1953 was a big year.
I was six years old, almost seven and my father bought me my first guitar. It was not to be the presage of new musical talent which disappointed my father as he thought being a Doucet meant being musical. But something that occurred right across the street would root in my memory and be laden with prescience.
The mother hung a banner across the laneway. It was multicoloured and had balloons flying from it and said ‘WELCOME HOME, DAD.’ I had never seen anything quite like it and could not figure out what it meant. My Dad came home every night and nobody ever made any fuss. That evening a brand new, powder blue, Chevrolet parked in the laneway under the banner. It’s girth and general disposition were most impressive. Something important had happened on our street.
My father didn’t own a car. Dad walked to work and my mother took the streetcar to go shopping. A few months later, my father bought his own car.
When I think back to that banner and the powder blue Chevrolet, it marks for me the beginning of the oil age. Six years later, Ottawa would dismantle one of the largest, oldest and greenest city streetcar systems in the nation. (Ottawa had over 300 kilometers of track, built its own streetcars and powered them with hydro electric power from the Chaudiere Falls.) A year later, in 1960, the city’s principal inter-city rail line would also be torn up and replaced by an expressway. A few years later the city’s central train station itself would be dismantled.
In just seven years, the city shifted from a pedestrian-streetcar dominated neighbourhoods to one that was dependent on the single occupant vehicle. The new Ottawa would be grouped around the expressway, malls and parking lots. Car dependency would increase with each passing year. Nothing has changed. More people, per capita, drive today than ride public transit than did in 1953. This is true across North America.
What in 1953 was considered so special that a wife would welcome the family’s new car home with a banner, has become so omnipresent it is poisoning the planetary habitat for humans. Cars has changed the landscape of continents, the lifestyles and values of nations.
The best measure of the importance of people’s values whether familial or national is what people are prepared to sacrifice to maintain their values. Death in war is often referred to as the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ because it is made in the name of overarching values like ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’.
It’s clear that people are also willing to sacrifice a great deal to drive their cars, starting with their health – asthma, obesity, cancers. To be specific, asthma is the number one reason we admit children to Ottawa city hospitals. Mothers are 15 to 20 per cent more likely to deliver prematurely or have low birth weights’ who live near expressways’ (from a study by Quebec’s Institute of Public Health); traffic is the number one killer of primary school age children; tail pipe emissions are the largest, single contributor to greenhouse gases. I could go on but you get my drift.
City Councils are at ground zero for climate change. Eighty per cent of the greenhouse gases are generated by cities. And it’s clear the electorate values their mobility with cars above the threat of climate change, health or even the cost of running the city. Road construction is entirely subsidized from general taxes, there are zero user charges.
Consider these climate heating decisions by Ottawa city council. We just voted to send a fresh water city pipe 28 kilometers out into the country so that a rural township can ‘grow’ at twice its present rate. The folks who already live there need clean water because the local ground water has been contaminated by farm pesticide runoff.
Out of 23 councillors, there were only five who voted against it. In 2007, Ottawa city council will set a new record for road building – over 200 kilometers. It has approved another road bridge for a cool $50 million. Expansion of public transit has been deferred. Mr. Baird, the Environment Minister and same guy who helped kill light rail, is promising a federal share for another road project on the city’s eastern rural fringes. This one is worth $104 million. It will allow the 13,000 people from Rockland to drive to Ottawa faster, at least until they hit the current east-end road gridlock, which will require even more money to “solve”.
Climate change sprawl is nourished by all levels of government. West of Ottawa, the province is busy building a new divided highway from distant towns like Carleton Place, (Cost estimate in 2006 $106 million for 16,000 commuters) that will make commuting even longer distances easier than ever. Nothing new here. This has been going on since 1953 and is typical of any other city you care to mention.
Federally, the government has 3.2 billion dollars to purchase and service four planes to ferry tanks to and from Afghanistan, a 12 billion dollar surplus, but no national public transit program (the only G-8 country as such). Climate change ain’t black magic folks. The sprawl landscape, the number of vehicles on the roads, the hotter summers, warmer winters, declining water reserves, it’s coming from ‘we the people’, from our values and from the governments we elect.
Stop complaining. Hang out the banners.
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