Advertisement

Motor Mouth: Is the anti-car movement winning?

With inner cities dying, why do we need to ban cars there?

Article content

Anne hates cars. All cars. Oh, she reserves a special antipathy for the internal-combustion engine, but, like so many politicians who have jumped on the EV bandwagon in cynical opportunism, Teslas and Taycans would seem to have no place in her world either. If she had her way, they’d all be banned.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

The trouble with a concept you’d think would be on the outlying edge of the political spectrum is that Anne Hidalgo is the mayor of Paris. And as plenipotentiary of the French capital, Mayor Hidalgo has decided to act on her antipathy and is trying to ban cars from four of Paris’s central arrondissements starting in 2022. While charging a congestion tax is a comparatively civilized effort to discourage urban driving, simply forbidding anyone from driving a privately registered vehicle would not seem to be very — what’s the word I’m looking for? — inclusive.

Nor are Hidalgo and Paris the only politician and jurisdiction looking to enact anti-car dictums. Amsterdam, New York, Seattle, and London are amongst those that are either looking at or have enacted plans to discourage or outright ban privately owned cars from the inner cores. The stated reason for the dramatic action is that traffic has become too dense and, worse yet, increased population density being inevitable, inner-city congestion is forecast to only get worse. Electric vehicles may solve the greenhouse-gas issue, but they do nothing to ease traffic congestion. The only solution, we’re told, is to ban cars.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

Except cities seem to be dying. To be more precise , according to the September 8 edition of The Economist , “as national economies come back to life, cities are lagging seriously behind.” Residents around the globe, it seems, are abandoning their downtown condos.

More On This Topic

  1. Motor Mouth: Why Vancouver's proposed gas tax is a bad idea

    Motor Mouth: Why Vancouver's proposed gas tax is a bad idea

  2. Motor Mouth: Are pickups really a plague on Canadian streets?

    Motor Mouth: Are pickups really a plague on Canadian streets?

In an article titled “The New Economics of Global Cities,” The Economist makes the argument that, while the migration was initially thought to have been temporary and motivated solely by the coronavirus, the exodus from urban areas “now looks more permanent.” Indeed, according to the magazine’s “exodus index,” its metrics show that the recovery in the U.S., Britain, France, and Japan remains substantially lower in their major cities than nationally. Here in Canada, for instance, while restaurant bookings are up a whopping eight per cent nationally over pre-pandemic levels, dining traffic in Toronto’s downtown core is down some nine per cent. Some parts of San Francisco feel like “an abandoned rustbelt city” says the The Economist , and even Hidalgo’s much-cherished Paris is “much less lively” than the rest of France. The beneficiary of this migration, says the magazine, is the much-maligned suburb.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

So, how will this affect automobile traffic? Well, obviously, if fewer people are living downtown, there will be less traffic. If Toronto’s data is accurate, fewer suburbanites will be availing themselves of supposedly superior inner-city cuisine, in particular. We’ve long assumed that the continued growth of city cores was inevitable, our dystopian future a Blade Runner -like inevitability. If the magazine’s “exodus index” proves a long-term trend, we could be looking at, if not an outright hollowing out of our inner cities, certainly their stagnation.

Toronto traffic
Evening traffic along the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto. Photo by Ernest Doroszuk /Postmedia

This leads to a two-pronged problem. The first is that, if people really are leaving city cores, bans like Hidalgo’s would seem unnecessary and, for the downtown economy, counterproductive. The other issue (as equally unfortunate, at least if you hate cars) is that, if people really are leaving their condos behind for the backsplits of the suburbs, there will be more cars on the road, not fewer, despite all the entreaties for us to drive less. Public transportation in many cities — stand up and take a bow, Toronto — is barely passable. In most ’burbs — certainly here in North America — the public transit infrastructure is downright laughable. When suburbanites head to their local coffee house — and suburban outlets are doing much better than those in dense metro centres, says Starbucks — or their local department stores (also doing comparatively better), they’ll be doing so in a privately owned car and not an electrified tram.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

This migration, as well as the social-distancing requirements of the pandemic, is already being seen in consumer trends. For instance, a recent insurance survey reveals that 71 per cent of Canadians plan to use a car to get to work, a significant increase from the 65 per cent of commuters who used a car for similar purposes last year. By way of comparison, only 13 per cent say they will be taking public transit. And, according to RatesDotCa, more than a quarter of Canadians “have either recently purchased or plan to purchase a car for the return to office life.”

A deserted street in Paris, leading to the Galeries Lafayette
A deserted street in Paris, leading to the Galeries Lafayette Photo by Getty

Nor does it seem we are, individually, driving less. According to Michael Sivak of Sivak Applied Research, road vehicle miles in the U.S. are only down one per cent compared with a pre-pandemic 2019, this despite a 13-per-cent increase in the price of gas during the same time frame. By way of comparison, Sivak says that “unlinked trips on public transport” are down some 49 per cent and, by all recent reports, “car sharing” is all but dead.

Advertisement

Story continues below

Article content

Indeed, we seem to be reaching an interesting inflection point where many of our governments are actively trying to discourage not only internal-combustion but driving in general, while the public has, especially in the last two years, chosen the privately owned automobile as their most popular and trusted mode of transportation. Like much of our public policy — gas taxes, congestion charges and even, as I cautioned in a recent Motor Mouth, an inadequate EV charging infrastructure that will make long-distance motoring a nightmare — the ultimate goal of car-haters like Hidalgo seems to be making driving so thoroughly inconvenient that motorists abandon their cars. Consumers, meanwhile, have responded with a migration that will result in more miles driven, not fewer.

As my new favourite Yiddish adage goes: Mayors plan, God laughs.