Just because one step doesn’t get you to your destination, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take that first step.
But the first step shouldn’t be to focus on car manufacturing… again.
Bikes aren’t practical in a large number of Canadian cities, especially ones with -30 degree seasons. They aren’t practical for disabled people. They aren’t practical for families with young children.
Says who? With the appropriate infrastructure (i.e. like what you see in Montreal), you can have cycling year-round. Hell, I’m not from Montreal, and have used my bike all winter for errands.
And last summer, I was hauling two grandkids around by bike. It’s not hard.
Cars are unaffordable, and will continue to be for most people. Even families who can “afford” a car, are being hurt by their dependency.
And taxpayers all lose when cars are the focus of our transportation network.
A lack of road infrastructure also hobbles emergency services such as ambulances. It reduces the ability of trucks to deliver goods to stores. It reduces the ability for utility crews to service utilities such as power lines and sewers.
I didn’t say we should reduce our roads to dirt paths and let it all crumble. But we don’t need 18 lane highways or 2 lanes of parking on a four lane road… we are building too much to support gridlock by inducing demand.
Emergency vehicles and delivery trucks benefit by having FEWER drivers on the road. This is a fact.
There are a lot of potential issues with aggressively pursuing what you envision. At the very least you’d need to massively re-work city design and zoning, rebuild a ton of stuff. That will take time.
No, it really doesn’t. What takes time (and money) is road widening, constant road repair, figuring out what homes to demolish to make room for another road we don’t need to build.
Cities and countries that have de-prioritized cars have done so very quickly and with massive benefits to their communities. See Montreal, Paris, any city in the Netherlands, Vancouver, Columbia (the country!), etc.
It costs much less to build out cycling and public transportation, and it can be done much faster than building out infrastructure just for cars.
Shifting to electric cars will take less time, and be a net ‘win’ for the environment, generally speaking. I see no issue with the first persons response saying we should try to make evs in country.
That’s not true at all. We don’t need or want people making short trips in an EV. It still puts the community at risk (crashes), it still degrades the road surface, it contributes MORE to “tire dust”, still keeps people inactive, still keeps the poor at a disadvantage, still removed “community” from our communities. It’s just not a path forward.
I’m not saying we need an all-or-nothing solution. We need to rebalance our transportation network and make transportation more equitable and easier to access. There’s no reason why the majority of Canadians can’t walk, bike, or bus their way around town for the majority of their errands.
Europe has shown cars and pedestrians can co-exist peacefully, it’s all about planning. Major arteries can still be made for cars, while capillaries are made for foot. Residential roads can be closed off to cars except with special license eg ambulance deliveries, you DO need cars, nobody denying that.
There’s a lot of wasted space by making every house have their direct access to the road, their own parking. Sure, Canada has lots of space, but eventually we’ll run out. It’s not done with any future planning, the government is not thinking at all of how to connect cities by transit, or how cities could be accessible inside. It’s just a lack of political will, and a lack of imagination, it’s like the government has already resigned to mediocrity.
I play Cities Skylines and personally see how traffic flows better when i use a “lung” road system, with residental areas as isolated cells, rather than a grid system. We DON’T need high-throughput roads everywhere, and have to stop every 50 meters at intersections. We can do better, i’m sure we have very smart road engineers.
The problem maybe more so in the west is our cities are massive and have no density. That is the first thing to work on. Then we can have maybe decent public transit.
People living in rural areas of Canada represent less than 16% of the population (and even fewer drivers, since that number includes children).
Everyone else lives close enough to “everything” and don’t need to use their car for “everything”.
And people living in cities or the suburbs for sure don’t need a large truck.
And people in rural areas don’t need 4 lane stroads.
So where is this huge need to continue building things out for more cars?
For what it’s worth, I’m often in rural Ontario… On my non-electric bike. Unless I’m hauling a thousand pounds, it seems more than reasonable to see an ebike work quite well in those areas, too.
If you need to use a car or truck, then use a car or truck. Most people don’t for the majority of their trips.
Personally I think Toronto should focus on finishing their damn light rail expansions instead of proposing a giant new tunnel for cars under the city that will cost billions and solve nothing.
I’ve had enough discussions with people on lemmy so far, where they demand I source/cite a bunch of stuff, while they choose not to cite anything. So I’m not overly fussed, and I find your response kinda funny given how the site seems to trend.
I’m fine with people stating opinions and not sourcing stuff, but to that effect it doesn’t make all that much sense to try and pick apart an opposing opinion without citing things, if you’re wanting to get into a back and forth. If people want to ‘dream’ about some ‘Freedom city’ that’s designed with eco sustainability in mind from the ground up, that’s great, but it’d need to stay in the realm of fantasy until it’s costed/proven viable.
Like in his response he goes on about montreal’s infrastructure, but doesn’t acknowledge that Quebec receives the most in equalization payments by far as a province – the amount of money that province receives, as the second largest in the country, has often been a bone of contention from the West. Most likely if they have the funds to build a bunch of that stuff in Montreal, it’s because of these sorts of uneven supports driven by the federal parties wanting to cozy up to Quebec, moreso than it being realistically viable for a small town in northern BC/Alberta. I don’t need to “prove” that explicitly, because I’m not the one arguing Montreal as the poster child of his approach – so he/she/they should be providing that information in more detail for consideration, if wanting to convince readers that ditching cars is the way to go.
There’s an old line where extreme claims require extreme evidence/proof – so on this one, calling for abandoning cars, is a far more extreme change than saying we should switch to in-canada EV production. The onus of providing evidence is on the other poster.
Maybe I misread the other guy’s opinion, but how is not putting cars at #1 priority the same as “abandoning cars?”
Cars, public transportation, bikes, and pedestrians can coexist. But it’s not gonna happen of we keep prioritizing cars is what, I believe, OP was saying.
Saying we should have a Canadian made EV isn’t saying we should priortize cars. It’s a relatively marginal item, with low relative cost, that the guy is saying we shouldn’t do. Saying we shouldn’t do a low cost marginal thing, and should instead focus on spending huge amounts to re-orient city infrastructure so that bikes become the primary mode of transit, is a far bigger / more complex / more costly shift – and one that he argues should be made at the cost of relatively small changes in the existing industry. If you aren’t bothering to weed your garden (a low cost task to maintain your theoretical personal green space), because someone convinced you to build a trebuchet in your backyard because its a far more interesting thing to do than weed your garden, you’ve abandoned your garden. If in order to build that trebuchet, it needs to have large building materials strewn all over your yard, crushing your existing bushes, you’ve definitely given up on having that garden.
And if you get frustrated and abandon that trebuchet project part way, your garden is just toast. Prolly would’ve been better off just weeding it.
But the first step shouldn’t be to focus on car manufacturing… again.
Says who? With the appropriate infrastructure (i.e. like what you see in Montreal), you can have cycling year-round. Hell, I’m not from Montreal, and have used my bike all winter for errands.
And last summer, I was hauling two grandkids around by bike. It’s not hard.
Cars are unaffordable, and will continue to be for most people. Even families who can “afford” a car, are being hurt by their dependency.
And taxpayers all lose when cars are the focus of our transportation network.
I didn’t say we should reduce our roads to dirt paths and let it all crumble. But we don’t need 18 lane highways or 2 lanes of parking on a four lane road… we are building too much to support gridlock by inducing demand.
Emergency vehicles and delivery trucks benefit by having FEWER drivers on the road. This is a fact.
No, it really doesn’t. What takes time (and money) is road widening, constant road repair, figuring out what homes to demolish to make room for another road we don’t need to build.
Cities and countries that have de-prioritized cars have done so very quickly and with massive benefits to their communities. See Montreal, Paris, any city in the Netherlands, Vancouver, Columbia (the country!), etc.
It costs much less to build out cycling and public transportation, and it can be done much faster than building out infrastructure just for cars.
That’s not true at all. We don’t need or want people making short trips in an EV. It still puts the community at risk (crashes), it still degrades the road surface, it contributes MORE to “tire dust”, still keeps people inactive, still keeps the poor at a disadvantage, still removed “community” from our communities. It’s just not a path forward.
I’m not saying we need an all-or-nothing solution. We need to rebalance our transportation network and make transportation more equitable and easier to access. There’s no reason why the majority of Canadians can’t walk, bike, or bus their way around town for the majority of their errands.
Europe has shown cars and pedestrians can co-exist peacefully, it’s all about planning. Major arteries can still be made for cars, while capillaries are made for foot. Residential roads can be closed off to cars except with special license eg ambulance deliveries, you DO need cars, nobody denying that.
There’s a lot of wasted space by making every house have their direct access to the road, their own parking. Sure, Canada has lots of space, but eventually we’ll run out. It’s not done with any future planning, the government is not thinking at all of how to connect cities by transit, or how cities could be accessible inside. It’s just a lack of political will, and a lack of imagination, it’s like the government has already resigned to mediocrity.
I play Cities Skylines and personally see how traffic flows better when i use a “lung” road system, with residental areas as isolated cells, rather than a grid system. We DON’T need high-throughput roads everywhere, and have to stop every 50 meters at intersections. We can do better, i’m sure we have very smart road engineers.
The problem maybe more so in the west is our cities are massive and have no density. That is the first thing to work on. Then we can have maybe decent public transit.
“If you live in one of Canada’d largest cities, ebikes work great!”
Just another item on the “fuck people in smaller towns and rural Canadians, I want mine” wishlist, I see.
I don’t understand the objection.
People living in rural areas of Canada represent less than 16% of the population (and even fewer drivers, since that number includes children).
Everyone else lives close enough to “everything” and don’t need to use their car for “everything”.
And people living in cities or the suburbs for sure don’t need a large truck.
And people in rural areas don’t need 4 lane stroads.
So where is this huge need to continue building things out for more cars?
For what it’s worth, I’m often in rural Ontario… On my non-electric bike. Unless I’m hauling a thousand pounds, it seems more than reasonable to see an ebike work quite well in those areas, too.
If you need to use a car or truck, then use a car or truck. Most people don’t for the majority of their trips.
Prove it with a fully costed source / platform. Maybe push it to the green party. Run for election.
Otherwise your stated dissent against my points basically amounts to is just two assholes arguing on the internet, with both getting covered in shit.
Personally I think Toronto should focus on finishing their damn light rail expansions instead of proposing a giant new tunnel for cars under the city that will cost billions and solve nothing.
There is only one asshole here and it isn’t the person you are responding to or who is currently responding to you.
I’ve had enough discussions with people on lemmy so far, where they demand I source/cite a bunch of stuff, while they choose not to cite anything. So I’m not overly fussed, and I find your response kinda funny given how the site seems to trend.
I’m fine with people stating opinions and not sourcing stuff, but to that effect it doesn’t make all that much sense to try and pick apart an opposing opinion without citing things, if you’re wanting to get into a back and forth. If people want to ‘dream’ about some ‘Freedom city’ that’s designed with eco sustainability in mind from the ground up, that’s great, but it’d need to stay in the realm of fantasy until it’s costed/proven viable.
Like in his response he goes on about montreal’s infrastructure, but doesn’t acknowledge that Quebec receives the most in equalization payments by far as a province – the amount of money that province receives, as the second largest in the country, has often been a bone of contention from the West. Most likely if they have the funds to build a bunch of that stuff in Montreal, it’s because of these sorts of uneven supports driven by the federal parties wanting to cozy up to Quebec, moreso than it being realistically viable for a small town in northern BC/Alberta. I don’t need to “prove” that explicitly, because I’m not the one arguing Montreal as the poster child of his approach – so he/she/they should be providing that information in more detail for consideration, if wanting to convince readers that ditching cars is the way to go.
There’s an old line where extreme claims require extreme evidence/proof – so on this one, calling for abandoning cars, is a far more extreme change than saying we should switch to in-canada EV production. The onus of providing evidence is on the other poster.
Maybe I misread the other guy’s opinion, but how is not putting cars at #1 priority the same as “abandoning cars?”
Cars, public transportation, bikes, and pedestrians can coexist. But it’s not gonna happen of we keep prioritizing cars is what, I believe, OP was saying.
Saying we should have a Canadian made EV isn’t saying we should priortize cars. It’s a relatively marginal item, with low relative cost, that the guy is saying we shouldn’t do. Saying we shouldn’t do a low cost marginal thing, and should instead focus on spending huge amounts to re-orient city infrastructure so that bikes become the primary mode of transit, is a far bigger / more complex / more costly shift – and one that he argues should be made at the cost of relatively small changes in the existing industry. If you aren’t bothering to weed your garden (a low cost task to maintain your theoretical personal green space), because someone convinced you to build a trebuchet in your backyard because its a far more interesting thing to do than weed your garden, you’ve abandoned your garden. If in order to build that trebuchet, it needs to have large building materials strewn all over your yard, crushing your existing bushes, you’ve definitely given up on having that garden.
And if you get frustrated and abandon that trebuchet project part way, your garden is just toast. Prolly would’ve been better off just weeding it.
No one cares.