Suburbia, Once a Dream, Now a Nightmare
Traffic jams, gridlocks, detours, accidents. Drivers are well too familiar with bumper-to-bumper traffic on roads and highways. Most, if not all major cities in North America, have been criticized for poor urban planning, tardy public transit, and the relentless urban sprawl of single-family homes throughout the boroughs.
As city populations continue to grow, with cars contributing to over 10.8 per cent of all CO2 emissions globally, this growth model—led by rapid expansion and construction—will become unsustainable in the future.
Sprawling Out of Control.
How did we get here? How did we let the sprawl of suburbs happen? Around 60 per cent of North Americans lived in metropolitan areas in the 1950s, compared to today’s number of 80 per cent. The need for a walkable city wasn’t on everyone’s wish list as the postwar housing shortage had people scrambling to find a place to live. Accompanying the fact that automobiles were marketed heavily towards the middle class as options for living outside the borders of the city, suburbs seemed to be the best-case scenario. Millions of eager homeowners were drawn to living in the suburbs, captured by the economic benefits that came with owning a car and living far from the city centre. Companies took advantage of residual fears many had regarding the war and the Great Depression, advertising suburbs as a safe haven for those who desired a stable life for the future.
With the influx of cars, highways had to be built to facilitate higher traffic. This trend continues to this day; as more and more people move to the suburbs, highways are needed to connect various parts of the city. This becomes a vicious cycle that destroys the natural greenery of a city and promotes additional driving, and thus, heavier traffic. In the past, urban planners have thought to add lanes to highways, as the solution seemed natural to reduce congestion; however, traffic has become worse for cities with added lanes due to induced demand. Induced demand is a phenomenon where in the case of highways, commuters see it as an opportunity to drive their car instead of taking public transport or slower local roads. Many are lured by the convenience of faster travel which ultimately brings up the number of drivers on highways. For example, Ontario’s 401 highway experiences the most traffic out of any other highway in North America despite having significantly less population than most US cities. The idea of suburbia was widely accepted by all, we can’t fault specific figures in authority to act as scapegoats. Everyone contributed to how our cities are planned today, with the middle class looking for stability while the market supplied the demand for it.
North America’s past has made it extremely difficult to build reliable public transportation, hence the lack thereof it. Moving forward, we must recognize the importance of transit due to the precarious nature of our Earth and general sustainability.
Kings of Public Transportation
If you stumble upon any source of media that speaks upon public transportation, Japan is always complimented for their highly efficient and superbly developed railways, city walkability, and punctuality. But why is this the case?
There are several reasons as to why Japan’s transportation system outshines the North American model. Firstly, Japan has privatized their railways beginning in 1987, as opposed to North American public transportation companies which are owned by the government; consequently, these companies were allowed to be more agile and profit focused. This heavy sentiment of privatization forced companies to enter a competitive transportation market where cleanliness and timeliness became the benchmark for a well performing company.
Similarly, the culture in Japan heavily valued punctuality and order, everyone is expected to be on time for everything that is done, especially in business. With land area and space being an issue for Japan, the country has opted to build vertically instead of the horizontal sprawl we see in North America. That reason alone has driven infrastructure to expand to all areas of Japan as an ease of access for all Japanese people. (See Figure 1)
Figure 1: A map of Toronto’s Subway compared to Tokyo’s Subway. Source: blogTO, Navitime
Future of Transportation
With North America’s past decision to scale cities horizontally, it may come to bite us in the future. The incredible difficulty of providing reliable public transportation to every single suburban neighbourhood will pose to be an outstanding challenge as governments shift to greener and more sustainable forms of transportation. An increasing number of Electric Vehicles are hitting the road, with almost every major automobile manufacturer in the market; however, the Earth does not have enough resources to support the switch over to electric for every current internal combustion engine vehicle on the road today. Lithium mining—which is required to produce the batteries used in electric vehicles—has a dark side. There are a number of common side effects, including: soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions, and an increase in global warming, which was what electric vehicles were there to solve in the first place. The mining of rare earth metals like lithium also produces hazardous waste that cannot be disposed of and will likely remain in “lithium pools” near the mining sites for years to come. Furthermore, the mining of Cobalt ore, most commonly extracted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has infringed on human rights with child labour and unsafe work conditions to be the two largest factors; society currently wields a double- edged sword of causing environmental damage to live a greener future. Our only feasible solution is to make the switch to public transportation. The matter of fact is, urban planners, governments, and city counsels must act now to prevent further urban sprawl, invest in renewable energies, and set limits to the construction of suburban homes.