Until We Have to Make Them a Reality.
// It’s easy to get people to agree that our cities would be less polluted, more pleasant, and safer—for the elderly, for kids, for everyone—if we relied less on cars.
It’s equally easy to get them to acknowledge that we should be encouraging children to get more exercise by walking or riding their bicycles to school.
What’s hard—really hard—is to get anybody to do anything concrete about it. When it comes to removing parking, or closing streets to cars, lofty statements of good intentions too often vanish into the (increasingly smog- and smoke-filled) air.
That’s the experience I’m having with my children’s public elementary school in Canada’s second largest city. Montreal’s mayor is Valerie Plante, whose party Projet Montréal has done a lot to close streets to traffic, green alleys, and expand pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. (I argue in this dispatch that they’ve fallen short on the transit file, especially given their role in killing the REM de l’Est, which would have provided a crucial light-metro route to the city’s east end.) Last week, just in time for la rentrée (back-to-school) Plante announced $10 million for making the streets around schools safer.
I should be rejoicing. But I’m not. Here’s why.
Last year, I joined several parents in organizing an “Active Transport” committee at our children’s school, which is located in the borough known as Outremont. (Here’s our Facebook page; I invite you to visit, we love, and need, your “Likes.”) The school’s playground and main entrance are located on a relatively quiet one-way street. On the other side of the street is a private elementary school; many of the parents there drive in from outside the district. In the morning, around 8:30, the street becomes a dangerous corridor of distracted, car-driving parents jostling for space to drop off their kids. Some park on the sidewalk, or in the crosswalks (the goal of many seems to be to get as close as possible to the entrance, and walk as little as possible). Yet there’s a public parking lot, free in the morning, with lots of spaces, located just one short block away the school.
My two boys have always walked or ridden their bikes to school. Over the years, they’ve experienced a lot of near misses (some of them bad enough to have added grey hairs to my head). We’ve seen fender-benders, but happily, no children have been injured—though last year, Maria, a 7-year-old refugee recently arrived from Ukraine, was run over and killed by a car as she was walking to school in another Montreal borough. (I also wrote about the issue in a dispatch earlier this year, “The Case for Car-Free School-Streets.”)
