Roads are not Places: by R. Wayne Guy Nov 2024

 

This past summer, my wife and I headed across the continent on an epic road trip between Halifax and Yellowknife. We were hoping to find pleasurable routes through fertile valleys at the edge of the world, where the experience favours the unencumbered driver. Though we found this, through Gaspe, Ottawa Valley, Prince Edward County, and northern Alberta, our experiences through the larger centres of the GTA, Chicago, and Cleveland left a lot to be desired. Finding pleasurable driving experiences has become exceedingly rare, denigrating the once wide-open road to congestion in asphalt rivers travelling at speeds that were at times slower than that of the pedestrian. In urban areas, lives are clocked in hours on the road rather than with family or, in nature; our lives are now dictated by the metronome of the commute. Highways have evolved into hostile corridors which strangle cities in multi-lane highways, harsh, dangerous, brutal and loud. The cost of personal mobility to neighbourhoods and communities has far exceeded the benefit promised by suburbia, which now devours farmland, rivers, forests, and grasslands at an ever-accelerating rate. The automobile, conceived as a novelty of the late 19th century, through mass production and marketing, has become an ubiquitous force, and the nightmare of the 21st century, transforming our environment into a sea of pavement permeating our towns, cities and continents. The environment it has created has shackled our citizens to expense, injury and time lost in gridlocked cities. What if this were not the case?

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Let’s describe  new possibilities, in which suburbia’s cul-de-sacs are turned into common green spaces for food and recreation with the automobile  relegated to the periphery and urban parking lots which rip and weaken the urban fabric, can been mended through bylaw revisions to become  mixed-use development that create places and spaces for people to live, work, and congregate.    Let’s imagine highways giving way to linear parks connecting cities and over them, conveniently available high-speed public transit runs. Time is then returned to the individual, to spend reading, walking, biking, and living. For those who relish the experience of the pastoral drives, let those experiences also be enhanced with the narrowing of roads, the slowing of speeds, the placement of road-side attractions, services and amenities. In this transformation, wide, soulless pavement  gives way to spaces and places which have meaning and value to us. As these intentional interventions that put people and community first, trumps the perceived convenience of having machines taking you to your door, we emerge from our metal chrysalis, an interaction is shared, and a community is born. This is possible anywhere and only subject to community will. Let’s  make the getting there as worthwhile as the destination, as roads are not places.