There’s nothing worse than being deeply annoyed by people who are, ostensibly, on your side of an issue.
Here’s where I stand on private car ownership: there should be less of it.
Our society, our entire built environment, would be better off if we had fewer private vehicles.
A society of mass car ownership provides individuals with a great deal of personal freedom – it’s one of the easiest ways to get around that’s ever been devised. You can zip here and there, at any time of the day or night, in air conditioned or seat-heated comfort.
But the side effects are dire. Vast swathes of land are covered with parking lots that are only used for a fraction of the time. Digging out multi-level parking garages makes condos and office buildings much more expensive. Crashes kill and injure people, cars pollute in multiple ways, rush hour is soul-deadening for commuters – you probably know all this stuff.
So in principle, I’m allied with all the folks who say we need fewer cars, more transit, more bike lanes, more walkable communities.
But lately, you’re seeing pundits (and random social media commenters; there’s little difference anymore) saying more aggressive things. Things like, we should ban private car ownership, or ban the sale of any new private cars, or jack up taxes on private cars to some stratospheric level to discourage it.
This is not, to put it kindly, a well-thought-out position.
To put it a little more bluntly, it’s stupid.
Here’s the problem with that – we built the world around cars. Then people built their lives around that world.
Let’s start with the fact that rural areas and small towns exist, and that making car ownership non-viable for people there in the short term would be like going back to the 19th century.
Beyond that, vast swathes of our modern cities and suburbs were built with cars in mind. You can’t un-build that, in favour of a transit-friendly future, overnight.
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Go right now and take a look at an aerial view photo of one of your nearby suburban single-family communities. Whether it’s Richmond or Surrey, Langley or Pitt Meadows, there are big areas that are just acre after acre of housing. You might be able to walk or bike to a school, maybe a corner store. But to work? Even to the nearest major route with a bus stop?
Nope!
We need cars. For now.
Even in my idealized future, where we have cheap, frequent, all-hours bus service, multiple rapid transit rail lines, and bike lanes as far as the eye can see, we’re still going to have to have some private vehicles. At the very least, there are going to be folks with peculiar schedules, long commutes, and careers ranging from contractors to veterinarians to farmers who need to move between urban and rural areas.
If we could cut the average number of cars per household down by half, we’d be doing an amazing job. But even that will be the work of decades. Because we need to literally rebuild our cities from the ground up to make that work for people.