The word freedom has been hijacked by some extreme folk in Canada and the United States lately. Folks who stand on over-passes and wave Canadian flags at you, but when you talk to them, their values don’t represent my Canada, nor any definition of freedom that I can agree with.

True freedom is the freedom to make choices

No choices? No freedom. In local government, the choices we have the most influence over are:

• Transportation

• Housing

Let’s talk about transportation choices

Currently, our municipalities primarily offer one viable transportation choice: get to places by car. I think it’s essential to increase and improve our transportation choices with viable alternatives to driving. Not for every trip. But if some of us choose other ways to get around some of the time, it’s a virtuous circle where traffic, walkability, air quality, and lots more - all improve for all of us—including when we drive.

Here’s a way of looking at the trade-offs between speed of travel vs. how close your destinations are. ‘Access’ is a way to think about how easy or hard it is to get to a destination. This concept is explained in Access: “Or the wall around your life”, by Jarret Walker. Here are some key images from it about any transport system:

Increase destinations

To increase access inside a 45-minute zone, you can move more destinations into the gray area or make the gray area larger by travelling faster. Moving more destinations into the grey area in most places on the North Shore would require zoning changes to allow more commercial areas in more neighbourhoods. As the North Shore densifies, this is slowly happening in town and village centers, but it could also occur in many more places.

Improve travel time

Travelling faster is currently impossible and won’t be solved by ‘adding more roads’ because, most of the time, speed is limited by the vehicles in front of you. One way to increase travel speeds for more people is to prioritize bus-only lanes right now and rapid transit in the future. Transit allows a greater number of people to move - by using a smaller footprint than vehicles, and good transit maximizes access to desirable destinations for as many people as possible.

Travelling by car only works for a few people because cars occupy a lot of space. This is a fact of geometry. Space for roads, space for parking, following distance, access ramps —look around—once you see how much space we give to cars, you can’t unsee it. Too many people trying to travel by car results in everything being further away. This means even destinations in what was once the gray area become too ‘distant’, and we suffer from poor access sitting in traffic. Our current lack of transportation choices keeps us all stuck in traffic.

Other viable choices

I’ve increased my average speed and therefore ‘access’ travelling by bike and e-bike whenever possible, as I’m not stuck in traffic. E-bikes on the North Shore are a game changer. I can’t recommend them enough. A friend of mine moved so that she could walk to work along a safe, traffic-free, multi-use path. Not all of us can do that, but the idea is to live closer to where we work, shop and play. On the North Shore, that means altering zoning to improve access to key destinations.

Let’s get busy creating more viable transportation choices. Safer & nicer walking routes, frequent, abundant transit that improves everyone’s average speed. Safe bike routes too - creating better access for all. How can anyone disagree with that?
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