There has been a rising awareness of the impact that our transportation choices are having on ourselves and the world in which we live. Over the twentieth century, we got quite a bit of an addiction to the combustion engine. The speed, power, and comfort (read: laziness) which cars promote have allowed modern civilization to become almost hopelessly addicted to this little marvel of engineering. A lot has come as a result: increased productivity, a much higher degree of personal and collective mobility, long commutes to work which keep parents away from their kids, roadrage-inducing traffic jams, air pollution which kills thousands of Canadians every year, dwindling oil supplies which might be required for more important purposes (ie: food production; everything plastic in your life; electricity), and a vast increase in climate change caused by human activities.
With this in mind, we should celebrate September 22nd for what it really means. International Car Free Day was started in France in 1998, and like a stalled SUV going downhill has been growing in momentum ever since. It’s not a difficult concept to follow. Bus, ride, walk, blade – do whatever it takes to get around without resorting to the family car. If you work in an outlying or suburban area, organize a car pool for the day, which hopefully you can make permanent.
This week will see a wealth of car free activities in the city. Following in the popularity of Toronto’s "Open Your Streets" festivals, today should see a number of street parties throughout the city. Throughout in the week, numerous trips were held in which historians and local politicians led tours of the harbour, Webster’s Falls, and the city’s historic sites. If you missed it, join Ward One Councillor Brian McHattie on Sunday for a guided walking tour of Cootes Paradise, which is Hamilton’s best urban-rural area. There’s also the monthly Critical Mass, starting at Hess and George around 5:30. Check out Transportation for Liveable Communities for more details. More importantly, you could pretend that more and more of your days are International Car Free Day.
I know what you’re thinking: my job and my family are important and I can’t change my behaviour. It really isn’t as hard as it sounds. Bogota, a city of seven million people in Columbia, has been having yearly car free days in April, during which all private automobiles are outright banned. Families there haven’t suffered as a result. Alternately, the emphasis on the city’s bike and bus network has created a more liveable and sustainable community that is accessible to everyone.
More importantly, those freedoms that we have gotten used to are highly dependent on cheap oil, which is quite obviously no longer something we can enjoy. The price of gasoline will go exponentially higher – and this is from industry experts such as Matthew Simmons, CEO of the world’s biggest energy investor Simmons & Company, and Dick Cheney, current VP of the United States and ex-CEO of evil devil's reject Haliburton. When the price of oil jumps from $66 per barrel to $200, and then jumps to $500 a barrel, people will be forced to understand what their freedoms relied upon. It wasn't ideology or economic growth which gave us "freedom", but rather finite material resources which are currently being wasted by bad planning, greed, and human apathy.
In North America, we’ve gotten so dependent on cars that we feel driving to be one of the most important rights and freedoms that we have. George Bush has gone so far as to call this lifestyle "non-negotiable", and with the recent Doctrine of Joint Nuclear Operations (Google it, it’s fun!) which specifies a pre-emptive nuclear strategy for those who disagree with America’s strategy for oil domination, we might in fact learn what it means to be truly free. This right of driving is so important that any attempts to get bad drivers off the road by screening more strictly for those who don’t in fact have the propers skills to drive – perhaps with driving tests every five years -- are routinely laughed away. Again as a cyclist who routinely uses every major street in the city, I can tell you how many Hamiltonians are still under the mistaken impression that bikes do not belong on the road and riders should remain out of "their" way by using sidewalks. Time for traffic school guys. We just accept road deaths as the cost of modern civilization, and to some extent we are correct in that assumption. At the same time, luck-of-the-draw circumstance should not overule proper urban planning.
I myself do not drive, but I can understand the dependence that it fosters. When you’re young, it’s pretty fucking sweet to be able to suddenly go where you want, when you want to make the trip. I know what that feels like. I felt the same when I was twelve and got my first bike which had gears. Suddenly the whole city belonged to me. The dual feelings of speed and mobility are very addictive. Those luxuries – let’s not kid ourselves by calling these characteristics "freedoms" – I found very stimulating, and consequently I remain an avid cyclist to this day.
The thing about youth, especially around the age when you first start driving, is that your lifestyle and recreational habits tend to solidify. By your mid-twenties, you are probably acting as you will when you are in your forties and fifties in terms of habitual behaviour. For this reason alone it is important to show kids that there are indeed alternatives to automobile transit. I can’t stress enough the importance of letting children ride their bikes, scooters, and skateboards around. Please parents, stop driving to school to pick them up. Let them take public transit or find their own ways home. Nobody wants to steal your kids, you've been conned by fear.
It’s also important to let them develop their culture around these activities. The Art Gallery of Hamilton – while doing good work otherwise – should be ashamed that it’s renovation has alienated skateboarders who used the Irving Zucker plaza by fencing off half the area and enforcing "trespassing" laws when boarders do show up. These kids got exposed to the art that was visible from the outside and which might have given them ideas about their own expressive abilities. Fascist ideas about how spaces should be utilized remove a use of public space by a community, which is the whole meaning of a downtown core. Boarders aren’t the problem with the downtown core; Hamilton’s Aerotropical desire to be the longest highway stripmall in existence is what keeps the core from achieving its potential.
We’ve gotten used to accepting roads as belonging to cars; it is time for pedestrians and human-powered vehicles to take back the streets. Keep your car at home, get some exercise, and learn what a living community really and truly can feel like. It’s nice that at this point in time, we have the freedom to choose whether to drive or not. That luxury is rapidly going to disappear over the next decade and a half.
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