That being said, I hate the saturation of our cities with cars.
Since their invention, they’ve been accompanied time and time again with incompetent mismanagement which bordered on the criminal. There are simply too many cars on the road. I would think that 73% of cars on the road, at any time of the day, are not being used out of necessity. Most of its use is due to sloth, pure and simple. Also, to a misguided sense of its advantages.
Without even mentioning pollution, one of the main problems is the space cars take. Compare a human taking public transportation. Compare a person walking. Compare a citizen riding a bike. A single person in a car takes more space than each of these examples and by several orders of magnitude. Think not only of the physical space occupied by a car. Think also of all the space needed around it for a minimum of safety. Next time you are in building which affords you a view on a busy street, look at the moving cars and the space between them. All around them. Immense. Waste.
And therein lies the ridiculous part of the automobile in the city. I mention the city because in the countryside, a car is a different beast and I will not get into it at this time. My hate, or rather frustration lies in the car and the city and their current ridiculous combination. The more public transportation is used, the better it gets for everyone. The more cars are used, the worse it gets for everyone. It’s that simple of an equation.
Higher use of public transport leads to a higher frequency and a wider network. More time gained. Higher use of personal cars leads to more congestion. More time lost. More sanity lost. More environmental damage. More life lost.
This simple inefficiency should make business-oriented people agree with me. I can understand businessmen and politicians in other regions being beholden to the car and its industries. However, the last car-manufacturing plant in Quebec closed shop what must be 10 years ago. And even then, it was producing a marginal vehicle. In the meantime, there are lots of manufacturers (and their money and jobs) of public transportation vehicles as well of bicycles in Quebec. Why does mentioning this feel slightly rebellious? It’s the truth after all.
Cars are a blight on our city, which would only be made fairer with stricter car circulation rules. Imagine St-Laurent permanently pedestrian. What about St-Denis? What a poster-child for the beautification that would follow the banishing of the car!
In the end, I’m not arguing for cars to be banned from the city. I desire their vastly lessened presence. In my interest. In everyone’s interest. In your interest.
9 comments:
Obviously, you haven't taken the metro during rush hour in awhile. The more people use it, the more the capacity remains the same.
Well, there is admitedly a lag. I was talking about long term.
And anyways, you obviously have not driven during rush hour in a while.
Death to the cars and people who use them!
When the shit hit the fan, and it will soon, believe me, given the amounts of Jelly fish in the seas!!!
Did you see that!?!?! The Uribachi syndrome? It takes 2 weeks to kill you, and you live these 2 weeks in excruciating pain and muscle spasm that tear your limbs apart.
Jelly Fish are every where man!
They're taking over!!!
And the worst part is, we cant even fight them! True!!! Cause when you kill them, thats when they release their sperms and eggs, and millions of jelly fish are spawned! WE'RE DONE.
Acually Napoleon, The STM has increased the frequency and number of metros twice in the past year.
And yes...driving in rush hour is much worse.
I admittedly read only part of the post in haste before commenting. I agree that, with the right infrastructure, public transport can be way more interesting, especially with no cars around. Though I fear that, without the need for car space, streets will close in like those of medieval cities. Eventually, the buildings will interconnect and we'll all become denizens of a megalopolis sized cube.
That doesn't sound so bad until you consider the multitudes of slow walkers. Imagine, your whole life being spent in hallways and waiting on escalators behind some asshole. Public areas will be like the Eaton Center during Christmas time. At least in the street, you can borrow some car space to pass someone. But not in the cube. Never in The cube. The cube!
Let me tell you about the cube. It is a one-speed place, a slow-brewing maelstrom of repressed motion where mustachioed constables wearing latex gloves stand posted at every intersection to guide human circulation. Public transport, along with cargo transport, basically becomes a three-dimensional network which, in the end, emerges as the only mode of transportation. Maintaining tunnels for cyclists or, at one point, walkers, is deemed too costly for such an assumed minority of users. And they truly are a minority due to the complacency that gently creeps into our devolving genome throughout the generations.
My point is that the car, like the bicycle, is a symbol of independence. We all need independence in one form or another. To sacrifice that for an ideal is to go against our self-destructive nature. This is why utopian societies don’t exist. And if we do manage to make such concessions to adapt to our ever-growing human pollution problem, we just might lose a bit more of our inner-violence in the process. One valuable trait is once again traded for the other. There is no improvement, only change.
By Jove! What a depressing proclamation of fatalism and resignation. It's people like you man... and people like I.
Yes, I too believe in the evilness of human nature. But whatever our views on the subject, nothing will change, nothing can change. It is too late. Its been too late for decades. Humanity's self-destruction process is well into its development phase and will not be stopped. We can only watch, and either flush our feelings of revolt down the drain along with the other stuff we produce or we can embrace our true nature and start devastating, as to accelerate the coming of the end.
Also, I may add that eating shit and dying is another plausible option.
alright....
first things first, we're not getting rid of cars any time soon, nor should we aim for that either. i think that the problems that some cities have with cars lies in their inability or unwillingness to manage their infrastructures responsibly by giving so much space to cars. Cars have changed the city life in ways that no one would have thought possible before, and that only a few visionaries had forseen.
Cities evolve like we do, and usually according to the changes in technology and most of the time because of changes in modes of transportation. Old cities were dense because people walked and needed to keep the distances short, usually settled around a well and the church where the market was. People often settled near waterways because they were efficient to move merchandise and keep trade going. People also often settled near the resources they wanted to exploit, near a forest for timber for instance. The steam machine allowed people to settle away from the resources...
I don't want to write all day, i'm basically giving you a general idea of a 20 hour class i had 2 years ago on the evolution of cities in time and space.
So when cars were invented no one imagined that they would change things so much because only rich people could buy them, usually a few people owned the majority of them... Then Mr. Ford changed it all.
So yeah, we've given so much space to cars in cities which is fine but we fail to manage that space and the relationship we have with cars (in montreal at least). But it doesn't mean that i'd love to see pedestrian streets everywhere. St-Laurent and Mont-Royal would be extremely bleak and boring if they became pedestrian streets... They tried it on Mnt-Royal in the 70's or 80's and it was a total failure.
Pedestrian streets are complex too in modern cities, they require a completely different type of management and need to be planned carefully. They usually are a link betweeen two important destinations, straight lines or funnels maybe if you will between place A and B, which we don't really have in montreal. I'd say that Rachel would be a good option, linking the 2 parks... then again, we'd need to rethink the entire street and see if this region could sustain another important commercial artery...
my 2 cents and there's much more change but my fingers are hurting and i've got real work to do.
Sale fumiste de merde.
DEATH TO THE CAR!
(and to people who drive them)
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