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Senior Member
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/302992
Feb 13, 2008 04:30 AM
Sean Geobey
Getting ready in the morning usually means grabbing your car keys or your bus pass. Which one of these you take says a lot less about who you are than about where you are.
In Canada's big cities, only half of adults who live in the downtown core drive every day. Outside this core, four out of five adults drive every day, which is natural since fewer interesting places are within walking distance.
In the newer suburban developments in the quickest-growing parts of the 905 region, walking to the nearest grocery store can seem like an epic trip. In Canada's suburbs, where you work, play, eat and sleep might well be in totally different areas of the community. This makes a car your ticket into a full suburban life.
There is a cost to buying, fuelling and fixing cars, much like housing downtown is expensive. Those are the trade-offs we make when deciding where to live, and building higher-density housing in the city is key to pulling more cars off the road.
What is interesting then is the relationship between driving and density. Outside downtown Toronto, it does not matter whether people live in highrise apartments or bungalows, car usage seems to be about the same. While we expect people to drive more in Mississauga or Vaughan, the similar driving patterns in places like Rexdale or the Jane/Finch corridor seem surprising, yet these are the results of a recent Statistics Canada report on car use in our cities. Density alone does not keep people out of their cars.
However, poverty does. The densely populated but poorly transit-serviced "inner suburbs" between the city core and the 905-belt suburbs are where our young, our people in transition, and our new Canadians cluster. These pockets of poverty contain many people without the cars to access services in the suburbs and must instead take long transit rides to go downtown.
Because of this, the least economically secure members of our communities are saddled with very time-consuming commutes. A revived mass transit system would ease their burden, but it could create another one elsewhere in the system.
Right now, the main transit bottleneck for people in the inner suburbs is the bus stop. More frequent busing from residential areas to the subways means crowded platforms along the entire subway system. When more people get on the subways at Kipling and Kennedy, there will be longer waits for subways at every station in between.
While a transit revival is key to supporting new urban density, looking to transit alone would be short-sighted. Just transporting people from Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough to downtown is not enough to sustain our city.
A better approach would include a mix of better transit and local development. More entertainment, employment and service clusters outside the city core would improve the lives of those who live in some of our most underserved communities.
The United Kingdom has been wrestling with modern urbanization longer than anyone else, and in the past 15 years there have been a number of successful "urban village" developments. These mixed-use neighbourhoods are designed to be walkable and environmentally sustainable while still providing transit access to more densely populated urban cores. Urban villages promote neighbourhood diversity, and while they accept cars as important to a city, the approach does not view car ownership as a necessity.
Needing a car locks too many people out of a full urban life. For too many Torontonians, the city they love is far from home.
Sean Geobey is an economist and writer.