What a time to be in Ottawa! Just when the city dodged the bullet of the 2009 municipal budget, the city is hit with a blizzard and then a transit strike:
Sam Barr left his home near the airport at 5 a.m.
“I’ve been walking for 2½ hours to get to work now. It’s pretty tough,” Barr told CBC’s Steve Fischer after meeting him on Bank Street in the Glebe.
He was heading to the Elgin Street Diner downtown, the rendezvous point for him and his colleagues, who do electrical work.
In North America, particularly in the past 50 years, residential planning has been dominated by the concept of the suburb. A demographic that didn’t exist at the time of the first American census now represents over 50 percent of the American population in the 2000 census and is overwhelmingly where children are being reared in Canada as well - in an analysis of the 2001 Canadian census data, it was determined that 17 of the 25 fastest-growing municipalities in Canada are suburbs. Without the automobile opening up the option of living beyond the limits of mass transit, these kinds of demographics wouldn’t be possible.
As the strike lengthens and the (rather surprising) public vitriol towards labor unions grows, a city is getting to know itself by foot in a way that it hasn’t for some time. Pedestrian scale thinking is setting in and people within the region, many without cars, are being forced to re-think the way they navigate automobile-scaled environments.
This means that even moderate distance travel is now delimited by one of three things:
- Cash flow - Can I afford a cab to where I have to go and back? Can I do this every time I go out?
- Walking distance - How far is it? How long will it take to walk there?
- Network capacity - Can I get a ride from someone? Do I know someone going in that direction?
For those without the cash flow to support taxis as their primary mode of transportation, walking distance is the first option for individual movement - a position that it hasn’t enjoyed for quite some time. As I prepared myself to leave my house the other day, I also realized that I hadn’t thought about distance in those terms since I was 11 or 12. And that’s when it struck me:
This strike is to the average non-driving adult in Ottawa what life is like for any kid in the suburbs without a license. While being somewhat inconvenient, this strike also offers an opportunity to appreciate something that we might take for granted: the transportation reality of youth in an auto-scaled world.
If we find those delimiters challenging during this strike as adults, imagine the experience of a young person moving into a suburb with limited access to public transportation. Their movement is restricted exactly the way that mine is now, except compounded by parent-set boundaries, inexperience, and limited income - space is really a challenge for them.
So while it might be a bit to the left, what this transit strike really has me thinking is: how can we include the perspective of someone limited by those three things - cash flow, walking distance, and network capacity - in suburban planning practices? Not specifically for transit-strike situations like this, but overwhelmingly for kids in general?
And now, as always, some music.
December 16th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I grew up in the woods, literally. So public transportation didn’t even cross my mind til I moved to Philadelphia for a summer in college. While there, I felt liberated grabbing the trolley to get downtown. But then they had a transit strike. I never felt so stranded and totally stuck in my life. No car. Unfamiliar city. Too far to walk from my apartment to work. I had a landlord kind enough to drop me and pick me up at my internship most days since it was near her husband’s office but otherwise I had to rely on cabs and the kindness of coworkers. To get to your question, I honestly don’t know what could have helped in this no-transportation situation - a big part of it, for me, was a safety issue. So I guess I just wanted to share my limited mobility story and commiserate.
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:48 pm
This growth of the suburban is about more than urban planning. North American society has been dominated by an economic system that requires people to live in suburbs. Nobody really wants to spend 2 hours a day driving, or be located in a place far removed from services.
Unfortunately, affordable housing is limited in all city centers, including Ottawa’s. I’ve watched housing prices rise in my neighborhood, which is historically a low-rent area. Some of the more marginal residents face a very tough situation, that can only be made worse by a this difficult reminder that living downtown is desirable.
The growth of the city and decline of real earning power over the past three decades has forced city-livers to make a choice: live downtown and delay independence (having kids, moving out, buying a home), or live in the ‘burbs and spend all that time in the car. As cities get even bigger, less walkable, and more exclusive, this organization is untenable. How do we make the suburbs a place that you don’t have to leave to get services?