Transportation – Strong Towns Ottawa

Good transportation is the backbone of our cities. Every interaction with your city involves you moving from place to place.

Transportation involves many different modes including walking, biking, driving, public transit, and more.

Getting this step right can make or break our city.

Image from: https://www.transportchoice.org/

At some point in every trip you make you step out of whatever form of transportation you used and become a pedestrian, we should focus on making that experience as enjoyable as possible.

Making sure that every part of our transportation system is working efficiently means we all get to where
we need to go on time

By only focusing on one form of transportation (cars) we have ignored every other alternative, locking citizens into the least efficient form of transportation. This has led to congestion, slower travel times, fewer options, higher cost of traveling, more road deaths, pollution, louder cities, a huge amount of space being taken up to move and store vehicles, and many other negatives.

Having alternative options keeps our transportation system adaptable and allows people to make the choices that best suit their needs. You shouldn’t have to drive to every location you want to go. Having alternatives such as safe bike/pedestrian infrastructure or reliable public transit means you’ll have plenty of choices for every trip you make.

Image from : Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative

Cars just aren’t efficient enough and cost too much to plan a large city around

With more and more people moving to this great city we need to choose efficient ways to move them around. As you can see, cars just don’t cut it when we have to move large amounts of people. Not only do they not do the job well, they also cost the city the most to plan around with the high cost of roads, parking, sprawl, etc… By planning for cars we’re planning for an inefficient and crumbling city with not enough money generated to cover our costs. This isn’t sustainable now, nor will it ever be in the future. We will never be able to build enough lanes to get us out of the congestion that cars brought to us. And even if we could, we would destroy all the places worth going to to make the highway wide enough.

But what about…

If we switch to electric cars, that will solve our car problems right?

Electric cars are still cars at the end of the day. While they might be more efficient with energy they still take up large amounts of space, require tons of infrastructure upkeep in the form of roads to run, are extremely expensive, cause congestion, do not carry many people, and all the other issues that come with cars. We have been making our cars more efficient since the moment we created cars, and it has never solved any of the underlying issues of car dependency. Electric cars solve none of these underlying issues

My/my children’s hockey practice, I can’t bike to it!

Nor should you have to, providing alternative options doesn’t mean that you are restricted to these options, quite the opposite, it means you can now choose the best form of transportation for your circumstance. Just like how you might not want to bike to hockey practice you might not want to take a car to go to your local park, or to get a coffee with a friend, or to go out drinking at a bar on the weekend.

People with disabilities, they can’t bike/walk everywhere!

Making our cities more accessible for alternative forms of transportation makes life easier for anyone with a disability. Most of the time now they cannot rely on our failing public transportation system, which means they have to either pay high prices for a personal driver, rely on an even worse ParaTranspo system, or have someone in their own lives drive them around. If they had a good public transit system they’d have much more freedom to get themselves to where they need to go without relying on people in their lives.

How unreliable public transportation is?

With our current setup this is unfortunately true, but it doesn’t have to be like this! Public transportation is extremely efficient in many other cities around the world, some even having it as the preferred mode of transportation as it’s quicker, cheaper, and more reliable than getting through traffic. We need to change our priorities here to have a more balanced approach. We also need more density throughout our city to enable public transportation to work efficiently, as without density we just don’t have the people required to run frequent bus/train service that makes a good public transportation system.