A Tangent About Cars

This is an excerpt from a longer piece about Why I’m Obsessed With My Community from cgow.ca, where I publish urbanism stuff specific to my work with the local community association.

This is Part * of a 5* part series of posts about my thoughts on the urban design of our community.

• Part 1. An Introduction
• Part 2. Oops, All Cars
• *A Tangent About Cars
• Part 3. Isolation and the Status Quo
• Part 4. Finally, Why I’m Obsessed With My Community
• Part 5. What’s Next?

Cars (and other motor vehicles), in the way we’ve designed and built cities these days, are typically the most convenient and flexible way to get places. The key here is to think about how monumental a task it has been to get out of the way of cars to have that be the case. Cars are not convenient and flexible inherently, it’s because cities have been doing socioeconomic gymnastics for decades making sure cars are king.

Look at any suburban neighborhood with an eye for how much space we set aside almost exclusively for motor vehicle use. The easiest way to see this is to look for parking lots, which are really easy to see in satellite view because they’re extremely empty the vast majority of them, and they typically reflect a lot of light, so they are nice and bright from above. But one must also consider garages, where cars live for an incredible majority of their lives (think about how many hours you drive in a typical day, the rest of that time your car is in a garage or a parking lot). Another important space taker in the suburbs is driveways, which can easily take up even more space than a garage in terms of square footage. Some residents use their driveways for hockey or basketball or chalk drawings, but a lot of the time it’s just the place your car lives or the way your car gets to the garage.

So far, I haven’t even brought up streets and roads yet. Despite the fact that in the suburbs, only a very very small percentage of road space is actually used by cars at any given moment, to venture there outside a car is considered extremely dangerous. We teach our kids to be on high alert when they have to cross even the street we live on, because at any moment a car could basically appear and take precedence as road users, despite the fact that (again) there is no sidewalk.

Now that we’ve spent a little time talking about just how much work we have done to ensure that cars have the absolute priority in transportation almost everywhere, we can talk about how frail car supremacy actually is. Cars are flexible and convenient for everyone, up to and until everyone actually tries to express this freedom all at the same time. This leads to a little discussed phenomenon called ‘traffic’, and it is the main way in which arguments for car-dependent culture fall completely flat for me.

The reason I created a website called lesscar.ca last year is that it is a unifying idea. If you’re driving to work and moving 5kph on the highway, the idea of “less car” is super appealing. If you’re downtown looking for parking and spend 15 minutes circling the block to park and get to a restaurant, in that moment what you want is less car. When you are trying to head home after a football game at Lansdowne and stuck behind a lineup of 300 cars trying to leave the parking lot, would you prefer there to be more car, the same amount of car, or less car. The choice is obvious to all of us in those cases, but the same arguments can be applied to almost every situation.

In an ideal world with no changes to the way our cities are laid out, any sane person would want to be the only one driving. Why wouldn’t you want a transportation system that is designed perfectly for your use case and your use case alone, and why can’t other people stop using it so much. I hope this is obvious, but people want to go to places that are nice, and if places are nice, people want to go there. If you want to go somewhere, other people are probably also going to want to go as well. Cars scale just terribly, they are good for going somewhere that has mainly straight or gently curving lines along the way, and they do best with a lot of open space around them.

Cars are not maneuverable, they cannot change size, shape, or direction easily, and they have to go somewhere when you’re not using them. When you are in a car, you cannot see anything except what’s right in front of you. A modern car from the driver’s perspective is mostly blind spots, with some affordances to try to help you determine whether anything is occupying that space around you. The very first time I drove an SUV, it was a rental car and I absolutely hated it. At the time, I was mainly getting around on a bike or by bus, both of which have great visibility (and in a bus, only a single person actually needs to concern themselves with what’s going on around the vehicle). I sat down in the rental, and realized that on this trip, I wasn’t going to be able to see…anything… Sure, I could see out the front windshield fairly easily, as long as I didn’t want to look up or down, but a shoulder check in a vehicle like this shows you basically nothing.

Cars are by far the most isolating form of transportation. There are an extremely small number of ways to communicate with other drivers. You have: 2 turn signals, brake lights, 4-way flashers, flicking your headlights on and off, and a couple of hand gestures if you happened to be moving at low relative speed with respect to another driver so there is any way they can see your hands, and of course the car horn.

The horn is by far the funniest to me, because it is the most ambiguous communication signal in the entirety of human existence. Imagine going on a first date except you can’t talk or gesture or signal anything, each of you just has a button to facilitate communication. It would be completely useless. Now imagine the restaurant you’re having this date at is full of couples with buttons and anytime one is used you have to also figure out if it was your date who actually pushed it. I’d watch that dating show, except no I wouldn’t because as funny as it would be for a few minutes, it would be so painful.