Anyone who has driven in Toronto during rush hour can tell you how busy the roads can get. In the face of traffic gridlock and rising commute times, Ontario Premier Doug Ford recently announced his government is exploring the idea of building a roughly 50-kilometre tunnel beneath the 401, North America’s busiest highway.
That announcement came days after the Ford government said it is considering banning new cycling lanes if they result in reductions in car lanes.
Confronted with escalating housing costs and reduced affordability, the government proposed reforms to provincial planning legislation to speed up construction on Greenbelt sites in what many described as weakening local control over the quality of development and its potential environmental impacts.
If the provincial government continues with this agenda, the weight of evidence in planning research points to long-term decreases in the quality of life for Ontario residents. Here’s why.
Issues with car-oriented planning
First, new highways bring more cars and eventually result in the same or even worse gridlock. They also contribute to air pollution and climate change. Therefore, to accommodate new growth, governments need to consider alternative modes of transport.
Second, car-oriented development inherently produces more urban sprawl, making it difficult to accommodate walking, cycling and public transit that are known to have important environmental and health benefits.
When more highways are built, there is usually a desire to separate residential subdivisions from traffic, resulting in more dispersed amenities that are difficult to reach without a car. That can be expensive. Given the rising cost of living, it is not unreasonable to expect that car ownership will become increasingly costly for more people.
This means that not only could Ontario residents face more urban sprawl, but many people will also find it difficult, and time-intensive, to get to where they need to go.
This is not an anti-car argument. There will still be many cars in the future and some of it will be from new growth, but progressive planning policies would help create alternatives.
North America’s car-centred planning
Ford’s emphasis on cars is reminiscent of another time, coincidentally often called the Fordist period by urban researchers — so named after the mass production of Ford automobile plants that became a symbol of the economy and suburban expansion of the times.
At its height between the 1950s and ’70s, original Fordist urban planning focused on the automobile, separating land designated for workplaces, retail stores and homes, and developing large scale subdivisions at the suburban fringe. North America’s heavy car reliance is an artefact of this development model.
Planning decisions have long-term consequences.
In part arising from the social activism of the 1960s, planning began to place more focus on environmental issues. In the ’70s and ’80s, this pertained to the protection of environmentally significant areas; the Niagara Escarpment plan was one important achievement of this movement.
In the 1990s, it became clear, however, that environmental protection would eventually be challenged, and fail, unless development itself was going to use less land and become more co-ordinated.
This was the height of the smart growth movement that emphasized the need for greenbelts to constrain suburban sprawl, and concentrate development into higher density neighbourhoods and more walkable growth centres connected by public transit.
Building better
Public health, the environment and growing pressures on municipal finances are all important reasons to build communities that are more walkable, bikeable and transit-oriented.
However, the Ontario government’s recent announcements do not clearly indicate how prioritizing cars would address health, environmental and municipal fiscal issues.
Connecting communities with better rail service, for example, and putting some restrictions on automobile traffic would be an investment made in preparation for a future where gas prices are expected to rise. Furthermore, there will likely be mounting pressures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as governments face the rising costs of natural disasters and a changing climate.
The Ontario government’s approach to infrastructure development hearkens back in time when urban planning did not incorporate urban planning ideas around environmental protection and smart growth. It’s also an approach without sufficient investments in critical community infrastructure, such as affordable housing.
Hallmarks of the original Fordist period were investments in community centres, schools, transit infrastructure as a social service, and yes, affordable housing. Although the governments at the times focused on car-reliant urban development, there was still significant investment in social infrastructure.
That is not the case today. Governments are pushing for the kinds of policies used in the past that are the very reason why citizens are so reliant on cars today — but without the social infrastructure that was arguably a redeeming feature of original Fordist urban planning.
The Ontario government’s approach is not consistent with the current evidence on best practice planning. Car use and low-density sprawl will continue and perhaps even accelerate because new and proposed policies make it attractive to do so.
The future would likely be more congested, more polluted, and we would see more loss of agricultural and environmentally significant lands. Ontario’s policies of more auto dependence are heading in the wrong direction, and would reduce the quality of life of Ontario residents in the future.
Markus Moos receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
