Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be looking at how we have designed our community, and what effect that has on how we get around.
A community's transportation system is one of the most important bits of infrastructure. It shows who gets priority, and what a community's values are. As I've noted in previous weeks, I think the transportation system in the Comox Valley, B.C. and beyond could use a bit of a refresher. What I plan to do for the next few weeks is look into each mode of transportation present in the Comox Valley, and discuss its benefits and its shortfalls 鈥� all from my own point of view as a lower-middle class white man without disabilities 鈥� and how we can adjust our system to be more equitable to everyone.
I'm going to start with the mode of transportation everyone knows and loves: cars.
Like almost everybody else in the Comox Valley, I drive to work. I get up, go to my car, start it, let it warm up, scrape off the frost, then join the thousands of other cars heading across one of three bridges to the downtown area. I start up the hill, and get caught in the congestion. I sit, idling for a bit, until either the light changes or the cars in front of me turn right onto Cliffe Avenue. I too, turn right, avoiding the worst of the downtown traffic and head to my office, stopping at the crosswalk and dodging anyone backing out of a parking spot into the road. I then squeeze into the parking lot near the building and head in to work. Sometimes, I can actually follow some of my colleagues in to the office, since we all live within a few blocks of each other. But for work, we do each need our own car, so we drive in separately. The whole process takes anywhere between five and ten minutes, depending on traffic and things like construction.
At the end of the day, the process is reversed. We all leave at the same time, get into our cars and head down fifth street. This is where things get backed up a bit. Travelling those two blocks takes about ten minutes, thanks to the funnelling nature of the stop light, the fifth street bridge and the construction at the bottom of the hill. Once I'm through the gridlock, it's just a few minutes to home. Then I have to find a place to park near my building, competing with every other multi-car owner in my complex. Most of the time I can find one. I park the car, and then head inside at the end of the day. My partner brings the other car home, having gone through the exact same process I did, but she can park it in our designated parking spot. If I need to run out for anything in the evening, this is the car I'll take, because I know there will be a parking spot waiting for it when I get back home.
This is the routine, and it's fine as long as the price of gas doesn't go up too much higher. Right now, I can afford the car payments, insurance, gas, repairs and parking because I've structured my life around owning these machines. Courtenay has free parking, as long as I can find a spot. I can't do much about the price of gas, but my second car is electric, so that helps a bit. But if anything goes wrong with either one of them, I'm basically screwed. The average Canadian pays $1,387 per month for car ownership. That's a combination of everything from car payments and insurance to gas and even depreciation. Statistics Canada says that's about 15 per cent of household spending, and that's provided that you have a half-decent commute and don't drive more than you need to.
Then, if you need any emergency repairs, be prepared to reconfigure your finances for the next few years. A recent car-related emergency cost me over $2,000 out of pocket, and that's not anything I can sniff at.
These days, our society is designed around us getting to and from wherever we need to go by car. That means we need to spend a large chunk of our income on hauling around a full living room set, a few tons of steel, make a ton of noise and spray carcinogens around as we do it. And we're often not going further than five kilometres per trip, not moving much faster than people on a bike, or sometimes people on foot. Adding lanes to existing roads doesn't really fix the problem, as traffic tends to continue being bad even when new lanes are added. Cars also tend to slow down other forms of transportation, like buses that get stuck in traffic. Sometimes I watch the cars drive by me in intersections, and am not at all surprised to see that they're often driven by one person at a time, meaning that all of this space, money and time is going in to moving us around, one at a time. Cars can also be exclusionary, with people with disabilities at a disadvantage.
One final detractor of cars is that they are a major cause of death in Canada. In 2022, the last year statistics are available, the number of motor vehicle fatalities in Canada was 1,931, which was the second highest count in the past decade. Serious injuries were 8,851, and total injuries were 118,853. Car-related injuries and deaths are so commonplace that we use them as a comparison for other very deadly activities, but never really consider the fact that these numbers are wholly unacceptable and actually avoidable.
What cars do well is give us the chance to get out of town and into harder to reach areas. They are great for going long distances in a relatively fast and inexpensive way. But while a common argument is that cars bring freedom, the ability to go wherever you want, when you want, there are many parts of the world where other forms of transportation 鈥� whether that is by bicycle, public transit, trains or a combination of the three 鈥� actually give more freedom and choice than cars do. I'll be going over those in the coming weeks.
For now, I'll finish this. I'll also be driving home tonight in my car, by myself, trying not to hit anybody. And I'll do the same thing tomorrow.
