Reading an article this morning that talks about how turning the struggle for safe streets into a culture war is a lose-lose situation. The author's point is that you won't get anywhere by demonizing the large majority of people who drive. He instead argues that the goal should be drawing the circle of empathy big enough for as many people as possible.

"Every parent has fear that their teenage kids won't make it home alive. Every parent fears putting their baby into the car seat in the back of the car. Everyone with elderly parents fears finding out that they have been involved in some kind of traumatic crash while behind the wheel...

Everyone wants the street in front of their own home to be safe. Start with that. Here are all the ways your street is designed to kill people. When you show people, they get it—and they get their part in it."

I remember reading a similar idea around activism that suggested drawing your 'line of division' in such a way that gives you the most allies as possible. This is something that progressive causes just do not seem to understand, often pushing for full agreement on an issue before collaboration. We need to draw a larger circle.

This seems especially true when dealing with multisolving opportunities in which we are trying to rally multiple issues around a shared solution. Not everyone is going to be aligned on every aspect of all of those issues, rather we must paint a picture of a better future that the most amount of people can agree with. Embracing a new spirit of collaboration across our differences will be the defining value of the coming decades.

I hope.

"For decades, society tolerated — even encouraged — public smoking. But then a growing awareness around public health risks associated with secondhand smoke, combined with harsher government regulations, led to a shift in public perception. The same could eventually hold true for driving."

From a 2023 article that provides a bit of a scientific basis for the notion of car-brain, or 'motonormativity' as it is referred to in the study referenced. The core idea here is that people are less tolerant of bad behaviour that doesn't involve a car. The challenge, according to the article, is that we don't currently look at driving through a public health lens. However, this seems to be changing, albeit slowly.

It's something I think about often as I walk my kids past all the idling vehicles in the school kiss-and-ride. The very narrow sidewalk runs parallel with the car entrance with no buffer and a property fence on the other side. So we are forced to breathe in all the exhaust fumes and tire particles. Imagine us being okay with an equivalent line of people smoking cigarettes in front of a school every day. We simply wouldn't. And that's the key point because despite immense lobbying and money, society can and does change.

There was another really good part in the podcast on alternative modes of travel that I was listening to the other day in which one of the speakers was noting that in many of the more suburban areas in Europe that she had visited, the speed limits were reduced to 30km/hour and high fines were imposed. Kids were then free to play in the streets without fear of cars speeding through them. However, what stood out to me the most was the way she described cars as guests in the streets.

What I have noticed in my day-to-day travels is that most drivers seem to feel a certain entitlement to the streets, as though it is by default their space and everyone else is an inconvenience to their needs. This mindset is ever expanding to the point where it is barely challenged; and, I assume many drivers would scoff at the idea that streets weren't made solely for their vehicles. But, as I have noted before, this is not the way it always was.

The thing I liked about this is that it's a relatively inexpensive infrastructure change to make. Smaller communities could easily make this change. In fact, with proper enforcement, it could be a bit of a money maker for a while as drivers get accustomed to this change. Of course drivers will bristle at this, but tackling car dependency is a major multisolving opportunity for us.

I was listening to a podcast recording of a panel on alternative modes of travel and one of the speakers brought up an interesting point on transit routes. They shared how transit companies have these goals to have transit stops within a certain proximity to a certain number of homes; however, rather than adding more routes they simply expand existing routes to more stops. The result is that bus routes end up being less direct and more time consuming as they wind through neighbourhoods in order to pass by more homes. This, of course, leaves transit feeling like a far less convenient alternative to car travel.

If we ever want to get serious about our car dependency we need to invest in alternatives in a way that makes them more compelling than driving ourselves. Nothing would boost transit more than sitting in traffic and watching busses move along quickly in their own direct and dedicated, congestion free lanes.

Happy New Year.

Yesterday I was walking my kids to the library and I had a thought around collective vs personal responsibility as it relates to safety. As the girls ran up ahead of me I considered how this is what parenting is, watching your kids exhibit freedom and move forward into the world in ways that will always be ahead of and beyond you. We're in the process of trying to decide when to start letting our kids walk to school on their own and a big part of that comes down to trust.

But the thing that struck me was that it's not only about trusting my kids to be safe, it's about trusting the community to keep my kids safe. To make this thought even more brazen, it is your responsibility to keep my kids safe. Just as it is my responsibility to keep other people's kids safe.

This is a mindset that I think we've really abandoned here in our neoliberal 'western' society. Here, one's wellbeing is primarily a personal concern. Watching out for one another, especially strangers, increasingly feels like a quaint, naive thing of the past. At best, we accept that there are certain structures in society (laws, systems, etc) that are designed to organize us in a way that keeps people safe. Yet, even those are often pushed back against in exchange for personal freedom. Our car-centric way of life is perhaps the best example of this. There are so many small steps we could take to make our streets safer, but we often reject these as they might interfere with our freedom of movement. And perhaps no one bears the burden of this more than kids.

But, coming back to this idea that kid's safety should be a collective responsibility. I think this is part of what fuels helicopter parenting. We simply don't trust that society will put our kid's wellbeing before their own freedom. So we adopt that mindset as well and our kids experience the world from the safety of their homes, backyards, and the backseat of cars. Never mind that this is having negative effects down the road.

I believe this is something we should reject and move away from. The old adage, 'it takes a village to raise a child' had it right. Kids should be seen moving around freely in our communities as though they belong there, not as a failure of parenting; because we should look at those kids and think it is my responsibility that they feel safe here.