Two of PT’s more articulate commenters:
Wrote Karin:
Millennials are being conditioned to believe that driving is bad, so many of them don’t, and they are consequently being robbed of the mobility that previous generations had growing up and starting in life. I say that millennials should drive: on her blog here.
Responded Geof:
You write, “despicable are those older people who lived their own formative years with the benefit of guilt-free automotive mobility and are now counselling young people that it is possible to have a perfectly fulfilling life without a car. . . . This transit referendum is all about old people building themselves a comfortable and secure life by reducing the comfort and security of young people. . . . A car expands your world. Being transit and bicycle dependent shrinks it, and also reduces the amount of control you have over your time and what you can achieve. Anyone pretending otherwise is a liar.”
Wow. I disagree. I never wanted to own a car. Not out of guilt, not out of concern for the environment (I prefer urban pavement to green wilderness), but because of the hassle and the cost and the kind of life it creates. Not having one to tie me down, I was free to move to Switzerland, then to Burnaby, arriving with a backpack and a duffel bag: only to find that this was a place where one was rejected at every turn if one lacked a car. I finally gave in and started driving at 26. Fortunately the city is changing: were I to do the same thing now, I would certainly choose to remain carless far longer.
My car cost me $5,400+ a year (in 2015 dollars). Years of not owning one in effect paid for trips to Europe, Japan and China which expanded my world far more than a car ever could, and showed me how a good life could be lived without one. The campus in Beijing where my carless parents-in-law lived was one of the most humane places I have been. (China has changed since then, its fleets of bicycles giving way to cars and even worse smog.)
By car, the city is a network of places connected by lines of travel. Without it, I didn”t just travel past: walking through neighborhoods I got to know the texture and rhythms of the places I was in. I experienced the seasons and the weather, the calls of songbirds and the noises of the city. I witnessed subtle changes over time. I crossed paths with people who lived lives very different from mine. And good transit (unlike the car) gave me the feeling I could go anywhere at the drop of a hat.
That is how I lived my formative years. I experience the car as a necessary convenience, but also one that contracts my world. Unlike transit and walking (no bicycle – this is Burnaby), it gives me no pleasure. For others, I would wish the same opportunities I had – and better. I recognize that for some, the car represents freedom. There should be space for them too; the differences between people are beyond understanding, and that is good. Your angry screed, with its assumption that the car is the same for all people, leaves no space for people like me, or for some of the wonderful places I have visited.
Ohrn adds this: “Has the world reached peak car from a Globe and Mail article. Provocative headline, but not new information: Cars are not cool any more. The gasoline engine plays little or no part in the lifestyles or ambitions of the very young. Bikes are cool, personal electronic devices are cool and big cities are cool.”
Lol. Geof, you gave up your car so you could fly around the world on jets.
I realize you specifically said you didn’t give up the car for environmental reasons, but I think you’re unfortunately being hailed as a pro-environmental example of how “the gasoline engine plays little or no part in the lifestyles or ambitions of the very young”.
Flying somewhere on a jet and then spending a month walking, biking or transiting around still uses less gas than driving around for the same month.
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/issues/climate-change/science/climate-change-basics/air-travel-and-climate-change/
There was an article somewhere that showed that a single long haul flight to Europe produced more GHGs than commuting daily in a car for an entire year. Of course, that depends on so many factors and variables that it can be slanted either way. I would encourage people to use a GHG calculator to measure their own footprints.
http://www.zeroghg.ca/carbon_calculators.html
That’s a good point. From things Karin says in her blog post, I suspect she’s more environmentally responsible than I am. I was not particularly conscious of climate change during the 1990s.
I don’t value the environment in and of itself, but as the foundation of human life. I am extremely concerned about climate change, and favor large-scale collective action to address it – it might even justify revolutionary change on the scale Thomas Beyer has proposed.
A small correction: I did not give up my car. I simply never got one. It didn’t even occur to me to buy one until I moved to Burnaby. In effect it paid for my travel, and having one might well have kept me home, but that wasn’t my intent.
This isn’t black or white, as always. Driving a car has its place. Road trips up Island, trips to Provincial Parks, hell even trips to Ikea essentially require a car of some sort.
But in a metro region like Vancouver, with appropriate infrastructure, driving or owning a car does not equate to mobility. Whether you take transit, walk, cycle, whatever–you have more mobility than taking a car. Can you get from a-b as fast? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but you’re not less mobile. The turning of the tables on this debate, that somehow not owning a car is considered elite as opposed to reality, it’s bizarre.
“This transit referendum is all about old people building themselves a comfortable and secure life by reducing the comfort and security of young people.”
This is a curious line and written by what sounds like a teen with angst.
To be fair to Karin, much of her comment is a criticism of what she perceives as a guilt trip imposed by the old on the young, who are being told to deny themselves to pay for our sins. I have not seen this, but I can easily imagine it. In my experience, the old have never had much respect for the young. Rather than doing the hard work of fixing the world’s problems ourselves, we imagine that we can manufacture better children to do it for us. It’s not fair, and it doesn’t work. If young people are not driving because they are made to feel guilty, then I agree with her that this is wrong.
Still, I think for many, youth can be a great time to be without a car. It’s a freedom that we may often have to give up when we have children, as Karin has mentioned previously. When we grow old transit may again serve us well. I don’t imagine we could or should ever get rid of cars, but perhaps we can displace them from being the central essential fact of urban life. Perhaps driving would be a phase, and a key assist at the right moments.
Geof, “imagine we can manufacture better children” is nicely articulated, thank you. That’s exactly how poisonous the impulse is, and why you correctly divined that I’m angry. As I think you’ve correctly understood, my view isn’t about being pro or anti car, but about whether we enable or deny young people that “key assist at the right moments.” And since the “right moment” is a matter of personal happenstance, and since a full driver’s licence takes a minimum of 2.5 years to obtain nowadays, it’s not a pro-car stance to say that it makes sense for young people to at least learn to drive – it’s pro-young people. I’m not for forcing anyone, but what I’m speaking out against is forcibly denying them a choice through social conditioning, tax policy, building design, and so on.
I think she is right on. It is about entrenched union rights (run by old people), defined benefit indexed pensions (for old people, at the expense of young people), of protecting jobs with low risk of layoffs (like unionized trash collectors earning triple what a private firm would pay) etc ..
yes this vote is not only about transit, but also about old people benefiting at the expense of young people. Look no further than Europe what is happening here, and MetroVan is like a mini-EU: politicians and public sector unions protecting their turf, while young people get low paying jobs, pay high taxes, get student loans and have a very high unemployment rate, especially in S-Europe. Ditto in MetroVan !
Don, for the record, I’m 56. It’s possible I have some angst, but it isn’t teen!
I feel that the captioned debate, taking place in the fervor of the transit debate, may be jumping the shark a bit. The debate seems to imply that the road to self-actualization lies in how one gets around as opposed to what one does when one gets there. Seems a bit rich.
Odd that a reader and eloquent contributor to your blog would fail to mention urban design patterns and choices in her blog, painting the world as black and white.
As a millennial West End resident with a zipcard, I very rarely drive and feel very free. I value the ability to Zip into the mountains on the weekend, but sitting in traffic for an hour or more a day strikes me as an odd definition of freedom.
Do I count as a driving millennial? Is Karin’s definition much tighter, perhaps non-license-holders? That seems a very small number to be upset about. And my wife, a non-license-holder, always has space in the passenger seat. Most cars can seat five, you know, but only require one license holder.
So, why does “Vision” Vancouver fight Uber so much then ? We’d have less congestion, and more people per vehicle with ride-sharing systems like Uber. Uber is really public transit, a mini-bus, really. To reduce cars on the road we need systems like Uber and RAPID transit, both not even in this band-aid transit plan.
Or is this vote really more about protecting entrenched political, defined pension benefits and union rights ?
I think this is the most jarring bit of Karin’s blog:
“I say Millennials should drive. They should get licences, and they should have [‘have’ is shorter than ‘buy, maintain, park, fuel’, but rather skips over the important costs – Ed.] cars or at least participate in car sharing. They don’t HAVE to drive…
It is in some respects a glorious free life not to be tied to a big steel box on wheels and all its expenses, no question.
Until that big steel box is the difference between you being able, or not, to get somewhere or do something that the transit planners didn’t have in mind when they designed the transit system…”
No, not “until”. The rare trip does not justify the constant use. It is STILL glorious not to be tied to the box. It is also glorious to have access to taxis, or car-share.
(Or a cargo bike, or course, but I appreciate I’m still in the minority there.)
In 1999, the last year of the last century 56 million vehicles were built. Last year 87 million vehicles were built and sold. Some of these were sold to millennials. In less than fifteen years vehicle production and sales have increased by 50%. There might be a few millennials and a few retired wealthy boomers living in some of the trendy edgy cities of the wealthy western world that are opting for bikes and kale, but, really.
Worldwide sales figures tell us nothing about the purchase and use habits of boomers, Xers and millennials in Canada.
The effects of those sales figures, on the other hand, tell us a lot. When I was in Beijing in the 1980s one could breathe freely and take landscape photos with blue sky backgrounds. Good luck capturing anything but brown haze today.
Whatever. Vehicle sales were a record high in Canada in 2014.
The median age has risen by 7 years from 2001 to around 40.
Vehicle sales in BC in 2000 were 167,700
In 2014 they were 197,800, a 18% increase.
During the same period, BC driving age population grew from 3.2M to 3.8M, a 19% increase. So from 2000 to 2014 per capita vehicle sales in BC declined.
Statistics are fun, but is there a point to the repetitive car sales comments?
This Karin has a bizarre perspective. That more choice is less choice. She even makes the assumption that people feel morally superior when they’re on the bus.
Her example of driving to buy cloth for a quilt and feeling guilty about it. The guilt is all her own doing. Nobody else is out there judging other’s mode choice for each trip. She can do what she wants to with her money and time like everyone else.
One other thing I take issue with in her perspective is she writes that young people should not have driving taken away from them. That somehow people campaigning for more mobility options are denying the youth from the advantages that they had. I see the opposite. The laws of physics and
Well, it’s not the campaigners who are denying them, it’s physics. There’s only so much space. The only way to make the space for more cars is to knock down neighbourhoods. And it’s not just millennials who find they can’t afford to centre their life around a car but even older people have been finding that for a long time now. Providing more transportation options is giving them more mobility and independence than the laws of physics were.
So she’s got it backwards.
Agree completely, but on the other hand, yes someone is judging her for her choices. At the very least, I am. Her choice is bad, that is my judgement and I won’t hide it. When I see single occupant vehicles racing to the next red light all around me every day, I judge them negatively. They are destroying our planet (yes I do care about this) for very little gain. That sense of freedom most drivers seem to have is a lie and they wilfully allow themselves to be deluded by automotive industry advertisements on an ongoing basis. I consider it a tremendous malinvestment of limited resources and while I only have power over my own choices of transportation, it pains me to watch our region make bad choices about our collective mobility. So in a sense, she is right. She is judged, and I don’t apologize for it.
Amen Brother
Judging people polarizes and alienates them, and those who relate to them. That can be effective for mobilizing a political base, but I don’t think it’s the right thing to do unless it is a) productive, and 2) fully justified. In my opinion, neither is the case when it comes to people in cars. When so many people drive, it cuts far too close to the undemocratic impulse to blame “the masses.” I think it is far better try to understand and make space for doubt.
I also think that people who say unpopular things are doing a great service, regardless of whether they are right or wrong. They help me to understand; they force me to question; they prompt me to work through what I think and how I express it. Honest criticism is a treasure.
Frederik deBoer (see http://tinyurl.com/oktp389) argues that when politics really matters, people can’t afford to treat it as an opportunity to vent anger: they are forced to grapple with the compromises necessary to get things done. Being angry is the privilege of those who can afford to walk away from an issue. In the process, they often destroy the possibility of successful politics. The truly poor, powerless and disadvantaged can seldom afford the luxury of sitting in judgment.
The No side of this vote is all about angry judgment: of Translink, of “ivory tower elites,” of “thieves” in “communistic cattle-cars” (gotta love it). People who express such anger feel free to “send a message” because they think they have little to lose: Yes or No, life goes on. If they were not so privileged, they would have to recognize the necessity for compromise.
I can’t resist pointing out the charming coincidence of being accused of having things backwards by someone with that particular user name…
I love these very pointed comments by Karin:
“The transit referendum yes-vote (tax more for transit!) is populated by people like this: hypocrites. We had it all, coming of age, free of guilt, but today’s Millennials should be ecstatic because we are bringing them bike sharing! Yes, bike sharing. Whee. Freedom.
What they are telling young people amounts to a Big Lie – and it doesn’t make it any more palatable that the Big Liars are usually securely attached to the public payroll with a juicy pension at the end of it. Being lied to by your elders is bad enough, but when those elders are also siphoning their income and their pensions out of the meagre earnings of Millennials, whose capacity to earn better is reduced because the liars have also stolen their mobility, the Millennials need to cry foul. If they’re too brainwashed (or depressed) to do so, then the older generation who are wise to the game has an obligation to step up, so I do. This transit referendum is all about old people building themselves a comfortable and secure life by reducing the comfort and security of young people. We old geezers have no right to do that.”
This vote is indeed not only about transit, but also about excessive public sector wages and defined benefits pensions, i.e. a continuation of the excesses of spending by politicians catering to public sector unions !
Canadians and BCers are taxed enough. There is enough money in the system TODAY to fund all required additional transit, but the issue is EFFECTIVE SERVICE DELIVERY and that is not the case today. MetroVan raised spending well over 50% the last decade, well above immigration plus inflation. The existing spending needs to be reduced, especially wages, then we can find the money for new services required, such as rapid transit.
Whenever I see a (usually) shiny pickup truck with a unionized pubic sector worker in it, often two, usually Caucasian, frequently overweight, male, emptying trash cans at Vancouver Parks I know that we are paying far too much in taxes as the cost per trash can is likely TRIPLE to what it could be with outsourcing. Ditto the fight against Uber which would reduced congestion in Vancouver but at the expense of unions and city revenue from cab companies. Ditto with TransLink security forces making well over $100,000 or bus driver making over $80,000 (all costs counted such as excessive benefits and pensions).
Hence the forced referendum onto MetroVan by the cost reducing BC Liberals. They are not against transit, they are just against excessive spending by MetroVan municipalities.
This vote is not really only about more transit, but also about government inefficiencies and overspending. Yes to more transit, but no to this band-aid of a solution with mainly more buses, continued overspending by government agencies and not nearly enough RAPID transit to get people out of their cars.
Karin eloquently captured that in her blog post.
btw: do they actually teach kids in high school these days that Canada is the world’s fifth largest oil producer, a main source of its wealth, high wages, low taxation and excellent social services, or do they still only teach about the inconvenient man-made global warming myth ?
Money does not grow on trees, like too many of politicians in power today seem to believe; just tax them more and all will be well.
Karin: well written !
Those Unions you hate gave us the 5 day 40 hour work week. Otherwise we would be working like the Nepalese in Qatar.
Yeah, that was 50 years ago. Today they are just raping the tax payer with their excessive demands.
New Port Mann Bridge + New Massey Bridge = Today they are just raping the tax payer with their excessive demands
Goods movement by truck for a growing port oriented exporting nation and population growth east of Langley and south of Fraser necessitate such widening. SFPR is already too small. Should have been six lanes, not 4. And yes, PM bridge with no train consideration was a grave mistake.
Keep in mind tunnels and bridges last 50-100 years, so MetroVan in 2050 or 2070 (with 7M+ people) will not find these bridges or tunnels oversized. Maybe in my life time I even see a subway to UBC or a train to W-Van and N-Van, you know, what is missing in the current band-aid plan: RAPID transit in lieu of cars (or slow wobbly buses).
If your so worried about Goods Movement then prioritize it with a dedicated lane or run the trucks over night like they do in NYC/New Jersey. Please tell me what city has reduced congestion by building more roads?
Why is it excessive to demand things like equal pay and benefits for your family? Why do you advocate a race to the bottom?
I advocate fair wages .. ie similar pay for similar work, not more pay for less work, less layoff risk and far far higher benefits ! As such, if you want less layoff risk and far far higher benefits then your base salary has to be 20-30% lower !
Right, straight for the basement.
Thanks Thomas. The union wages angle is important context although I take the issue of public sector labour costs further up the ranks than the hourly staff.
Don/Ron, it’s funny what we attribute to unions, when unions were simply a tool that people used to achieve certain changes to employment standards – they could have used co-ops instead, or some other form of organization. I actually think an alternate tool would have had a better outcome as workers are now captive to their tool and it is now a source of problems rather than a solution. Again, it’s stuff no one ever mentions, like for instance … why are wage increases negotiated on a percentage basis? That means the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
And the move of bargaining into the public sector changed politics to the point where unions generate something of a race to the bottom among the rest of the population, partly with taxation pressure. It’s complicated, and again, as with driving, I don’t think anyone benefits from a polarized good/evil view of union or non-union merits.
The world’s collection of labour unions have nothing on the 1% when it comes to diverting wealth and revenue en masse from various economies, governments (via corporate subsidies and public policy designed by private donors), the middle class and the poor.
If you’re worried about the supposed local drain on tax revenues from union labour, then you really do need to attend to the arithmetic of car and oil dependency as soon as possible.
Beautifully Put
I did. And I conclude it is THE major issue of our times, namely the excessive taxation due to excessive spending due to excessive wages & benefits. Excessively paid civil servants with defined benefit indexed pensions collecting from their late 50’s to their 90’s with only 30, maybe 35 years in the workforce. That is why we do not have enough funds to pay for necessary transit upgrades, that is why we have homelessness and not enough social housing or potholes in our streets.
Thomas, just run for mayor already.
And give us the chance to give you a landslide defeat.
HAHA
If all “union wages” were reduced to the lowest equivalent private sector level, how deep would the resulting recession be? You do not practice sound economic management by lowering wages.
I advocate fair wages .. ie similar pay for similar work, not more pay for less work, less layoff risk and far far higher benefits ! As such, if you want less layoff risk and far far higher benefits then your base salary has to be 20-30% lower !
Removing money from the economy by reducing wages by 20%-30% will not cause the economy to grow. Wages are a key stability indicator. Down is down, up is up.
I enjoy the days when I get to take the train. Yesterday was a beautiful day for it. I’m not a terribly outgoing person, yet I found myself chatting three people: a worker guiding dump trucks, a bus driver watching the construction, and a seldom-seen elderly neighbor resting during yard work.
Returning home, the cherry trees were in full bloom. I thought I heard a hum as I walked: I looked up and around, but detected no source. Maybe it’s traffic, I thought, or construction at the mall. Then the sound stopped, and started again when I arrived beneath the next tree. Looking again, I caught movement. There must have been dozens of bees hidden among the blossoms, woken by the glorious sunshine. Every tree was like an umbrella of sound.
A couple of days ago I was at a gas station just across the border. A guy wearing a Coast Mountain Bus Company jacket was filling up. His wife was there too. They both had big four-door sedans (6 cyl.). Just that one fill up for them means a savings of around $25 tax that his company will not get from him. You gotta laugh!
He is probably in the minority of people who cross border shop because they live close enough to it for the savings to equate to or ring in less than teh time and fuel expenses.
The fact he was wearing a bus company jacket is irrelevant unless all his co-worker, even those who live 50 km frmo teh border, crossed and gassed up.
Karin has failed to provide a cost benefit analysis on car ownership. In my experience, which includes a decade without owning a car, freedom of the road is mythical.
MB, it’s kind of my key point that everyone’s cost-benefit analysis is personal; not up to me to do for you or for you to do for anyone else. Freedom is relative, one could say 🙂 We all have what Doris Lessing called Prisons We Choose to Live Inside.
I remember you now………. you’re the one who had that epic rant about the bike counter on Burrard and Cornwall.
… it’s kind of my key point that everyone’s cost-benefit analysis is personal; not up to me to do for you or for you to do for anyone else.
Karin, I think that’s a bit of a literary cop-out.
To first conceptualize society as little more than a collection of individuals, then to characterize one segment (Millennials) as somehow ‘unfree’ because they in fact exercise their freedom of choice to not purchase cars, then to characterize many Boomers and other older people as graduates from Brainwash University for their public discourse over breaching environmental carrying capacities and ignoring the laws of physics, is irresponsible in my view. Context is everything.
Every action one takes, like buying a car, has an impact on themselves, their family, their neighbours, their city and the world to one degree or another. The implication that Freedom of the Road is a right for anyone including Millennials, should be followed by an honest acknowledgement that a vast quantity of resources, support infrastructure and public financing is required well beyond what each driver pays. The math is quite frankly not sustainable no matter what one’s opinion is.
It’s simple analysis, and not conducting it when espousing opinions on the rights of individuals over the cost of those rights to society does not encapsulate the complete picture.
MB, it’s actually far more fun to imagine this kind of debate in the past than it is to have it now; because it’s conjecture how people will get around in 20 years (I’m betting on driverless individual vehicles that are non-polluting in operation and fully recyclable), it’s just a tug-of-war between one point of view and another.
But if one goes back to the transition from horse-based transport (riding/carriages) to electric/steam/internal combustion engine forms of mass and personal transport, imagine the question is, in 1910 or so, whether young people still needed to learn to handle horses or not. What would you have advised a 19-year-old at that time?
Here is a nice link that conveys a bit of the flavour of the changes people faced: http://parkcityhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Teacher-Background-Information.pdf. I also like this one because it shows the picture behind the picture, so to speak: http://www.happytrailstrailers.com/article.php?aid=9. One also has to remember that the bicycle had just been invented in the 1880s http://www.localhistories.org/transport.html at which point gear-shifting mechanisms and tires inflated with air weren’t even in the picture.
It may be more fun (and who doesn’t like fun?) but a dose of realism is required, especially when surmising because it’s conjecture how people will get around in 20 years when such conjecture needs to be built on a solid foundation.
E.B. Whyte said, Writing is an act of faith. I interpret that as faith that you know what you’re talking about.