The New Year is coming

Do you believe in  New Year's resolutions? I don't. I just hope next year is better than this year. 



One must not think that the residents or the city of Kitchener knows when and how to clear snow and ice off sidewalks (and streets). I don't care too much about the streets right now because I don't commute by bus and so far the roads cleared simply by having cars driving on them but the sidewalks matter - to me at least. I don't think to too many other people because most  Canadians keep their ass attached to a (heated) car seat during the winter so what do they care what the sidewalks look like. Argh! Two days ago it first rained, then snowed fairly wet snow. Clever people would have gone out that evening and cleared the slush off their sidewalks before it could freeze. And they would have burnt off a lot of turkey calories at the same time! But nobody did. So yesterday my daughter and I stepped out the door and after my first step I thought, "oh shoot, ice!". By that time my daughter was already lying flat on her back, slipped in the ice (no, we did not have to go to ER). Poor baby, she will not be walking much outside this winter. Salt seems the most common "tool" in the fight of winter here in Kitchener and I don't like it.  The slush sticks far too well to the stroller. Never mind the puddles we leave behind every time we go into a shop or other building - stop starring, I am not going to clean it up. Get out the snow shovels and sand., they are much more effective and better for the environment. But I have not seen any yet.
 
So, I got a little book for Christmas called Life Lines. One of the first ones is, "We own nothing, everybody rents." It's true, especially when it comes to our planet. I received an email today from CPAWS asking  for donations and listing their achievements for this year. I am not even happy about the achievements, even though I probably wrote letters to lots of MPs telling them to help protect this or that space or area. But the tarsands are still there, still operating, still expanding. No change. Kyoto, a disaster - Canada, the big loser, bailed out. F*** this. The Canadian government ought to be jailed for it. Or have above phrase tattooed onto their foreheads. Do they really not get it? No they don't. That's far more than embarrassing.

Oh, and the worst, last year at this time we did make donations to different environmental organisations, this year we are far from it, low tide in the bank account due to a dead job market. Instead, we have the prospect of taking our building management to court over our windows. Hey, there's a new experience looming! When it rained inside our bedrooms the day we moved in we were told this problem is new. Recently I found out leaking windows have been an ongoing issue and the windows were apparrently repaired last spring. With no improvement obviously! Our building management is well aware of the problem, it has been contacted by our superintendents verbally and by us in writing at least twice. Nothing has happened. As soon as the temperatures dropped the outside window panes froze shut they were so wet. (Are they going to burst when too much ice accumulates?) The inside panes are daily covered with water and mould grows everywhere on the frame and surrounding area unless I clean it off every week. We think the windows do not comply with the local building standards. Neighbours have unsuccessfully tried to change the situation, with the management getting away with their poor maintenance. How can that be, I wonder?

I read an article recently from an engineer who wrote a letter to The Record suggesting Canada should produce pre-fabricated houses, just like they put up here everywhere but smaller, and ship them overseas to help with the housing crisis in poor countries. After all, Canada has plenty of forest to turn into lumber and it would help the economy. My quick thoughts on that: Safe the forest, and safe the rest of the world from these poor constructions called houses. Unless of course they come without windows. Maybe new houses like in all those ugly suburbs are better than the oldish apartment buildings we live in but then again I don't want to live in suburbia. That's for car-addicted people, not people like me who dream of giving their bike an upgrade and have fenders and other handy things installed. That is once I earn money of course. 

Over Christmas we rented a small car and unlike in Edmonton we got one too. Wow! It was a Toyota Yaris and with the three of us, car seat, stroller, Christmas gifts etc. it was well loaded too. It worked well and still it was very fuel-efficient. We need more of those, the cars I mean, and rental agencies that rent them out. 

Suburbia live

Last week I visited a friend in Cochrane near Calgary. She lives in a new development on the outskirts of the town with a gorgeous view to the Rockies. Apart from the view there was not much to this development. Far away from anything you depend on your car. My friend admitted that if she was to walk shopping she'd have to carry her groceries uphill for 40 minutes. You better be a fitness-fanatic to do so. The houses were large but close to each other because gardens were practically non-existent. Since all houses are on dead-end streets there's no through traffic and therefore no sidewalks. It seems safe to walk on the street but how am I going to teach my child not to do it? For being a large house it had only 3 smallish bedrooms. Even the wardrobe between the living area and the garage was bigger than the bedrooms. Unless you host dozens of people regularly I don't see why you would want extremely spacious living roomS. 

It was my first trip from Edmonton to Calgary and luckily I did not have to go right into Calgary as Cochrane is located Northwest of it. I drove Stony Trail though, a new road around the outskirts of Calgary that helps you avoid going through the city. At the moment the road is surrounded by barren, of nature cleared land but soon there will be neighbourhoods everywhere as beginnings can already be seen. It's not looking beautiful. I said to my husband, in Alberta the population must be expected to double very soon or who is going to live in all those houses? I would not want to. Despite the fact that Calgary has an apparently pretty good LRT (Light Railway Transit) system these new neighbourhoods will not be connected right away. There's a Park & Ride (in driving terms) nearby but even those massive (ugly and space-consuming if built as a single level) parking lots can only take so many cars. In Edmonton Park & Rides opened last year in the two locations where new stations were opened and residents still complain that unless you are there at 7 AM you can't get a spot until 3 PM when the first commuters go home again. So Albertans will keep driving for many years to come - don't complain about gas prices!

The new federal government just looks stupid to ask oil companies why petroleum prices are high. It's a free market, you can do it as long as somebody pays the price. Besides, the oil industry is highly supported and subsidised by exactly this Conservative government - so shut the f*** up!     
         

Sprawling from Grace

is another documentary I watched recently. It's a US-American production which was very different from The Nature of Things. It hardly dealt with the suburb itself but went straight onto automobiles and petroleum because suburbs only exist due to the car and cars need gas. Here a few bites and pieces:    

Cars suggest freedom, safety, and achievement, cars are the icon of the American dream and every little boy dreams of driving a car one day. We actually define ourselves by the name of our cars - Explorer, Venturer, ... and whatever they are called. If you build a highway system you get congestion & pollution. With the growing population there’s not space to accommodate all the cars & have places with character (suburbs have none). Commuting times keep increasing with more cars on the road & people living further away from work. Automobiles cause 1/3 of all US greenhouse gases. 

"Suburbia" is a car-depended living arrangement, where you have to drive to work, to shop, to get services, to run simple errands, to take the kids to school & other activities. It's also the greatest mis-allocation of resources in the history of the world because we know that it is the living arrangement that does not have a future. As we are trying to get out of this "stuckness" we keep putting more resources into trying to solve the problem by doing the same thing ... growing outwards. Besides, upkeeping the ageing infrastructure costs society a lot of money and adds on to the federal debt. If you had to commute by foot, public transit, or bike ... you would not live in the suburbs. Generally, living in suburbia requires trade-offs, so why not rethink city design, car efficiency, and public transit – and find other arrangements for daily life in America? 

Every year 30 billion barrels of oil are consumed worldwide. Experts predict an increase to 45 billion barrels in 2020 – but consumption will outpace production. Peak oil is about the rate of delivery not the resource availability. With most of the easy-to-reach conventional oil gone, most of the oil that’s left will be expensive and difficult to get too – currently we don’t have the ability to increase supply as fast as demand. Consequences of the great gas shortage in the 1970s were cuts in the speed limit, car pooling, and switching factories from oil to natural gas and coal. But this happened when the US had lots of time and money which now they don’t have any more.

China plans 65,000 miles of expressways as more and more Chinese own a car. Even a marginal increase in cars will be devastating. The car culture in US is a near-disaster, it’s a guaranteed disaster in a populous country like China but China still tries to copy the US living structure. China has 4 times more people than the US but today the US still uses 3 times more oil. China takes the money that it gets from producing Walmart merchandise and spends it on oil from Alberta, Venezuela and Libya.

Each US American consumes 5 times more oil (20 lbs) per day than oxygen (4 lbs). US Americans spend an average of 25% (another expert said 19%) of their income on automobiles – the most expensive transportation system in the world. Rich people spend about 5% of their income on their car, poor people about 40%. Consequently poor people often have to give up something that they could have spend the money on but decided to invest their limited financial resources into a car, for whatever reason. 

Americans think, thanks to advertisement, everything is choice instead of circumstances of reality! Peak oil climate change and a few other big issues aren't choice though. One wonders what are they willing to scarifies? In the film some interviewed Americans still said they didn't believe that the US will run out of oil.  

There is the temptation to maintain oil resources through military actions but it will not work – it's too expensive and too intense. Venezuela is already past its oil peak and quality of oil is bad, the US itself has nearly no oil left, Canada has the tar sands but it’s expensive to produce. The US needs a new energy policy since heavy unconventional oil can not take the place of light conventional oil. There’s still lots of coal (I wished there wasn't), hydro, sun, wind to generate energy from. But there’s no single solution/ energy source that could keep up the level of oil usage. There's the dillusional thinking that the unmaintainable can be maintained for example through technological advancement. In the meantime, resources will be wasted to prop up our current comfortable living until the last one realises that when you have a shortage of energy you can't simply replace it with technology. Technology requires energy.

It takes political will to break the concept that cars are more important than pedestrian. Americans have to figure out what kind of life to they want to have, what kind of activities they want to pursue, what kind of spaces they need. Then they have to fit the buildings in. Ideas include giving a suburban city a centre, that city planners need to be walking planners, that public transit must be a "first class" alternative to get people out of cars. The city & transit planning need to go hand in hand to create "living local" that benefits people & environment. The good quality of life needs to be there for everyone not only for certain (rich) parts of city. Poorer people will be better off with public transit because they save the cost of having a car & spend it on something more valuable to them like health, education, travel.

Finally there's the option to wait until the pain arrives and change then but it will be awefully expensive. Or you can change now while the US still has the strength and energy to do it without facing so much pain and it will work better - unfortunately it's harder to sell to people too. If politicians started change now it would prepare cities better for the future and make them more competitive. The knowledge, information, and expertise is there already. But there's a lack of vision, a lack of realisation how psychologically rewarding and economically sustainable a life without car & oil dependence could be. 

www.sprawlingfromgrace.com  www.earthnowfilms.com

Lost in the suburbs

is another episode of The Nature of Things from 2008. It visits Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, Mexico City and hey, Portland, Oregon!   


In order to facilitate Toronto's expansion some of the most fertile soil in North America had been covered with concrete and asphalt. Suburban residents cover 4 times more space than those living in the city.


L.A. is the "ultimate suburban wasteland" according to David Suzuki. The Fresno valley nearby that's threatened to be built up too provides more than 200 commodity crops and is one of the biggest food providers in the U.S. Farmers start to become the minority though and the urban population does not understand their lifestyle. Farmers work earlier, they also work later, and some of their duties are noisy and dusty. Although the soil and the climate are great the water for irrigation comes via pipeline from far away and required a huge financially investment by the federal government. Unfortunately, the municipalities decide what to do with the land and sacrifices it for construction that creates jobs. In one place in California "extravagant" people can even live in a suburb made for small air planes! The garage, the street, the parking in the front of the house are all designed to accommodate the wing span.      

Vancouver has apparently an even higher car use than L.A. and an additional 30,000 cars enter the roads every year. But the city barely builds any new roads. Vancouver is so unaffordable for most people that they move into the suburbs which are designed for cars, or "extensions of highway intersections". "The  sound of sprawl is the freeway roar," it was said but it has turned into ever growing congestion. Widening the roads and adding more highways has not and will not solve the problem. Maintaining 1 km of road costs $10,000 per year, and new roads cost more. This does not include the costs for police, accident services like health care, and air pollution. Presumably, there will be road tolls soon which will increase the cost of living in suburbs! Together with demographic changes the demand for large houses in distant suburbs will disappear over the next couple of decades.   
 
Mexico City with more than 20 million people is an urban nightmare, sprawling tremendously. There's no more natural beauty & tranquillity, just cars & too much traffic, air and other pollution, and water shortage. The city is not human any more. 

Portland Oregon has not stopped the sprawl but has made room for nature in the city. It started 25 years ago that the city tore up a freeway and put in a waterfront park, tore up a parking house and create a public space in the centre of the city, diverted money from road construction to public transport and built a light railway instead. City neighbourhoods revived and the growth was directed into more dense, already existing areas instead of adding on to the city boundary. A model suburb is denser, the houses closer to the sidewalk, a front porch faces the road instead of a garage, school and shops are in walking distance.In Portland people want to live there and don't feel forced to live there - that should be the goal of city planning. Some critics said that Portland's moves were a socialist conspiracy to get people out of their cars but in fact in was a conspiracy that brought people into cars in the first place.        


Generally suburbs provide more affordable housing than the city centre, get you more space for less money. People think it is easier to start a family, it feels safer to raise children, suburbs have a perceived higher quality of living. But it's not actually that comfortable: commuting means sacrificing time and well-being, expose oneself to accidents, fuel & maintain the car, pay insurances. It's not affordable to the individual or the community. 
Generally, cars have driven the sprawl. The deal has been that the private sector provides the vehicles -without any limits - and the government provides the pathways. But huge amounts of money (subsidies) go into supporting the car and even only a 10% of it would better be invested in public transit. 
An initial problem is that wilderness and natural areas are often considered as land to be developed, as something that needs to change. Another problem is that the costs for infrastructure (water, sewage, roads, community services) are only partially accounted for in the price of suburban houses. The municipality that provides the infrastructure usually ends up with a debt that can't be recovered from taxes from the new residents. So they keep building hoping it pays off next time ... but it does not. Suburbs won't work forever.