Articles tagged with: Opinion

• Build it and they will ride: Bicycle geography lessons for Toronto

  Tuesday, December 18, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  REPOSTED FROM THE CONVERSATION 
  December 17, 2018 | By Phillip Mackintosh

  To paraphrase urbanist James Howard Kunstler, Toronto city council is sleepwalking into the future. While 21st century Toronto’s shift to multi-modal transportation (public transit, automobiles, feet, bicycles, motor cycles, scooters, and skateboards, among others) is already under way, council stubbornly resists its formal implementation.

  We see the catastrophic results of city council’s inaction — negligence — every week. On Nov. 1, 2018, there were 16 vehicle/pedestrian collisions. This echoed another terrible 24-hour period in October of 2016, when 18 people were struck by motor vehicles. And still another in 2015, with 15 collisions in one day.

  Fatalities have risen from an average of 47 per year (2005-12) to 64 per year (2013-16), a consequence of the increase in people on automobilized streets. So far in 2018, 38 cyclists and pedestrians have died on Toronto streets.

  Part of the problem is that too many city councillors have repeatedly voted against bicyclists, bike lanes and multi-modality in general. One infamous and intractable (and now turfed) councillor said, “I do not believe bicycles should be on roads at all.” How odd. This is not what city councillors thought a century ago.

  

  An early attempt to envision multimodality, by the Toronto Civic Guild (Civic Guild Bulletin, Vol. 1 (June 1912): 10). Toronto Civic Guild, Author provided

  The ‘bicycle-friendly’ council

  At the beginning of the 20th century, Toronto city council embraced bicycles and their riders. City councillors worked with city engineers, bicycle clubs and the Canadian Wheelman’s Association (CWA) to pave streets with asphalt, organize cinder bicycle paths, pave and maintain the so-called “devil strips” (narrow strips of roadway between the opposite running streetcar tracks) and fix the interminable pot holes in the city’s ubiquitous cedar block roads. Council did this to encourage bicycling in a city where “tides of cyclists” used the streets. City councillors, many of whom were cyclists themselves, passed bylaws regulating cycling in 1895. These councillors appreciated that “the thousands of bicyclists of (the) city will hail with pleasure any move on part of the Council” to make the streets accessible to them.

  Why and how does the present city council not see the urban social geographic and economic utility of the bicycle? Likely because it needs a lesson in transportation geography — and it can’t get one soon enough. So here’s a simple, introductory concept: Build it and they will come.

  Traffic generation

  In 1900, Scribner’s magazine published a typically dry civil engineering piece by William Barclay Parsons, the chief engineer of the New York Rapid Transit Commission. In the article, Parsons imparted this transportation planning gem:

  “Whenever a new line has been built in New York, although the first effect may have been — but not always — to draw traffic from a parallel and near-by road, such withdrawal has been but temporary; and in a short time the natural growth of the city, stimulated by the new means of transportation offered, has been sufficient to provide requisite traffic for the new line and increased traffic for the old ones.”

  In other words, each time Parsons built a new subway line, he generated traffic on all the lines.

  This observation was not exclusive to Parsons. In his well-thumbed “Street Pavements and Paving Materials: A Manual of City Pavements” — also published in 1900 — Canadian road engineer George Tillson made a similar contention. Writing about the practices and problems of road paving, he insisted that:

  “It must be remembered that when any one road is selected to be made into a thoroughfare, traffic will be immediately diverted to it and the wear of the pavement abnormally increased.”

  For Tillson, the principle was: Pave it and they will come.

  American road-builder Robert Moses learned these same lessons through his automobility experiments in mid-20th century New York. He intuited that what Parsons was really talking about was traffic generation: the idea that a public transit line or, in his case, a highway, is constructed to increase traffic volume.

  Every time Moses built a road or bridge, traffic invariably choked it, and he would have to build another. This was intentional and he admitted it. As he said:

  “We wouldn’t have any American economy without the automobile business. That’s literally true… this is a great industry that has to go on, and has to keep on turning out cars and trucks and buses, and there have to be places for them to run. There have to be modern roads, modern arteries. Somebody’s got to build them …”

  So Moses and his road-building acolytes did, creating the automobile economy in the process.

  The transportation geography principle that Toronto Council must learn is this: build public transit and you will increase the demand for public transit routes and increase ridership. A public transit culture and economy will follow.

  Choose instead to build roads, and the principle remains the same: you will increase the demand for roads, and increase drivers and driving culture, resulting in an automobile economy.

  It works for bicycles, too…

  

  A cyclist rides past as workers lay down streetcar tracks at the Toronto intersection of Broadview and Queen. June 12, 1918. Arthur Goss/flickr, CC BY

  As Toronto undertook the arduous and contentious process of paving its streets with asphalt in the 1890s, the bicycle population swelled. The CWA estimated…

  Continue reading on The Conversation.

  Tags: geography, Human Geography, Opinion, Phillip Mackintosh, Transportation
  Categories: News

• MACKINTOSH: Death by street – Toronto’s ongoing problems with the automobile

  Wednesday, August 15, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  

  Banning cars is one way to ensure pedestrian and cyclist safety on city streets. Andrew Gook/ Unsplash

  Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Associate Professor of Geography and Tourism Studies at Brock, wrote a piece recently published in The Conversation about pedestrian and cyclist deaths and injuries in Toronto’s busy streets.

  Mackintosh writes:

  It seems every day, another pedestrian or cyclist is injured or killed in Toronto. In this respect the city is living a historical déjà vu: interwar Toronto (1919-1939) witnessed similar numbers of walkers and bikers — especially children — dying on its streets by the same cause: Automobiles.

  Yet, like their earlier cousins, today’s Torontonians hear the same platitudes voiced by police and community leaders: Cyclists and pedestrians must actively defend their own self-interests. In other words, cyclists and pedestrians must ultimately construct ways to protect themselves — by themselves — on thoroughfares full of dangerous motor vehicles.

  How odd that in 2018 the best Toronto’s policymakers and enforcers can do is to rehash a century-old idea that in practice failed catastrophically in the past? Historical fatalities involving children give us a glimpse into Toronto’s remarkably unimaginative approach to the street.

  Toronto’s leaders alone created this intolerable street-policy circumstance. Their virtual indenture to the car since the 1910s effectively renders them policy-impotent.

  Continue reading the full article here.

  Tags: Cycling, Opinion, Phillip Mackintosh, Transportation
  Categories: News

• Policy-makers tune out Toronto’s human roadkill

  Thursday, August 02, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  From The Toronto Star
  Sunday, July 29, 2018

  By PHILLIP GORDON MACKINTOSH
  Opinion

  To read relentless news of pedestrian and cyclist deaths and injuries in Toronto is to relive the city’s early 20th century past.

  We see the same cause of the tragedy (motor vehicles), hear the same heartfelt condolences, and note the same bromide from constable, politician or lobbyist: cyclists and pedestrians must attend vigorously to their self-interest on hazardous streets.

  Crossings at Maclennan Ave. were labelled death traps when this picture was taken in 1937. Traffic officers were stationed at the bottom and top of the hill to make sure schoolchildren crossed — or dashed across — safely. (EI SCAN)

  It never occurs to anyone that such platitudes have been rehearsed by civic leaders for over a century.

  To be fair, they have no other words. Automobilization in Toronto since the 1910s has rendered the city’s community leaders virtually speechless. Why? Because there is only one — impossible — public policy to effect pedestrian and cyclist safety on streets dominated by motor vehicles: automobile prohibition. With prohibition as a workable policy left permanently “off the table,” what else can our leaders say?

  Torontonians have long felt the threat posed by automobilization, watching the slaughter on roadways and sidewalks. A century ago, children died by the dozens at the wheels of motorists (90 were killed between 1919 and 1921).

  The pedestrian and cyclist carnage continued through the 1920s and 1930s. Children especially were imperiled. City newspapers gruesomely described how motor vehicles flayed, crushed and dragged children to death.

  It wasn’t always thus. Before the First World War, street traffic consisted primarily of walkers, slow-moving streetcars and horse traffic. Yet, by the end of the war, as motor vehicle ownership increased, collision statistics had risen precipitously.

  Drivers ran through intersections, failed to yield to streetcars and riders, jumped curbs, drove on both sides of the road and cut off or bumped cyclists. Importantly, pedestrians could not yet accurately assess the time and space compression of fast-moving cars, or the emerging danger of an automobilizing environment.

  Throughout the 1920s, the city’s irresistible opportunities for work attracted migrants, further swelling the numbers of pedestrians on the streets. Alas, pedestrian populations and automobile ownership ballooned simultaneously, neither constrained by countervailing public policy.

  Compounding the situation, the automobile was seen as an excellent “vehicle” (as it were) for economic prosperity, enlivening the urban imaginations of Toronto’s politicians and business people.

  Newspapers promoted it as the “perfect machine” and “the chariot of prosperity.” The car “had achieved its rightful prerogative over all other methods of transportation.” Such hyperbole propelled the automobile into an actual, lethal conflict with traditional street users, including carefree children on their ancestral playground.

  So, what did policy-makers do to stop cars from killing children on the streets? Nothing, despite deputations to City Council by the Toronto Playground Association in 1920, and a 1928 motion by Alderman Pearce to ban automobiles from streets where children played. In every year between 1927 and 1934, dozens of toddlers died horribly in the streets.

  The closest that leaders came to policy was encouraging drivers to be careful, and admonishing pedestrians that “The Game of Walking Has Been Speeded Up.” This meant persuading children (including preschoolers who simply strayed onto streets chasing butterflies, blowing whistles or pushing doll prams) of “the necessity of guarding against accidents by abstaining from contributory negligence,” as the Ontario Safety League put it.

  This is why we look both ways before crossing the road — a solitary “policy” legacy of a history that systemically privileged automobiles above pedestrians and cyclists in the urban hierarchy.

  Closely connected to looking “up and down before crossing the road” is an official predilection to blame pedestrians, cyclists and children for the horrors that befall them. To blame automobiles would be to confront them in policy. That won’t happen.

  Call this what it is: political negligence. Any pedestrian or cyclist can tell you how to save lives in Toronto. Put severe restrictions on automobile use in pedestrian- and bicycle-heavy city neighbourhoods. This won’t happen, either.

  A century ago, Toronto wouldn’t enact policy to prevent “the needless mangling of little ones,” those innocent “little tots of the streets” who died by the hundreds. Don’t expect policy-makers in 2018 to protect our adult bicyclists and pedestrians, equally precious, yet regarded by many as wilful and intrusive nuisances.

  Phillip Gordon Mackintosh is associate professor of Geography at Brock University, and author of Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935.

  Article reposted from The Toronto Star.

  Tags: Opinion, Phillip Mackintosh
  Categories: News