Getting There Together is a new column exploring alternative modes of transportation.
The car dominates most public space in North American cities. The rest is divvied between property owners. The lines between properties need to be efficient pathways to get between those properties. Streets and sidewalks are our public space—if it weren’t for getting between pieces of private real estate, public space might not even exist.
On the road and on the sidewalk, we must wake each other to a common concern. We are frogs in a boiling pot. Shall we just ride around, warming the waters until we cook ourselves? How we get around must change. Fossil fuels make a sizable contribution to greenhouse gas, but our cognitive dissonance is deafening. We protest pipelines and tar sands but are too slow to change how we warm the planet as we move about in the private car.
Besides its fuel-combustion engine, observe the elephant in the room: the ridiculous inefficiency of the car’s size. Even if you’re a climate-change denier, it has never made sense to haul 2,000 pounds of metal to move the weight of one human.
How else can we get around? One example is cycling. You can add saddlebags or a trailer for cargo; a child seat for very young folks; an electric motor for hills and heavy loads. You can put on a rain suit, rubber gloves, and shoe covers for the rain, and wool sweaters and longjohns for the winter. An e-bike goes anywhere in Victoria faster than a car and costs 20 cents a day to recharge. No parking problems. No licence. No gas. It should be a no-brainer.
What about walking? Shop local. Live closer to your work and play.
How about public transportation? A bus pass is included with our tuition. Or do we drive just to stay in private spaces, afraid of the street person with a squeegee, threatening to burst our bubbles? Go public. It’s high time for change. We’re all in this together.