I drive lots of places. I’ve had my licence for decades, have countless kilometres under my belt, and see cars as liberating. I’m an “Ontario speeder” which means I generally drive around 20 over, yet have zero infractions over all my years driving. Zero accidents either, aside from a minor thing where I went a bit off-road a bit and hit a mailbox: A bee or wasp somehow crawled into my summer shoes and like most I have an irrational overreaction to such things. Only yielded a scratch on a passenger door and a country mailbox that needed to be put back in place on its stand.
Oh, I also once scratched the bumper of someone in the parking at Awenda Provincial Park as I pulled a 26-foot travel trailer and the combined turning radius wasn’t quite what I calculated.
But I also love biking. I love walking. I love transit. I love being in areas that facilitate and encourage all of the above, where I never need to think about parking or other car-related nonsense. We go on vacations to better-planned cities where everyone is walking and biking and it’s just wonderful, and then we come home to our “designed for cars” cities and just accept this as normal or the best we can do? It isn’t.
Here in Ontario, a leans-on-populism premier recently did a big dictum where he forced his way on a lower level of government and ordered them to remove some already built and paid for bike lanes. This was idiotic, and is the sort of self-destructive nonsense that make us look backwards and clownish, and thankfully the courts have thus far blocked it. A number of propagandist figures posted videos to support the premier’s overreach, lamenting the “low number of cyclists” using the bike lanes, not noticing that in their own cherry-picked video there were more cyclists seen than personal vehicle occupants.
Brian Lilley, for instance, who pretends he’s a reporter but shares a bed with Ford’s media relations manager, and is the sort of guy that just puts out completely worthless, thoughtless partisan noise.
The weird thing, and the only way this car-centric nonsense continues, is the significant percentage of the public that makes being anti-bike their personality. It’s like the obnoxious people who want to start incredibly boring spiels about how much they hate pineapple on pizza. If there is a discussion or media story about bikes, these sorts (likely heart-attack in waiting sedentary lazy-bones) always crowd the discussion, making the cliché bot-like noise. It’s bizarre.
Cities should not be designed around single-occupant vehicles. Indeed, those uses should be massively discouraged, tolled, impeded, and so on. The outcome would be better for literally everyone, even if so many can’t see how self-sabotaging the pro-car prioritization we currently endure is.
Every single-occupant vehicle is a massive failure in basic civic sense and city planning.