Oops, All Cars – Why I’m Obsessed with My Community: Part 2

This is Part 2 of a 5* part series of posts about my thoughts on the urban design of our community.

• Part 1. An Introduction
• Part 2. Oops, All Cars
• *A Tangent About Cars
• Part 3. Isolation and the Status Quo
• Part 4. Finally, Why I’m Obsessed With My Community
• Part 5. What’s Next?

Most of Orleans, especially the parts built after 1980, was designed around the idea that when people need to get somewhere and do something, they will drive. This is not because everyone driving everywhere is inherently better than an accessible mixed-transportation network. This is instead because in the time period our neighbourhoods were conceived, new neighbourhoods had lots of space to grow into and wide, looping streets that don’t form any kind of grid were in fashion. I wasn’t around to confirm this, but it seems quite clear that the thought at the time must have been that cars can navigate almost any route quickly. Therefore, there is no value in designing the street grid to be convenient or designed to be considerate of any other mode of transportation.

Sure, many parts of Orleans (especially in Convent Glen North, where I live) have lots of nice green space, but getting to and from these lovely places requires a huge majority of residents to spend lots of time walking on streets with no sidewalks. And the sidewalks that do line one side of Vineyard and Voyageur are decades old now and are not nearly as accessible anymore as they would have been new, after 40+ years of freeze/thaw cycles moving things around.

Our neighbourhood is designed with cars for transportation as the only option in mind, with walking and maybe cycling for leisure or exercise categorized as ‘also possible’. And honestly, at the time in the 80s, I honestly wouldn’t have blamed the designers. There are effectively no destinations within walking distance anyhow because of exclusive zoning, and at the time the sense I get is that the exclusive value of the suburbs is how you don’t have to be physically close to anything or really anyone.

A Tangent About Cars

I feel as though I need to take a slight divergence here, because I can almost hear people screaming at their screens right now. Suburban folks are yelling “so just take your car like a normal person, what are you even complaining about?!” Hopefully, you are willing to hear me out and let me take a few minutes to make the case for personal car travel everywhere not being the saviour of all of humanity.

I literally wrote this all as one continuous piece and it just got too long, so I would challenge you to take a break from this now and read that A Tangent About Cars, then come back here and keep reading. It is impossible for me to disentangle my feelings about our suburban community without my brain jumping back to many issues rooted in car dependence.

To sum up this tangent that has gone on WAY too long, I am trying to make two main related, but not identical, points: I don’t like cars as the be-all and end-all for transportation, and car dependency is objectively bad for society.