Car-independence is a good step

Don't let perfect be the enemy of better

I would love to live in a car free place. I know such places are possible, they do exist in a few small locations on earth. Some people will point out that they also existed for all of human history prior to the 1900s when automobiles first became popular. But I think this is a weak argument because I, like most people, would not like to live in the 1900s or before. This is why car free places seem so scary to most people. They cannot imagine their life without a car.

Common objections to car free places are: “what about deliveries?”, “what about tradespeople?”, “what about ambulances?”. These arguments ignore the fact that those aren’t the cars we are concerned about. Instead, single occupant personal vehicles are the problem. This objection is nothing more than a red herring.

Car-free doesn’t mean zero vehicles, a car-free place will still have buses; trucks for large deliveries (small deliveries can be made more efficiently by cargo bike[5]), heavy construction, and heavy trades; and obviously emergency response vehicles (one of the largest and most notable car free places in North America, Mackinac Island, has two vehicles, a fire truck and an ambulance, and yes, they have crashed into each other[6]). But these vehicles are the exception, rather than the norm of roads congested with cars that we have today.

A modern standard of living can be accommodated without personal automobiles. And that by removing them entirely we will live healthier, happier, and equally or more prosperous and comfortable lives.

However, that is a far off dream. The reality is the way our cities are built is incompatible with that vision today, and it will take time on the scale of a century to reform our urban design towards car freedom. It is hard and terrifying for the people who are completely dependent on their cars today to imagine that happening. I understand that, it’s a huge shift in life. If only there was some transitional form we could build, a place that provides the freedom to drive, without the dependence.

Of course, such a place would be better than what we have now, much more equitable, safer, quieter, less polluted, healthier etc. It is not the magical car free utopia some hope for: streets would still be lined with personal vehicles, arterial roads would exist and occasionally be choked with cars, reminders everywhere would remain that this is not a car free place. But there is still so much to gain.

The surprising thing that will surprise most in North America is that such a place already exists. In fact, tens of millions of Dutch people already live there. I live here in fact. This is shocking to many in North America specifically because opponents of more livable cities try to portray the Netherlands as an anti-car place. Nothing could be farther from the truth. America is more anti-car than the Netherlands.

I live in a suburb called Vathorst in the city of Amersfoort. This is a midsize Dutch city, entirely typical for the country. You will find similar places all over the country. While the centre of Amersfoort is a medieval creation many centuries old, the majority of the city was built in the last 100 years, and the part I live in was farm fields a dozen years ago. Sound familiar? It’s exactly the same era as any suburb in North America.

And like every suburb in North America, nobody here wants for a car. Owning a car is very common, most people do. Parking is free pretty much everywhere, there are roads connecting all parts of the suburb and to the town centre. There are no car free zones at all in Vathorst, only the medieval city centre is partially car free, but many people there still own cars.

The Dutch car ownership rate is only slightly below average for the European Union[1], which is well above average for the world, and is in fact, still increasing[2]. They have some of the best roads in the world[3], and by many metrics, one of the most dense road networks in their small country[4].

By all accounts, people who choose to drive have every freedom that they would have in any North American city (well, almost, nobody is allowed to drive in parks…WHY that is allowed in North America, I still don’t understand). And yet, here, we suffer less traffic, less pollution, and shorter journey times than any North American city I’ve visited. I live here without a car, and nobody so much as blinks at that. I can cycle or walk anywhere, complete all my errands, in the same comfort and with greater safety than I would have driving a car in North America. There are trains to take me to the rest of the country departing every few minutes, so my ability to travel inter-regionally or internationally is not at all restricted either.

Now, how is that possible? When we speak about reducing car dependency in North America it is, without fail, reflexively castigated with straw man arguments about banning cars. Some of this is bad faith, from tech bro car company CEOs with a vested interest in promoting car dependency, but most of it is fear and distrust from people who have never seen or experienced anything remotely different from the traffic choked streets they are used to.

Whether you agree our cities in Canada are broken or not, whether you believe car dependent sprawl is good or bad, one unassailable truth is that most of Canadian cities are sprawl now, and that will not change. We are not going to en masse tear down most of our cities in the short term.

We can and should STOP building more of it (no we haven’t stopped, no matter what the fear mongers say–we are still mostly building car dependent sprawl today) and start building better places. But even more importantly, we MUST find a way to improve the suburbs that do exist today.

Retrofitting sprawl into urban density is difficult at best and harmful at worst. Even leaving aside the people who live there, who will resist any changes, this is physical infrastructure. It is expensive in time, resources, and money to replace, and we simply cannot replace all of it simultaneously.

But looking at the strategies and infrastructure used here in the car independent suburbs of the Netherlands and with a little bravery, we can imagine how we can improve our suburbs without compromising our quality of life, our freedom, and while greatly improving our equity and access to transportation. I will discuss these strategies in this series going forward. Some are very technical, like improving the safety of intersections as in the last article. Some are much broader, like how bicycles can provide the mobility that people want in non-walkable places like American (and some Dutch) suburbs.

I hope that after a while you can start to imagine how we can improve our cities so that we can all benefit from better places to live.

[1] https://longreads.cbs.nl/european-scale-2019/car-ownership/

[2] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/10/car-fleet-growing-faster-than-population

[3]

[4] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264185715-20-en.pdf

[5] https://curbsidecycle.com/blogs/blog/fedex-launches-first-north-american-fleet-of-cargo-bikes-for-last-mile-logistics

[6] https://harris23.msu.domains/event/2005-first-highway-accident-ever-on-m185/