Try to recall: when was the last time the city did anything for the motorist?
Last week it pumped up the parking fees in the busiest parts of the city, where the presence of cars indicates the greatest need for parking.
Meanwhile, the bicycle infrastructure increases unabated.
Lanes keep appearing, and proposals for more keep popping up, including the city’s pitch for lanes near Vancouver General Hospital, which would take much-needed parking out of the mix for visitors. The city’s response: we might put in a parking lot a few hundred metres away – a nice thing to say, particularly to the elderly.
Bike rental kiosks abound, an overkill initiative certain as the rainy season turns cold to feature rusting, desolate stands – naturally, at the expense of hundreds of parking spaces.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Rather than an either-or strategy, there are third options.
Other cities have found intelligent ways to make traffic move more effectively – extended lights on certain roads at certain times and co-ordinated lights on the most obvious routes when traffic is highest, among other things. They have invested in better parking apps to reduce the chore of finding a spot and taken seriously the environmental consequence of the idling vehicle.
Vancouver, though, treats the motorist as it would today’s indoor smoker. It correctly encourages cycling but incorrectly discourages driving. In its effort to get people out of their cars, the city is provoking them to get out angrily. This is correctly frightening to the cyclist. The city seems indifferent to the conflict.
This need not be. If the city developed a modern strategy for vehicles, devoid of its ideological bias, it would win over suspicious drivers who feel penalized for the frequent frustration of driving and parking.
The car will not go away. The city is counting on it to fuel finances for transit improvements through mobility pricing. Perhaps the car will become driverless, but even the computers will blow a circuit at what they have to endure if the city does not see traffic effectiveness as a policy priority.
