(Montreal) Reducing dependence on the automobile and its ever-increasing place in our society represents a significant challenge for many municipalities, especially in a context where public transportation networks are announcing cutbacks. But solutions exist, even for small rural communities.
More and more cities in Quebec are succeeding in demonstrating that car sharing, public transportation and cycling are not only solutions that apply to large metropolises.
For example, Chelsea, Cantley, La Pêche and Val-des-Monts, in Outaouais, recently launched their own car-sharing project.
Assumption, for its part, has focused on several initiatives to reduce dependence on solo driving.
The municipality located in the Lanaudière region allows citizens to borrow, on an ad hoc basis, one of the electric vehicles belonging to the City, thanks to a car-sharing platform called Sauvér, present in dozens of municipalities in Quebec .
More broadly, the City has “really thought about optimizing the vehicle fleet,” explained Blandine Sébileau, transport electrification project manager for Équiterre, to participants of the National Climate Action Forum which had held in Montreal on Tuesday.
“Assomption tries to ensure that travel is optimized, to think about reducing the number of vehicles, the use of smaller vehicles, therefore less energy-consuming,” explained Blandine Sébileau.
Assomption also made electric scooters available to certain municipal employees.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
“When the weather permits, employees use electric scooters for certain trips, for example to carry out inspections,” said M.me Sebileau.
According to the City’s website, the use of a scooter “as a replacement for a thermal engine vehicle, an F-150 style van, very frequently used by municipalities for transporting employees within the territory, allows to save 12 tonnes of GHGs”.
Bike, work, sleep
The president of the National Regroupment of Regional Environmental Councils of Quebec (RNCREQ), who also participated in the National Climate Action Forum, reported on the success of Vélovolt, funded by the Quebec government.
“The project is quite simple. We lend fleets of electrically assisted bicycles to companies for two to four weeks so that employees can use them to go to work,” summarized André Lavoie.
“The modal transfer rate is impressive. There are families who got rid of their second or third car after trying it,” he said.
The president of the RNCREQ explained that the Société de transport de Trois-Rivières, which tested it, “installed a bicycle shelter with refills inside, but the bicycles were so popular that the year ‘Afterwards, they had to add another shelter with refills.’
The use of e-bikes by a small number of employees eventually created a ripple effect among other employees, and some “decided to buy e-bikes”.
But sometimes you have to cheat a little to promote the ripple effect, explained André Lavoie.
“If you’re a business that decides to install bike racks and no one is using them, at first, put bikes in them,” he advised.
“The world will say: “ah!, maybe I can come by bike”, and they will use it. We did it and I tell you it works! “, he explained.
Share corporate vehicles
For its part, the City of Laval is trying to promote car sharing by offering subsidies for users of this type of transportation and it also plans to share municipal vehicles with its citizens.
“This year we will begin this principle of sharing corporate vehicles with citizens. You know, after work hours, the vehicle is there, it’s parked and it’s of no use. So if we can save fellow citizens from buying a vehicle, so much the better,” argued municipal councilor Alexandre Warnet.
He explained that the City “is also working to develop the culture of cycling among children and adults” and that it has therefore created “parks or gardens for bicycle circulation”.
The objective is to familiarize citizens with the rules of road traffic, without car traffic. These parks are made up of real, reduced-size streets which include mandatory stops, pedestrian crossings and one-way lanes.
“We are trying new approaches to develop the culture of active mobility,” explained the municipal councilor.
Changing the mobility paradigm
For citizens to leave their cars for active mobility, “it takes infrastructure”, such as bicycle racks in businesses, parking spaces reserved for carpooling or even simply, sidewalks on the side of the streets, added André The way.
“We are starting to see sidewalks again in the villages. Those who work on development know that neighborhoods have been developed without sidewalks for years,” said Mr. Lavoie.
Jérôme Laviolette, researcher at McGill University, reminded participants of the National Climate Action Forum of a certain number of initiatives that make it possible to reduce dependence on solo driving. It remains “difficult to change the paradigm of personal mobility”, because Quebec is caught in a transport and land use planning system mainly centered on the automobile, he nevertheless argued.
“It is a system which has been constructed, over decades and political decisions, in such a way as to favor the automobile to the detriment of these alternatives” and it is “a system which has ensured the dominance of the automobile, which made it socially indispensable,” according to him.
The numbers seem to prove him right. In the 2023-2033 Infrastructure Plan, Quebec plans investments of 31.5 billion in the road network, compared to 13.8 billion for public transport.
So 70% of investments go to the road network, compared to 30% for public transport.
This automobile-centric transportation system, the researcher said, “wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there weren’t a bunch of negative externalities on the environment, public health and society.”
These are externalities, he clarified, “because in fact, they are costs which are not assumed by the user, but well distributed in society”.
Canadians want more sustainable mobility
A few weeks ago, Earth Day published an Ipsos survey on the habits of Canadians when traveling between home and work.
According to this survey, 76% of respondents who have a job would prefer to walk or cycle to work if they had the opportunity. The same percentage of respondents would also like to have more sustainable mobility options for traveling between home and work.