It's the Journey... and the Destination

What if we treated our streets as if both mattered?

A whole new world awaits us beneath our streets

It’s been a little while since I’ve written. First, because I’ve had time constraints due to some family struggles (struggles that so many of us share). Second because my rollercoaster of emotions (which you can call mental health or just life) has been getting in the way of my writing. The latest roller coaster had me questioning anew my role in this mayoral race. The gap between those consistently covered by the media and the rest of us (102 in total) has now widened so much that the participation in this race of anyone other than the top contenders feels irrelevant, which led me to question whether I should continue to write at all about my policy ideas during this campaign.

However, I finally remembered the conclusion of my last essay on the topic, which is that it’s not my job to measure myself by how much attention the world pays to me, or how many votes I get.

If A Tree Falls in the Forest, Does Anybody Hear?

My job is to speak up when, where and how I want to, and call it enough.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me proceed with another of my “platform visions”. This one is of how we get to safe, vibrant streets. This vision has driven me (pardon the pun) since I first learned about the geography of transportation as a student. It led me to run for mayor on a safe streets platform in 2018, and the possibility it offers still fills me with excitement when I imagine the city we could have if only we embraced something new.

The problem with our old approach to streets is not just that our sidewalks are too narrow. It’s not just that children can’t ride their bikes on our streets, that the process to put in a street cafe is filled with red tape and expense, or that those in wheelchairs find incredible barriers put in their way with every block. It’s that we have failed to appreciate the wonderful places of connection our streets are, places that are valuable destinations in their own right.

Up until now, our primary objective when it comes to our roads has been to move cars as quickly as possible from one place to another. Everything else is of secondary importance. But that objective, if it was ever successful, certainly isn’t any more. And, after years of traffic fatalities, it is no longer a desirable one.

It’s not desirable anymore because we now realize having speeding cars race through city streets lined with houses, businesses and people is dangerous, noisy and unpleasant for everyone who isn’t in a car. And we know the approach isn’t successful because it’s tough to get around by car in this city quickly even with the car friendly design. At election time (and in between) people ask for solutions to gridlock, but congestion is here to stay as long as we have an economically succesful city, full of places people want to go, and millions of people who want to go there.

So we have to take the impossible goal of congestion removal, and the dangerous goal of fast cars within city borders, off the table for good.

What we can introduce instead into our civic mind is the goal of free, safe movement for people. And we can adopt the concept of public streets that recognizes their value as destinations, not just travel corridors.

There is not a street in Toronto that doesn’t have something of value on either side of it. Some streets are packed with restaurants and businesses with extremely high foot traffic. Other streets are lined with houses and apartments that include children of all ages (I include my 51 year old self) whose access to the outdoors should be paramount. Designing our streets as places for the people who actually live and work there makes a better city than prioritizing the cars passing through.

Our streets also represent vast reservoirs of underused public space. They could be excavated to unearth buried rivers. They could be built on to provide housing. They could be planted with orchards full of fruit for humans, birds and bees, seeded with wildflowers and wetlands that protect water quality and stop flooding, or turned into ampitheatres, street cafes, playgrounds and flea markets.

Programs such as Pedestrian Sundays and Open Streets hint at the possibilities of our roadways, but they are so limited in time, space and location that they only show a tiny fraction of the uses we could put our roadways towards.

When we are ready to redesign our streets, we’ll come together, community by community. Our government will be transparent about the vast budget we allocate to our current road approach, and the tremendous cost savings that would come with the new one. And we’ll recognize that what we can create on our roadways can be unique and diverse according to neighbourhood needs.

We’ll treat every lane as the incredibly precious real estate that it is. We could start by making sure every street was allowed a minimum (and no maximum) of 50% space without cars. That means a two lane street would be able to have one lane at most occupied by cars. The second lane would be something else, and whether that was express transit, a wide and safe bike lane, a micro forest or a street cafe would be up to those who lived and worked along the street. A four lane street would have just two lanes for car traffic - perhaps one for parking and one for movement. The footprint of two extra lanes would allow for compact housing. And those behemoth 8 lane streets that people are used to using just for cars? The 50% minimum non-car space would still allow for 4 lanes of car traffic, and an immense potential for many other uses for the rest.

I love to imagine a city with zero cars. Yet I recognize that many people love their cars and no matter how good the alternatives were, they would still choose to drive if costs allowed us to do so (I suspect if we all paid the true cost of our cars most of us wouldn’t have one, but that’s another story). This idea of starting out giving half our road space back to people allows us to balance out the options so that it is still possible to have cars in this city. It’s just that, at long last, people will be coming first.