities to get a taste of life without it for a day,” says Michael Roschlau, president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Transit Association. But it’s a unique experience, he says, “although it’s simply unrealistic in today’s world, given today’s mobility needs,” to imagine a modern car-free city.

But in a few places around the world — the list of locations is growing slowly but surely — the populace woke up on World Carfree Day, dressed, and ate their breakfast, then got on their bicycles, put on their shoes, or pulled out their bus pass, and made their way to work on streets mostly free of automobiles. Just like any other day.

These car-free and car-limited communities are scattered around the world, blueprints for the steps that larger cities can take to reduce their reliance on the automobile. These places show that it actually is possible to overcome our history and our habits and start to move away from the auto-centric planning that defines all of North America.

J.H. Crawford, an American author and urban planner who works in both the U.S. and the Netherlands, may be the world’s foremost advocate for cities without cars.

Click to see larger version. Illustration by Sylvia Nickerson

Crawford has spent more than 15 years touring carfree communities across the world. He maintains the web’s largest database of car-free information (carfree. com), as well as publishing a quarterly newsletter (The Carfree Times). He lectures on how humans can cut our ties to the car and has written two books on the subject: his first, Carfree Cities, was an examination of the world’s car-free areas and what we can learn from them. His second, released in April 2009, is the Carfree Design Manual, a step-by-step guide to designing a new city, from the ground up, to be completely free of cars.

While many urban planners see a completely car-free city as a nice ideological goal to shoot for while we try to reduce the number of cars on our streets, Crawford believes it must happen in the next several decades. “Nothing is going to be easy about this,” he says of losing our urban addiction to cars. “We’re going to be beaten by the stick pretty hard. But there are some fairly juicy carrots out ahead.”

The crux of the problem, planners agree, is that our cities are stuck between past and future. The vast majority of the urban planning done in North America was done with the car as its foremost beneficiary, and that legacy is hard to escape. Cities here were built too late to take advantage of the small streets and convoluted layout that keeps cars out of the heart of many of the world’s medieval cities and too early to benefit from the emphasis on public transit, environmental sustainability, and livability that has characterized urban planning in the last few decades.

It’s why most urban planners and thinkers scoff at the idea of turning Canadian cities like Toronto or Montreal into car-free utopias.

“Trying to eliminate cars from whole zones is tied either very tightly to medieval city centres or cities that will be purposefully designed or redeveloped in the future,” says Jim Mars, professor emeritus of urban planning at Ryerson University. “We can’t solve the problem. What we can and must do are all the small- and medium-sized things we can do to make it better.”

This problem doesn’t exist everywhere. There are cities — perhaps the most famous example being Venice — where automobiles are an afterthought and other forms of transportation, from canal to bicycle to subway and light rail transit, account for, in some cases, more than half of all trips taken by the populace.

Most of these cities are in Europe, and most were built in the medieval period. It’s a simple history lesson: cities that were not designed explicitly for cars find it a lot easier to do without them.

“Medieval urban forms are superior to everything that came before or has come since,” writes Crawford in the introduction to his new book. “Once the needs of automobiles can be neglected, a remarkable degree of design freedom arises.”

Medieval designs have provided some of the most familiar blueprints of car-free cities. The largest car-free community in the world, Fès El Bali in Morocco, is home to approximately 156,000 people, and you simply can’t use a car inside it. They haven’t been prohibited, but the city is walled off from the outside and the streets are so narrow that it is impossible to navigate through the city in a car of any size. It’s a common sight to see trucks drive up to the gated city entrance, load their wares into handcarts, and have someone push the goods into the city on foot. Crawford points out that only a special slim ambulance is able to negotiate the streets in a medical emergency.

“If you go through the medinas of North Africa,” he says, “what you will find is that most of them have always been car-free, because the streets just aren’t wide enough. That’s also what happened in Venice.

“In the places where you find fully intact medieval cities, you find few or no cars at all.”

On a database that Crawford keeps of the world’s carfree areas, nearly all of the largest ones are located in Europe or Africa, and most are the medieval core in cities where it would be, as Crawford says, “nearly impossible” to get around by car.

“You can wend your way through a broad swath that extends from Portugal all the way to Italy, where you’ll find medieval city centres that are, if not car-free, then very car-moderated,” he says.

The vast majority of the rest of the developed world, however, is already built for cars, so other solutions are needed. There are plenty of techniques that cities large and small have used to curb car use, with an eye toward eliminating them altogether in the future.

Vauban, a small community of about 5,000 people located in Freiburg, Germany, a city noted for ecoawareness, is one of those places where last year’s World Carfree Day was just another Monday.

It’s also an example of the two approaches to converting people to car-free living that Crawford calls the “carrots and sticks.”

There are, he says, two ways to get large numbers of people in a city to change their daily habits: you can offer them rewards for doing so, or you can punish them if they don’t. Vauban uses both. Upon moving there, a new resident is offered two things: a parking space and a transit pass. The transit pass is free and all-inclusive, provided the newcomer doesn’t plan to own a car. The parking space costs roughly $29,000 and is available only in a garage on the edge of their residential neighbourhood. Only about 40 percent of residents have bothered to buy one.

The end result is that Vauban had only 150 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants in 2006. Canada, in comparison, had 559 cars for every 1,000 citizens as of a 2002 count.

“Essentially, they’re pricing,” says Mars. “The cost of having a car is the real cost of a parking space and of not having a bus pass.”

Road pricing — charging people a fee for having their cars on the road — is not only a rare point that a realist like Mars and an idealist like Crawford agree on, it’s one of the most rapidly advancing policy areas.

The idea isn’t such a new one: Singapore has had road tolls for drivers since the 1970s, Norway began charging them in 1986, and several other cities also collect them — but it was the London model that has spurred action in car-dominated North America.

In England’s capital, motorists entering the city centre must pay £8 (about $14) to the city. They can do it in advance for the entire year, either at the time (via convenience store or text message) or later (by phone or on the internet). A network of cameras records their licence plate as they enter, and there are stiff fines for those who forget to pay.

“The effects of London were fantastic,” says Crawford, noting research that shows the toll cut traffic by roughly 20 percent.

“You had a huge fight on your hands to implement it — and now you would have a huge fight on your hands, from the very same people who opposed it, if you tried to take it out.” A poll before implementation found that 40 percent of Londoners supported the idea in 2002. In 2006, that figure had risen to 60 percent, and plans were in place to enlarge the zone (which was done last February).

London was already equipped with an extensive public camera network, something most cities lack, but GPS technology is making road toll systems more attractive to congested municipalities by the day.

San Francisco is putting together a plan to present to city council this spring that would install a system to charge motorists for driving on major artery streets. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was close to instituting a similar plan in his city that would charge drivers US$8 to enter the most congested area of Manhattan. Lack of support killed it before it could get to the floor of the New York State Legislature last year. Toronto mayor David Miller declared last year he wanted to look at the idea, before Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and his transportation minister voiced a categorical “no.” Miller later said he would only back a regional plan for highways, not a toll fee for entering his city’s downtown core. But the idea is gathering steam.

“Driving on streets in most cases is free,” says Roschlau, “and if something is free, the demand will often outpace the supply.

“If you ask someone what they consider before deciding to drive their car downtown, their answer will most often be Ôparking,’ because that has a real cost attached to it. If people view the cost of driving somewhere similar to the way they take into account the cost of parking, more cars get left at home.”

A large part of convincing people to leave their cars at home is convincing them to live their lives closer to home. The concept of the sustainable neighbourhood — with nearly everything you need within walking or biking distance — is the goal of many plans for car-free municipalities.

“Whenever we approve a mixed-use development that has employment and housing as well as shopping, or has government services mixed in, we’re taking a step in that direction,” says Mars. Crawford has laid out a list of 16 functions that urban planners agree are necessary to create a sustainable district (see sidebar, page 19). The problem right now is: how do we get there from here? We can provide office and retail space in the bottom of high-rises and the middle of subdivisions, but we can’t force businesses to open and stay open if they’re not turning a profit. We can try to provide a walk-in clinic in every neighbourhood, but people are still going to travel to their preferred doctor or dentist. We can’t make employers locate their offices near their employees, and that would be impossible to coordinate anyway. In short, we can build it, but they’re not necessarily going to come. “It’s impossible to make the market do what you want,” says Mars. “That’s why I’m always skeptical about sustainable developments.

“I would rather see, particularly when we’re dealing with infrastructure renewal, that a lot of that money needs to go toward transit.” But even Roschlau, head of the Canadian Urban Transit Association, knows that more transit lines won’t solve everything.

“They’re simply the backbone,” he says, pointing to the most recent census data that showed a smaller proportion of Canadians (72.3 percent, down from 73.8 percent in 2001) were driving to work, and instead more were relying on public transit, biking, and carpooling. “The numbers show that people are looking for alternatives, whether it is better access to transit, more bike lanes, carpool lanes, mixed-use developments, and sustainable neighbourhoods — they are looking for solutions.”

There are signs of light on the horizon. Last summer, Montreal closed down 12 blocks of Ste-Catherine Street to traffic from June until September. The city held festivals and parties in the street nearly every week and Ville-Marie borough mayor Beno”t Labonté showed little sympathy to motorists irked by the inconvenience. “If they get fed up with the traffic, they can use public transit,” he said at the press conference announcing the decision.

There are plans to build new cities in places like the United Arab Emirates and Jordan with public transit replacing all but the most necessary of vehicles and solar panels used to power the needs of light-rail transit. Crawford hopes his book will outline a method of building large cities neighbourhood by neighbourhood without the need for cars. It’s idealistic, yes, but he thinks North America is nearly ready for it.

All evidence points to a long, tough haul (after all, Roschlau called a mere 1.5 percent reduction in car commuters in the last census “groundbreaking”), but there are enough blocks available to us now to start building. “We are going to have to do something about it. This is not a casual issue. It’s not going away,” says Crawford. “But it took us a hundred years to get here, and it’s probably going to take us another hundred years to get out.”

Illustration by Peter Mitchell

He’s in the CAW driver’s seat — but where’s he going?

When Ken Lewenza became president of the Canadian Auto Workers last September, he had no idea it would soon be begging for government loans — $14 billion in the U.S. and $3.4 billion in Canada — to stay afloat. Lewenza spoke with This in January about the challenges the CAW faces in these most uncertain times.

This: How did the North American automobile industry end up in the current crisis?

Lewenza: Looking at the market share decline [in recent] years, it was predictable that the market would continue to drop. Foreign vehicles were coming in at unprecedented rates. In the last decade, we’ve lost 15 to 20 percent market share. Thirty percent of the vehicles are [manufactured] offshore. That doesn’t include the transplants [cars made by foreign companies that are assembled in North America]. So I think public policy initiatives, of which deregulation was a big part, systematically destroyed the auto industry. The United States and Canada are open markets. Our biggest threats are Japan and Korea today and China and India tomorrow. They have closed markets. Less than one percent of the vehicles we build in North America go into Korea. Less than five percent go into Japan…because we don’t have access to those markets.

This: Why did the Big Three not foresee the current predicament?

Lewenza: GM and Ford in particular were making significant investments offshore. Ford is huge in Europe. GM is huge in China. They lost focus on their home base. They thought they could make up lost market share by concentrating their investments outside North America. But it didn’t work out.

This: When the federal and Ontario governments say all stakeholders should contribute to solving the crisis, do you think that message is aimed at the CAW?

Lewenza: Absolutely. They used the term “stakeholders,” but in every single interview they referred to the CAW and our collective bargaining.

This: Are you willing to make concessions?

Lewenza: We have already agreed to a three-year wage freeze and given up some of our vacation time. That’s a total over three years of anywhere between $750 million and $900 million out of our members’ pockets. Today we could work for literally nothing and it wouldn’t make a difference [toward solving the crisis]. The total labour rate for a fully assembled vehicle is just seven percent of the cost.

This: But do you agree the politicians need you to make concessions in part because of optics?

Lewenza: Yes. And “optics” is the right word to use.

This: So are concessions going to be made?

Lewenza: It’s hard to predict. In the U.S. they dictated as part of getting the loans that the UAW would roll back their total compensation rates comparable to the transplants in the U.S.

This: Aren’t some of the transplants paying $14 or $15 an hour in the southern U.S.?

Lewenza: They are. And they don’t have to pay for about a million retirees that the Detroit Three have to fund.

This: But when the public sees what a CAW worker gets paid —

Lewenza: Which, with all the benefits and deductions, the total cost of employing a manufacturing worker in Canada comes to be about 68 bucks an hour —

This: — they think that’s a lot and there’s room for concessions.

Lewenza: If [concessions] come, I think they will be in the form of improvements in productivity. New technology. More robotics. It will mean fewer jobs for the CAW, but we won’t oppose the changes.

This: What’s your forecast for the future?

Lewenza: About five years ago the total U.S. vehicle market was about 17 million vehicles in the U.S., which is where most of the cars we make end up. In calendar year 2008 it will be less than 12 million units. I don’t see the numbers increasing in the next few years. Bestcase scenario is over the next five years maybe as high as 14.5 million. So there are going to be casualties and the changes are permanent. The plants that we lose today are not coming back.

This: If you went to a high school career day what would you say to someone who asked if they should become an assembly-line autoworker?

Lewenza: I’d tell them to avoid the auto industry. [Years ago] I told them it was hard work, boring work, but you could earn a good living and support your family. I wouldn’t say that now.