It didn’t start when councillor Mark MacKinnon suggested that the new parking bylaw should remove any and all barriers that prevent people from being able to park two cars side-by-side in their driveway, but it was the proverbial match in a room full of gas.
On Wednesday, city council held a workshop to give feedback about the new parking rules that will make up the next version of the comprehensive zoning bylaw. MacKinnon’s point was that nothing should stand in the way of a two-car driveway, not trees, not the front lawn, and not any so-called concerns about stormwater.
One ward over, councillor Leanne Caron took umbrage with that proposition saying that such a bylaw would be backwards looking, reorienting the city to be built around car use again instead of looking forward and creating a city built on more transit and active transportation use.
Councillor Mike Salisbury then noted something I was thinking about at the same time. If you’ve ever been to the neighbourhoods with some of these newer subdivisions, there’s really no streetscape to speak of. If there were older trees in these areas, they were gone in the months and years before the foundation for those houses was ever laid.
In a sense, this is a battle between new and old parts of town.
In Guelph, we have neighbourhoods that have been around for nearly 200 years, streets that were laid out decades before the first car rolled down mostly horse-filled boulevards. If you didn’t have a horse, you walked, or maybe you took the trolly from the core out of the Sleeman Brewery on the outskirts of town, which is now Silvercreek Parkway.
Ours is a very different world from the one Guelphites lived in during the city’s first century, but I think it’s also safe to say that there are people in Guelph in 2021 that live in a very different world from their own neighbours. For all the talk about what’s fair and equitable in the course of the conversation about parking, council still seems entirely out to lunch about what’s really unfair and unequal in this so-called Royal City.
For instance, there was conversation about how people need room for multiple vehicles but can’t afford a detached home with more driveway space given the current housing market. Some on council called it an “affluency issue.”
You know what a real “affluency issue” in Guelph is? Affording to buy a home here, at all.
And let’s look again at those streetscapes because you know who doesn’t mind a treeless street with no shade, or no place to stop for a rest or to catch your breath? People in automobiles with their air conditioning on may not appreciate the difference a few trees and a bench can make, but if you’re walking to the store to run errands, they can make a very big difference indeed.
And what kind of equity is there in a city when a cross-town trip takes you 10 minutes by car but 45 to 70 minutes on transit? You’re never going to make transit a popular option when it takes you four to six times as long to get where you’re going on a bus versus in a car.
The same is true of bike infrastructure, where there are great big gaps in this city that provide no bike lanes and no direct access between different parts of town. That’s especially true in the west end, where you have to ride several kilometres east before you find a navigatable path southbound, and almost all of it is along some of the most dangerous streets in Guelph.
Parking, or any driving behaviours for that matter, can’t be completely solved with bylaws, because it starts with the decisions people make every day.
And before you “at” me, I recognize not everyone can get by without their car, and so on, but am I really meant to believe that absolutely everyone in Guelph with a two-car household can only get by with two cars? That every trip, every day, necessitates your own car?
I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, no one thinks they’re traffic, even if they’re sitting in it.
In a car.
By themselves.
But this started as a conversation about fairness and equity, and the truth is that Guelph is neither fair nor equal, and it’s getting worse with each passing year.
Housing prices have done nothing but gone up over the last 20 years, but other aspects of life in this city have not kept pace. The transit system today is almost the same as it was two decades ago, there’s been no perceptible increase in the amount of affordable and social housing, and we’ve lost good paying middle-class jobs that were mostly replaced with low-wage service sector work and the gig economy.
Not all of that is the fault of city council, but if they think the fight against inequity starts with driveway widths, the rest of us are in more trouble than we think.
