Ben Bull, Columnist –
There are many ways to get around this city, but none is more obnoxious than the single-occupancy vehicle. The passengerless car is an abomination.
I am watching one now, from a street corner. The shiny exo-skeleton gleaming in the sun, those beady little eyes, winking as he makes his turn.
The temperature is minus double-digits here, but I have to wait. Why? Thirty or forty pedestrians are shuffling from one foot to the other watching the metal hot-boxes fly by.
What did those drivers do to deserve VIP treatment?
I don’t understand it: Where are they all going?
I live downtown, and I drive only when heading out of the city. And I’m rarely alone in the car. None of these cars appear to be heading for the highway; they’re all going uptown or cross-town and – look at this one – he’s parking!
Outrageous. Maybe the driver is from out of town?
I used to be a commuter. My door-to-door was a 90-minute horror show each way, with crammed trains and a walking dead rat-run through the flashlight-in-your-face over-illuminated tunnels of the PATH network to my little office.
It was an awful adventure, but it was a lot quicker than by car. I ditched my vehicle shortly after moving into the city.
That little trooper served us proud.
He was a nineteen ninety something blue Dodge Caravan. The old boy had about a hundred and twenty clicks on his odometer and more than a few stories to tell.
There was that time he free wheeled sideways down a snowy slope on our way to Mount Tremblant. The tell-tale clunk-clunk of a dead battery after the drive-in movie with the kids (we really should have turned the heater off).
And the bills – my God, the bills. The endless oil changes, the double-take sticker shock every time I pulled the nozzle out of the tank, and the transmission. How much for a new transmission?
When I moved into Toronto the van crapped out almost immediately. It was as if the old dog looked around and thought – one-way streets? Stop signs at every intersection? Yeah, I’m done.
We didn’t help by pranging him into light poles. By the time we wheeled him out to the woodshed his passenger-side wing mirror hung limply like a mangled paw, and the front bumper muzzle was indistinguishable from the duct tape that held it all together.
I remember my wife and I waving from the curb as the tow truck driver hoisted the old boy up and rolled him away.
But I wasn’t sad for long. I bought a Zipcar membership, a stack of TTC tokens and a pair of walking shoes. And then Bixi-bikes came along and more bike lanes, and pretty soon I realized there are a lot of ways to get around this city. A car is far and away the worst.
People I know who drive downtown complain about their transit options. I sympathize. Cycling isn’t safe, the TTC is a crap shoot, and the sidewalks are like the wild west. But that’s the thing about transit. It doesn’t improve unless you invest yourself in it.
We don’t appear to have enough political will to improve the situation. The recent furor over the city’s plans to replace municipal parking lots with affordable housing caused one out-of-town councillor to bemoan the ‘war on cars.’
There isn’t a war on cars. We lost that battle a long time ago.
What about the rest of us? As I shiver on the sidewalk waiting for the single-occupancy vehicles to cross, I realize that we are just collateral damage. We have been pushed to the side, left behind and forgotten.
So tell me: how do you get around?
