Stop the madness of building roads

Stop the madness of building roads

Ken Gray, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Friday, May 16, 2008

Don't build another road. Don't build one, not one.

You see, we have enough roads. Most times of the day cars can travel around town easily. Trucks can make deliveries. Businesspeople can roam in search of sales.

No, the congestion problem exists for only a couple of hours every day during the morning and evening commutes. At those two times, you could widen the Queensway from Kanata to downtown or the Split to 25 lanes and it wouldn't be able to handle the volume. And if those roads did happen to flow smoothly, an unlikely prospect, freeways just channel thousands of cars into a downtown grid network, designed in the 19th century, running at more than capacity. Freeways just don't work. Long commutes by car are a time-consuming, frustrating, inefficient, hopeless exercise. Don't people have better things to do?

So, you say, if the municipal government doesn't build roads or widen them, how will people get to work? I have confidence that Ottawa residents will find a way to get to the place where they support themselves, that allows them to buy their food and raise their children. Ottawans will get smarter because they won't have a choice.

For example, selecting a location for a home won't simply be an exercise in getting a good price. People will consider if their dwelling lets them get to work quickly and efficiently. Ottawans will look for homes with uncrowded routes to their jobs or perhaps live close enough to walk or bike. Maybe they'll locate near a rapid-transit line. Right now, Ottawa has thousands of commuters driving to urban jobs from the rural city, perhaps even farther. They will rethink that if the Queensway or other major routes are even more stuffed with cars at rush hour than they are now.

Furthermore, we quite likely don't need to build more roads, even under the rather lax standard of need Ottawa employs now. For one wonders how long streets will continue to be crowded. This summer CIBC World Markets expects gas to hit $1.50 a litre. CIBC is predicting $2.25 a litre by 2012. Montreal has already seen more than $1.30. That means a fill will soon cost about $112 for a 50-litre tank -- the size of the one in a Toyota Corolla. That gets your attention. No word yet on how much it will take to top up the SUV but CIBC might extend you a loan to cover the charge.

So don't build any more roads.

Because roads contribute to urban sprawl. You can't have subdivisions in far off places without new or widened roads. And roads, expensive as a capital cost, get even pricier when you must repair them, plow them and rebuild them. For roads are just temporary in this freeze-thaw-fry climate. And underneath those roads are city pipes that contribute to raising your taxes. Don't build the road or the subdivision in the boonies and there's no need to extend the pipes. Or the bus routes. Or the electricity wires above those roads. Want to slow the increase of your property taxes? Don't build any roads.

If you don't widen the roads, fewer people will move to the outskirts, living in tract housing on valuable farmland -- farmland that is becoming more and more precious as food prices increase. Want to save the rural way of life? Don't build any roads. Not a one.

It's amusing to hear rugged individualists talk about public transit being government subsidized and expensive. Property taxpayers have been subsidizing drivers for more than a century now -- fixing their roads, building freeways, paving pastures and fields so they can enjoy the freedom of the Sunday drive. Jack Kerouac's character, the icon of the open highway, the personified free spirit of the Beat Generation, was really on a government-sponsored vacation in On The Road, save the sex and drugs.

Then, of course, there is the cost to the environment. Ottawa's particulate and ozone levels are similar to the Toronto area despite the fact this Eastern Ontario city is without heavy industry and has considerably fewer people. Our pollution is directly related to car use.

Perhaps Ottawa has begun to realize the folly of roads. City staff and politicians such as Alta Vista Councillor Peter Hume stood up to the federal and provincial governments as they tried to extend the freeway section of Highway 174 to Rockland. The city didn't want to broaden its urban footprint out into the countryside. All Highway 174 would have done is encourage people to move out along its route in search of cheap housing. But those new cars would have just piled up at the Split, only just a bit farther along. About four decades late, Ottawa has learned the lesson of the great Toronto Spadina Expressway debate.

We must lose our expensive preoccupation with roads. They are environmentally dirty, obsolete, inefficient, they eat up farmland, they're slow, raise your taxes, and they're pricey to build, plow and repair.

Planners should need a very good reason to pave. Better still, don't build another road. Don't build one, not one.

Ken Gray is the city editorial page editor and a Citizen editorial board member. His column runs on Fridays.

E-mail: [e-mail]

© The Ottawa Citizen 2008