Bob Ransford
Sun
We can build better places for people to live if we can get past some of the fears that people have about smarter growth.
Most people in Canada live in suburban communities. When suburbs first started growing 65 years ago, they were supposed to be bucolic places the masses would flock to when escaping crowded, polluted and unsafe cities.
Everyone would own a big detached house on a big lot with plenty of green space. Every family would have at least one car to get from home to work and back with a weekly stop at the supermarket.
Suburbs are anything but bucolic places today.
Every family owns at least two cars. Many have three or four cars they use to get from home to work and from home to school, to the shopping mall, to soccer practice, to a friend’s home or wherever. Everyone is battling growing traffic congestion. Few have time to cut their lawns, so they hire a gardener who arrives weekly in a truck.
People living in sprawling suburbs walk less, weigh more and are more likely to be hit by a car if they venture out on foot or by bicycle. In fact, people living in suburbs make fewer than six per cent of their daily trips on foot.
Imagine for a moment embracing just one of the concepts of smart growth — creating more walkable communities.
That might mean wider sidewalks with street lighting closer to the ground. It might mean fewer curb-cuts for driveways, if two homes were to share one driveway. It might mean single-car garages or car ports. It might mean a series of inter-connected pathways that link dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs and provide direct routes out to arterial streets.
It also might mean more compact lots, a slightly higher density and even some “granny flats” or attached legal secondary suites.
It might mean more and smaller playgrounds in your neighbourhood. It might mean corner stores, shops along some streets in your neighbourhood, other streets with shops and homes or even offices above.
It might mean schools with smaller parking lots and restricted on-street parking around schools. It might even mean schools that are built two and three storeys high, instead of sprawling monstrosities, like some of the schools built lately.
It might mean proper off-street pull-outs for buses and bus shelters that actually shelter transit riders from wind and rain. It could even mean at-grade transit running along with traffic down main shopping streets.
By tackling this small list of initiatives in an integrated way, we could build new true walkable neighbourhoods or transform existing neighbourhoods where people could live healthier lives.
Oh, the automobile? It would be relegated to a second place position on our list of the most important things in life.
I can imagine this.
I can also imagine the outcry if any planner or developer were to suggest this.
The moment anyone talks about building smaller homes with a single parking space, with shared driveways and narrower streets, immediately citizens react and suggest their property values will drop because substandard housing is being planned for their neighbourhood.
How do we get past those unfounded fears?
Just imagine the better life we would all have if we were to take a few small steps and build better places to live. Our fears should disappear.
Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with COUNTERPOINT Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer and a director of the Urban Development Institute – Pacific region.
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
