First written: 2020/12/15

If you need to get to Waterloo from south Kitchener by car there is the expressway which is built for cars. If you need to get somewhere by car west of downtown from the east Kitchener or east of downtown from west Kitchener, multi-lane streets such as Victoria St, Wellington St, and Ottawa St can be used.

Downtown cores are about density, everything is close by so once you are there you should be able to get anywhere within it by walking, cycling, or in the case of Kitchener, the ION (there are 4 ION stations within the area I defined and 2 on the north and south ends, so one does not even need to walk or bike to get from one end to the other).  

Why would we have streets used for both cars and cyclists/pedestrians when we don’t have to? Having to wait at traffic lights for cars driving through downtown unnecessarily just ruins the convenience of having everything close by and takes away the ambiance. This is not good for consumers or businesses. 

Delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, and vehicles for people with accessibility needs could be exceptions to the ban but the low frequency of these needing to drive through would cause minimal disturbance. 

Also, businesses that rely on people arriving by automobile shouldn’t be in downtown: that’s what shopping centres like malls, big box stores, and automobile-centric plazas like The Boardwalk are for.

A reactionary response to this proposal is that by banning cars in downtown it will just cause more congestion and make travel times for cars longer. I think this proposal could actually reduce congestion and travel times around downtown though. Less people would choose to get around driving enormous, dangerous hunks of metal and more people would choose a portable, human-powered set of wheels that you can hop off and walk along the side of the road with if you need to.

The increased convenience of living without a car could be a huge money-saver for a lot of people too. If you live close enough to downtown and can get all your shopping and socializing needs met there rather than paying thousands of dollars for a personal automobile, plus the insurance, gas, maintenance, licensing, you could pay a few hundred dollars for a bike plus a bit of maintenance (or even less if bike-share programs are brought back).

I understand what Doucet was trying to get at in his article last week but I don’t fully agree with the headline “when cycling becomes boring it’s working.” Rather I’d claim: when cycling becomes fun it’s working! I love biking around the city, I cherish every opportunity I get to do so, I get a rush from it even when it’s raining or snowing (or rather especially when it’s raining or snowing).

Obviously, I’d prefer if it was less dangerous, if I didn’t have to worry about interactions with automobile traffic while on the roads but because of some of the new bike lanes and since I was trained in cycling safety and signaling through working for Cycling Into the Future, I’m comfortable and confident in most situations on my bike on local streets. Many more people could feel comfortable and confident without training though if there were no cars at all to worry about, at least in downtown Kitchener.

More fun wouldn’t come only from the transportation method of cycling itself but the culture  that a community with a lot of people walking and cycling allows for. Downtown Kitchener comes alive with festivals such as Oktoberfest, and the Blues Festival, or when patios lined the streets because of the effects of COVID this summer. Why can’t it be this way all the time? How could this not be good for downtown businesses?

Gaukel St has already been made pedestrian-only but what if the whole downtown was like this? Instead of a Sunday afternoon drive on King St through downtown, a Sunday afternoon stroll would seem like an appealing option. It comes with exercise, fresh air, and the possibility that you could have a spontaneous interaction with a neighbour or an old friend or a friendly conversation with someone new.

Although the headline of my piece last year was “Strike against climate change must include strike against cars”, to be honest climate change wasn’t my main drive behind writing that piece or this one.  

With global carbon emissions down because of the pandemic and all the technology that is being developed that will soon allow our world to run on exclusively renewable energy, I have hope that climate change will soon be less of an issue. 

The car emissions in one city won’t make much of a difference anyways (although if more cities followed it could have a big impact). In addition, I think advances in transportation technology will soon make cars obsolete.

In ten years I would be very surprised and disappointed if cars were still the primary way people get around: e-scooters, e-bikes, and other sorts mobile, environmentally-friendly, vehicles will likely be the main way to get around in addition to public transit. 

We won’t even have to own our vehicles because everything will be autonomous or self-driving, we will be able to order a vehicle on demand, get dropped off where we need to and not have to worry about parking or flat tires. 

I think the technology for all of this exists today already but because people are so obsessed with cars and both governments and citizens are unwilling to make drastic changes, the market simply isn’t there yet.

So in conclusion, I believe car-free cities are the way of the future. In the forward-thinking, innovative community we live in though, I think starting by banning cars in downtown Kitchener would reap great benefits not only in the future but today. 

Our habits will have to change, but as Doucet made clear in his article, these changes will benefit everyone, not just the idealists, and the thrill-seekers like myself or the people we traditionally label “cyclists”.

Let’s stop letting nostalgia and our reluctance to move away from a transportation system that we believe gives us all freedom and independence but ultimately was built with the values of patriarchy and elitism (see Robert Moses: In the Name of Urban Renewal, New York: A Documentary Film), stop us from making progress and doing what’s best for everyone.

​Kitchener could be a leader, “the Creative Capital”, not just for Canada, but for North America, and the world.