Well seated, alone in my car, I regularly made the daily journey between Terrebonne and Côte-des-Neiges to get to the University of Montreal. It was in the 1990s. The congestion was not as dense as it can be today. But after a year of this solitary ordeal, I had had more than enough. I then made the decision to move near the university and sell my car. This choice, others cannot make it or will never want to make it.
For decades, we have heard the choir of traffic columnists tell us every morning about traffic jams, congestion, roadworks, orange cones and other impediments to automobile mobility. Being caught in traffic, let’s face it, doesn’t make anyone happy. I even dare to believe that no one knowingly makes the choice to get into traffic; we all suffer it. But when we’re alone in our car during rush hour, we’re not only stuck in traffic, we’re are literally congestion.
We must remember that we have collectively decided to promote individual mobility. Before the automobile monopoly was pronounced, mobility was collective and active. We lived together in our cities. Certainly, you will say, that there were carts and horses, but this mobility had no direct effect on the layout of the cities. Because that’s what it’s all about here.
When we address mobility issues, we immediately discuss means of transport. Yet it is a mistake to believe that human displacement is the root of the problem. We have to move for certain reasons on a daily basis, whether for work, school, leisure, consumption and many other activities. We must leave from point A to point B. In the vast majority of cases, the determining factor in the choice of our means of transport will be the distance to be covered. I would also add the security and user-friendliness of travel.
The problem of mobility is therefore not basically a problem of means of transport, but of regional planning. Automobile freedom has completely changed our perceptions of urban planning. To promote the fluidity of traffic, the competent authorities have chosen to deconstruct our cities by changing the very vision of their development. As we lived in cities built to accommodate human mobility, we began to build cities for cars.
We must remember the speeches of those who suddenly discovered this new solitary pleasure: in their opinion, trams in cities were the main cause of congestion. Since then, we have reduced the width of the sidewalks, widened the roads and highways, extended the cities again and again, always further, and all with the same objective: to reduce automobile congestion. Results of the races: not only has the congestion never been reduced, but the latter is always denser.
If we want to be able to reverse the trend, we must review the vision we have developed for land use planning. There are several concepts that have been put forward in recent years to address this issue. We are talking about ” transit-oriented development » (TOD), which relies on the convergence of mobility and urban planning, just like the strategy of people-oriented development » (PODs). The idea of the 15-minute city is also essential by focusing on trips of a quarter of an hour for all our needs.
These are good ideas, but often their principles do not easily apply, except in cities where the planning is already conducive to proximity. It is quite different in urban areas built entirely for the automobile. A TOD in the middle of nowhere will not change the mobility of people if you have to take your car for almost all of your trips. Conversely, adding a TOD in the middle of Montreal, it’s breaking down a door that’s already wide open.
Of course, we must offer structuring public transport to those who have long journeys to make daily to go to work. Needless to say. However, fundamentally changing our mobility will not happen without ending the 100 years of solitude that allowed us to transit from our single family home to our daily destinations alone aboard our cylinder kingdom. This is where the great challenge of North American suburbs developed over the past century lies. And this is no small challenge. We will have to question everything and even invent new formulas by creating proximity in environments that have been considered improbable until now.
It took us less than a century to radically transform our cities and push humans out of the center of our concerns. Blaming those who are caught alone in their car is counterproductive. It is town planning, the real culprit of this cul-de-sac. Rebuilding our territories is imperative. But we will have to take much less time to get there than it took us to undo everything. The challenge is immense, the problem whole, but unavoidable. The arrival in force of teleworking in our lives is already leading us elsewhere, in the right direction. Are we ready to reconnect with living together after 100 years of chosen solitude?
CEO of the Institute for Urban Resilience and Innovation, professor and associate researcher, François William Croteau was mayor of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie.