wyliepoon
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City planner with a dirty secret
In my day job I advocate cycling and transit use. But at heart, I love to drive
LINDA ALLEN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
November 19, 2008 at 9:44 AM EST
Almost daily, I promote smart growth - alternative transportation choices, reduced greenhouse gases, increased housing densities.
It's my business to help Canadians understand and adapt to a future that is different from the past. I am a 21st-century city planner.
Along with fellow futurists, I advocate less vehicle travel, more cycling and transit use, smaller cars and sensible energy consumption. The terms "eco-density," "high-occupancy vehicles" and "environmental footprint" are common currency.
By day I'm committed to radical societal change. But my lifestyle is suspect because I really like to drive. Mostly by myself. Pedal to the metal. Wide-open spaces. No boundaries. Zoom, zoom, zoom.
It doesn't matter whether the vehicle is turbocharged, comes with a GPS or has leather seats. It just needs to be peppy and have a tight turning radius. It's about the essential pleasure of driving, regardless of make, model or colour.
I understand the disconnect between the extravagant past and our frugal future. My lifestyle is unsustainable and I need to change my patterns. But I subtly resist the shift. Perhaps it's the curse of the baby boomers. For our generation, driving has been a lifelong love affair, one that isn't easily surrendered.
My formative years were spent cruising small-town Ontario on sweltering summer nights in my mother's flashy turquoise convertible. A few years later, I was circumnavigating North America in a Volkswagen "shagging wagon."
As a responsible adult, driving became shuttling giggling, gossiping children to preschool, dance lessons and soccer tournaments in an all-purpose passenger van. But whenever possible it also meant navigating 16-lane California highways. Zipping through European roundabouts. Pushing through Albertan blizzards. Always plotting the next trip, whether 200 or 2,000 kilometres.
Taking full control of a vehicle still remains a rite of passage. My mother grew up on a farm in Southwestern Ontario in the 1930s, learning to drive by navigating a tractor through cornfields. By age 14, Gwynethe was driving her father's Ford on county roads.
During the Second World War, she drove jeeps in the South Pacific. In the 1950s and 1960s, when some women were content with a stay-at-home lifestyle, my mother was a confident driver, never intimidated by the expressways and freeways created by North American engineers.
Even toward life's end, when she was too ill to drive, she wanted to be in a car - visiting familiar places and seeing new ones. I was her chauffeur and learned to see the world through the eyes of someone for whom driving had been freedom, not just a means to an end.
Perhaps this zest for driving is genetic. My children love to drive - both nailed their legal right to the steering wheel within days of their 16th birthdays. But not before mother and child spent many hours on sleepy Sunday mornings in vacant shopping centres and university parking lots, ever so slowly exploring the foot pedals, the signals, the turning circle.
The patterns of the last half of the 20th century have led to an extravagant consumption of land and resources. Owning a car, or maybe two or three, allowed us to spread across the countryside. Cheap oil made this possible.
Now everything has changed. Although, from a city planner's point of view, things haven't changed as much as they should.
Walking to and from my office - about an hour's hike each way - I enjoy every minute. But maybe I'm a little too smug about saving several litres of gas and burning a few extra calories.
During the summer of 2007, my husband and I plotted a drive across the United States, from Salt Lake City to Chicago, through long stretches of flatland in Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa. The geography was anything but dramatic, but there were wide-open spaces, almost-forgotten railroad whistle stops and endless horizons of corn and wheat fields.
The trip delivered much more than anticipated - Celtic music festivals, packed minor league baseball stadiums, superb local jazz and friendly brewpubs. Our SUV was reliable and great fun to drive, though a little heavy on gas. The memories will last a lifetime.
While the RV lifestyle isn't for me, there remain cross-country drives in my future. But we all need to shift our perspectives. So I will sign up for 11 months of the year as a committed walker, cyclist and transit rider. For the other month, I will clandestinely revert to a former lifestyle where fuel was cheap, driving was pure pleasure and cross-country road trips were our best education.
Linda Allen lives in Victoria.
City planner with a dirty secret
In my day job I advocate cycling and transit use. But at heart, I love to drive
LINDA ALLEN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
November 19, 2008 at 9:44 AM EST
Almost daily, I promote smart growth - alternative transportation choices, reduced greenhouse gases, increased housing densities.
It's my business to help Canadians understand and adapt to a future that is different from the past. I am a 21st-century city planner.
Along with fellow futurists, I advocate less vehicle travel, more cycling and transit use, smaller cars and sensible energy consumption. The terms "eco-density," "high-occupancy vehicles" and "environmental footprint" are common currency.
By day I'm committed to radical societal change. But my lifestyle is suspect because I really like to drive. Mostly by myself. Pedal to the metal. Wide-open spaces. No boundaries. Zoom, zoom, zoom.
It doesn't matter whether the vehicle is turbocharged, comes with a GPS or has leather seats. It just needs to be peppy and have a tight turning radius. It's about the essential pleasure of driving, regardless of make, model or colour.
I understand the disconnect between the extravagant past and our frugal future. My lifestyle is unsustainable and I need to change my patterns. But I subtly resist the shift. Perhaps it's the curse of the baby boomers. For our generation, driving has been a lifelong love affair, one that isn't easily surrendered.
My formative years were spent cruising small-town Ontario on sweltering summer nights in my mother's flashy turquoise convertible. A few years later, I was circumnavigating North America in a Volkswagen "shagging wagon."
As a responsible adult, driving became shuttling giggling, gossiping children to preschool, dance lessons and soccer tournaments in an all-purpose passenger van. But whenever possible it also meant navigating 16-lane California highways. Zipping through European roundabouts. Pushing through Albertan blizzards. Always plotting the next trip, whether 200 or 2,000 kilometres.
Taking full control of a vehicle still remains a rite of passage. My mother grew up on a farm in Southwestern Ontario in the 1930s, learning to drive by navigating a tractor through cornfields. By age 14, Gwynethe was driving her father's Ford on county roads.
During the Second World War, she drove jeeps in the South Pacific. In the 1950s and 1960s, when some women were content with a stay-at-home lifestyle, my mother was a confident driver, never intimidated by the expressways and freeways created by North American engineers.
Even toward life's end, when she was too ill to drive, she wanted to be in a car - visiting familiar places and seeing new ones. I was her chauffeur and learned to see the world through the eyes of someone for whom driving had been freedom, not just a means to an end.
Perhaps this zest for driving is genetic. My children love to drive - both nailed their legal right to the steering wheel within days of their 16th birthdays. But not before mother and child spent many hours on sleepy Sunday mornings in vacant shopping centres and university parking lots, ever so slowly exploring the foot pedals, the signals, the turning circle.
The patterns of the last half of the 20th century have led to an extravagant consumption of land and resources. Owning a car, or maybe two or three, allowed us to spread across the countryside. Cheap oil made this possible.
Now everything has changed. Although, from a city planner's point of view, things haven't changed as much as they should.
Walking to and from my office - about an hour's hike each way - I enjoy every minute. But maybe I'm a little too smug about saving several litres of gas and burning a few extra calories.
During the summer of 2007, my husband and I plotted a drive across the United States, from Salt Lake City to Chicago, through long stretches of flatland in Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa. The geography was anything but dramatic, but there were wide-open spaces, almost-forgotten railroad whistle stops and endless horizons of corn and wheat fields.
The trip delivered much more than anticipated - Celtic music festivals, packed minor league baseball stadiums, superb local jazz and friendly brewpubs. Our SUV was reliable and great fun to drive, though a little heavy on gas. The memories will last a lifetime.
While the RV lifestyle isn't for me, there remain cross-country drives in my future. But we all need to shift our perspectives. So I will sign up for 11 months of the year as a committed walker, cyclist and transit rider. For the other month, I will clandestinely revert to a former lifestyle where fuel was cheap, driving was pure pleasure and cross-country road trips were our best education.
Linda Allen lives in Victoria.