Toronto needs to ditch the car: Emily for #YourCityYourWay

Toronto needs to ditch the car

Hi, I’m Emily, and I think Toronto should ditch the car and make more space for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users.

I love living in a city where I have multiple ways to get from point A to B, whether it’s strolling down the street, whizzing by on my bicycle, or letting a subway or bus take me to where I need to go. This has led to me making a personal decision not to own a car.

Many other millennials like myself are ditching the car. A survey from Zipcar shows that 55 per cent of millennials are intentionally trying to drive less, due to their concerns for the environment and affordability.

There are also benefits to Toronto for ditching the car. The city is becoming denser, with the downtown core growing at a rate of four times the rest of the city. We simply can’t afford to have more cars downtown, so we need to make sure our other methods of transportation are effective, safe, and attractive.

So how do we get more people out of their cars and onto the streets? Well, currently many people don’t feel safe in our streets. An average of over one pedestrian per week has been killed this year in Toronto, showing that we clearly have a pedestrian safety crisis on our hands. Also, anyone who has biked on a street without a protected bike lane knows how scary it can be to bike alongside a two tonne vehicle when any mistake could result in serious bodily harm to yourself.

Other cities around the world have recognized this need to prioritize space for cyclists, pedestrians, and transit. In the Netherlands, after a public safety outcry in response to pedestrian deaths, Copenhagen rearranged their city infrastructure to build protected laneways for bike, pedestrians and transit, and restricted areas of the city to cars. Now Copenhagen is known as the biking capital of the world.

But Toronto consistently shows us that it wants to prioritize the car over other forms of transportation.

Take the reimagining Yonge Street project for example. The project proposed to cut down the lanes of traffic on a section of Yonge Street in North York from six lanes to four, making room for a protected bike land and a wider sidewalk. This would revitalize that area of the city so people could enjoy shopping, dining and spending time on Yonge street. However, city councillors rejected the project because they didn’t want to inconvenience cars, instead of considering how the project would improve the lives of the tens of thousands of people living there.

We can also see this in the death of Duncan Xu, an 11 year old boy in Scarborough who was killed when he exited a pedestrian pathway onto a section of street that didn’t have a crosswalk, jaywalked across the street and was hit by a car. The city’s immediate response was to close the pedestrian walkway, inconveniencing the many people that use that path every day, but they won’t consider any project that might make the area safer for pedestrians and motorists, such as a crosswalk, because that might slow down cars.

And lastly, the King St. Pilot. A main critique of the pilot is that it makes it harder to drive in the area, because you can’t drive or park on King Street anymore. The city’s response is to offer two hours of free parking in the surrounding area. But doesn’t this defeat the purpose of the pilot, and encourage people to continue their habit of driving? Isn’t the purpose is to get people to use the streetcar now that it’s more reliable and quicker? Or to get people to bring out their bikes and see how it feels to bike on a street with limited car access?

So if you, like me, think that Toronto needs to ditch the car and make more space for pedestrians, cyclists, and pedestrians, creating a network of protected space throughout the city, let your local representatives know, so we can start building this infrastructure. And together we can build a better Toronto. Thank you.