Jennifer Smith

As a brief follow-up to my previous post, I wanted to quote in full from one of my favourite books: "The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto's Sprawl" by former Toronto mayor John Sewell. It's a passage I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially after reading some of the comments on Hawthorne Villager.

After describing a commute by car and by transit, Sewell sums up these contrasting experiences:

"Transit promotes a sense of community: people are not competing with one another, but they are all on the same bus, sharing a common experience, reinforcing the idea of community. Transit promote tolerance - individuals experience people who are different ages, speak different languages, wear different clothes, and have different colours of skin, and know they are not a threat. One starts tolerating others because there is no choice, but quickly, toleration becomes a matter of standard behaviour. Transit promotes civility. One is expected to be civil to those around you , sometimes crowding very close, and most people are civil, respecting the space of others, sometimes even going out of their way to demonstrate respect. Teenagers do give up their seats to older people. The disabled do get priority. Riders do generally respect other riders.

"The private car promotes different values. It promotes a sense of individuality, as one must drive more against, than with, the rest of the world. Every day one proves how good one is. Driving promotes a sense of competition with other drivers for space on the road, and it is of the intense kind: each driver must pay very careful attention to what the other drivers are doing, and be prepared to react quickly if something is out of line. It's a bit of a jungle - one cannot relax for a minute. Driving in a sealed car also promotes a sense that everything is at a distance. The car is a bit of a cocoon with its personalized heat and sound system, and noise can't leak in too easily. The speed at which you move means the world passes by quickly.

"The private automobile promotes the values of individuality, competition, distancing. Transit promotes the values of community, tolerance, and civility. Obviously individuals can and do take actions that transcend these qualities. Some people on transit are really impolite and cause trouble. Some drivers are very considerate, and you notice it. For those in a bad relationship or a bad job, the drive to and from work can be the best part of the day. For some transit riders, the crowding is uncomfortable, and leaves them in a snit by the end of the ride. Sometimes transit breaks down and causes enormous inconvenience. But these cases are infrequent, and the more usual outcomes are the ones described."

Sewell is hardly unbiased when it comes to the suburbs, but I find this idea intriguing: that our values and attitudes are shaped by where we choose to live as much as they affect our choice. There certainly seems to be evidence of a fundamental shift in values and attitudes when one crosses the urban/suburban line; one need only look at a map of the results from any election in any city in Canada to see where that line is drawn.

How this might apply to Milton is another matter. We are not a suburb in the classic sense, and certainly no part of our town could be described as 'urban'. But I can tell you from experience that the sense of community I have felt living in downtown Milton is not all that different from the sense of living in any downtown Toronto neighbourhood. You get to know the local shop keepers and the parents of your kid's friends, you make at least nodding acquaintance with the rest of your neighbours, you participate in street events - you feel part of the life of the place. I've also lived in the Toronto suburbs, and it's not like that at all.

In our case, this has less to do with the use of transit and more to do with the availability of public space in general. Buses are one type of public space of course, but so are parks, sidewalks, libraries, coffee shops, restaurant patios, etc. Spaces like these all facilitate random interactions with many types of people of varying degrees of familiarity, allowing us to weave together what we think of as a 'community'.

However, none of these spaces can be accessed from inside a car.

I realize I might be coming off a little anti-car in these posts. Ok, more than a little, despite my earlier confessions about my car addiction. But honestly, I'm not trying to suggest that it's feasible or even desirable for most people to live entirely car-free in Milton.

Ultimately, it's about moderation in all things. It's about recognizing that there are multiple benefits in choosing not to drive sometimes in terms of our health, the environment, and the basic functioning of our community. Spending all of one's time cocooned in either a house, a car, or a cubicle is not only bad for us physically and psychologically - it disengages us from our fellow human beings in a way that, on a broader scale, may well be damaging our whole society.

But this is all terribly philosophical. I'll try to get more into the practicalities of transit in Milton in my next post.