We can feel the end of classes approaching. Everywhere, excitement and madness take over the parks, streets and alleys. Soon, day camps will begin. There will therefore be no respite from the lunches to prepare for the race in the morning nor from the endless questions like: “Dad, what should I wear today? I don’t have any shorts anymore. » “Your drawer is full. » “No, the one I want to put is not there. » Another routine, that is.
And with it, the same questions come back, such as those surrounding the obstacles to children’s free play in the street. For older people like me, these conversations invariably bring back nostalgic memories of a good old time when you could still block off a street to play hockey without worrying about safety concerns.
Of course, there are less suitable places to play, but children will naturally choose quiet places where they will not be disturbed and where they will have space to exert their energy. We have developed the bad habit of controlling their games to protect them against themselves, as if they had an intrinsic desire to put themselves in danger at any moment.
Behind the desire to protect our children from injuries and accidents may lie a deeper evil. More insidious too. What if the problem rather found its origin in our complicated relationship with the right to use the street and public highways? Everything is designed and supervised for the use of motorized vehicles. Those who harm their good circulation are penalized under the pretext that we want to protect them from themselves.
Recently, we had a great example of this in Sherbrooke. The gallery we learned on May 10 that the director of the city’s engineering, water and major projects department, Caroline Gravel, was exasperated by the interference of elected officials and citizens in what she considers to be the field of exclusive competence of engineers, namely road signs.
In response to many concerns about traffic calming, she responded this, and I quote: “If the engineers assessed that there was no problem… then there is no problem. not. »
Caroline Gravel is not entirely wrong. In reality, the Road Safety Code (CSR) grants engineers all the powers to authorize signaling and traffic analyses. Their intervention is therefore legitimate. The problem, however, lies in their filter for analyzing studies and recommendations.
What they use as guides are average speeds, the number of vehicles in circulation and their potential impact on automobile traffic flow. The pedestrian, the person with reduced mobility or even the cyclist are only secondary considerations in this all-car ideology which predominates among these engineers.
Which leads us to reactions of the “God syndrome” type in which humans are excluded from the equation, unless they risk injury through their own delinquent behavior or if they hinder automobile fluidity. Once again, to hear them, humans would have a natural propensity to throw themselves in front of cars.
What is most astonishing in these stories, each more absurd than the last, is the fate reserved for the creation of committees or policies aimed at improving the safety of people in public spaces. We have established programs such as Child Friendly Municipality, Senior Friendly Municipality, and others, to try to place people made vulnerable by CSR at the center of our concerns. And naturally, to achieve this, we had the ingenious idea of setting up administrative processes, permit requests, and this, very often, by entrusting all the powers of refusal to those who want to protect… the status quo.
We have experienced tragedies of children killed by motorists around schools, seniors run over while crossing an intersection too slowly for the hurrying motorist, and many others. Each time, we promise changes, but nothing happens. For what ? Because it is always the same philosophy that guides decision-makers: how to put in place measures to protect people made vulnerable by CSR from their own recklessness.
As a result, we consider the public highway as a fundamental right automatically accruing to the automobile. So don’t be surprised to see your grumpy neighbor complaining about kids playing basketball at noon on a Sunday, as if it’s a disturbing activity in town. And don’t cars that go by too fast bother you? Come on, children, go play your video games in the cellar or in your room and leave us alone with your joy of living.