going the distance

PHOTO POST

In September many migratory species head south from these shores. Not all of them have feathers.

The birds that nest here, but spend winters in warmer climates, cross paths with those which nest further north and only stop here in passing.

Autumn is sweet, with many opportunities to see and hear these beautiful friends before the quiet winter. Autumn is scary, too, with growing uncertainty whether each species will find safe travel to a winter haven, safe travel north again in the spring, and a safe place to nest and raise young next year.

Killdeer beside still waters

The elegant Yellowlegs, which often spends a few weeks around here in the fall, is one of my favourite visitors. In recent days a pair of Yellowlegs worked a mudflat favoured by Killdeers. On a single high-pitched signal they all took off in the same instant, circled around, and then landed together on a nearby mudflat. (I believe the bird pictured below is a Lesser Yellowlegs and not its larger cousin the Greater Yellowlegs.)

Dance of the Yellowlegs

A juvenile Green Heron landed beside the shorebirds but was after larger prey than insects, and it soon moved on.

Sharp left

Lurking in the shadows nearby, a furtive Swamp Sparrow briefly crossed a bare rocky patch.

Swamp Sparrow on the rocks

As the sun set a juvenile Sora cautiously stepped out from reedy cover.

Sora at sunset

On the migratory flightpaths, birds are joined by smaller and more delicate creatures.

Saddlebags

If I am correct that the above picture shows a Black Saddlebags, it is one of a dozen dragonfly species that conduct a multi-generational annual round trip from north to south and back.

The Green Darner, below, famously migrates to the southern US states, Mexico, or Caribbean islands.

Green Darner on Burning Bush

A tall clump of pink aster in our yard has been particularly attractive lately to migrating butterflies.

Pink Aster Sky

Monarch on pink aster

For weeks we have had many monarch sightings every day. All of them continued to move west, likely heading around Lake Ontario before flying south to Mexico.

On a couple of afternoons, though, the monarchs were joined by a smaller butterfly with similar colours.

American Painted Lady on pink aster, 1

This appears to be the American Painted Lady, part of a family known for migrations on and between several continents.

American Painted Lady on pink aster, 2

May all our winged relations, with or without feathers, find safe passage into a new season.

close encounters

PHOTO POST

A severe restriction can sometimes be a blessing in disguise – at least when it comes to noticing beautiful sights.

Deep Well (squash blossom)

So it was for much of this summer, as eye trouble encouraged me to focus on small things, close at hand.

Where does the bee stop and the flower begin?

With my better eye out of order (temporarily, I hope), and strict doctor’s orders to avoid physical exercise throughout recovery from retinal surgery, I tried to make the most of reduced vision.

Hanging on Pink

With my particular type of myopia, I can see well when focusing on fine detail at very close range. Thus I spent more time than usual gazing intently at flowers in our own yard – and if I stayed motionless for a while, a pollinator often landed right in front of my eye.

Heat Wave

Day Lily Reflects the Sun

Cranesbill Geranium Spire

These photos were taken in our back yard over the past two months, as cool and dewy summer mornings finally gave way to a real summer heat wave once September had arrived.

Hoverfly on Sylphium

Wasp on Porcelain Vine

Since I like flowers, and I also like to eat, I’m happy to admire a wide variety of pollinators going about their rounds.

Crystal Ball

Wet Pigment

Many insects, of course, are in precipitous decline. In this locale that certainly seems to apply to dragonflies. I was pleased to spot this Green Darner resting on the still-wet grass on a chilly morning – and especially pleased that it took to the air once the sun had warmed it and given it strength.

I gazed at this dragonfly through my one good eye, while it gazed back with its thousands.

Dragonfly at rest, 1

Truly a sight for sore eyes.

Dragonfly at rest, 2

 

in the weeds

PHOTO POST

Most of the summer slipped by and I didn’t get out to the marsh … but at least I saw a Bittern.

Over the past two weeks I’ve made several excursions, hoping to see a few of the sandpipers that like to run along from lily pad to lily pad. Or a beaver, plying the placid waters while chewing on fresh greens. Or dragonflies, or … well, the marsh often has surprises.

Wapato flower

One of my first discoveries was the flowers of the Wapato, which I hadn’t noticed before.

The more obvious white flowers, scattered across the marsh’s surface, are lily pad flowers. In late August, the flowers and lily pads are home to countless tiny insects, which attract the bigger insects that eat them, which attract birds and fish fingerlings and frogs and turtles.

Circle Segments

Still Life with Painted Turtle

Refracted Reflection

As I’d hoped, telltale motion along the lily pads alerted me to Spotted Sandpipers darting about and gobbling insects.

Spotted Web

In addition to the adults, several juveniles – still without their spots – were out hunting on their own. (If the bird in the photo below is not a juvenile Spotted Sandpiper, I’m grateful to anyone who can let me know the correct ID; just send me a note through the Contact link.)

Spotless One

Then an odd motionless shape protruding from the lily pads caught my eye. Zooming in, I saw it was a juvenile Least Bittern.

The smallest of the heron family, the Least Bittern is zealously secretive and usually stays hidden in the reeds. I’m not positive I’ve ever seen an adult, but the juveniles seem to be less cautious and I see one every year or two.

Step by Step

I watched quietly for an hour while dear Bittern fed from floating platforms. A step here, a step there, an occasional jab, and down the gullet went a dragonfly or a minnow.

Step One

Step Two

In one moment the Least Bittern appears stout and stocky. The next moment, it is clear that most of its body is just a storage compartment for the feathered slinky that is its neck.

Zap

At Least I Saw a Bittern

It was encouraging to learn that somewhere nearby, a pair of Bitterns had nested and fledged a young one this summer.

Could there have been a better way to spend a Sunday morning than watching a Least Bittern explore the marsh?

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Heron (III)

Photo at top of page: Poised Pose (click here for full-size view)

Reckoning with ‘the battering ram of the Anthropocene’

Also posted on Resilience

Is the word right on the tip of your tongue? You know, the word that sums up the ecological effects of more, faster and bigger vehicles, driving along more and wider lanes of roadway, throughout your region and all over the world?

If the word “traffication” comes readily to mind, then you are likely familiar with the work of British scientist Paul Donald. After decades spent studying the decline of many animal species, he realized he – and we – need a simple term summarizing the manifold ways that road traffic impacts natural systems. So he invented the word which serves as the title of his important new book Traffication: How Cars Destroy Nature and What We Can Do About It.

The field of study now known as road ecology got its start in 1925, when Lillian and Dayton Stoner decided to count and categorize the road kill they observed on an auto trip in the US Midwest. The science of road ecology has grown dramatically, especially in the last 30 years. Many road ecologists today recognize that road kill is not the only, and likely not even the most damaging, effect of the steady increase in traffication.

Noise pollution, air and water pollution, and light pollution from cars have now been documented to cause widespread health problems for amphibians, fish, mammals and birds. These effects of traffication spread out far beyond the actual roadways, though the size of “road effect zones” vary widely depending on the species being studied.

Donald is based in the United Kingdom, but he notes there are relatively few studies in road ecology in the UK; far more studies have been done in the US, Canada, and Western Europe. In summarizing this research Donald makes it clear that insights gained from road ecology should get much more attention from conservation biologists, transport planners, and those writing and responding to environmental impact assessments.

While in no way minimizing the impacts of other threats to biodiversity – agricultural intensification and climate change, to name two – the evidence for traffication as a major threat is just as extensive, Donald writes. He cites an apt metaphor coined by author Bryan Appleyard: the car is “the Anthropocene’s battering ram”.

Traffication has important implications for every country under the spell of the automobile – and particular relevance to a controversy in my own region of Ontario, Canada.

A slow but relentless increase

One reason traffication has been understudied, Donald speculates, is that it has crept up on us.

“These increases have been so gradual, a rise in traffic volume of 1 or 2 per cent each year, that most of us have barely noticed them, but the cumulative effect across a human lifetime has been profound.” … (All quotes in this article from the digital version of Traffication.)

“Since the launch of the first Space Shuttle and the introduction of the mobile phone in the early 1980s,” Donald adds, “the volume of traffic on our roads has more than doubled.”

Though on a national or global scale the increase in traffic has been gradual, in some localities traffication, with all its ill effects, can suddenly accelerate.

That will be the case if the government of Ontario follows through with its plan to rapidly urbanize a rural area on the eastern flank of the new Rouge National Urban Park (RNUP), which in turn is on the eastern flank of Toronto.

The area now slated for housing tracts was, until last November, protected by Greenbelt legislation as farmland, wetland and woodland. That suddenly changed when Premier Doug Ford announced the land is to be the site of 30,000 new houses in new car-dependent suburbs.1 And barring a miracle, the new housing tracts will be car-dependent since the land is distant from employment areas and services, distant from major public transit, and because the Provincial government places far more priority on building new highways than building new transit.

Though the government has made vague promises to protect woodlands and wetlands dotted between the housing tracts, these tiny “nature preserves” would be hemmed in on all sides by new, or newly busy, roads.

As I read through Donald’s catalog of the harms caused by traffication, I thought of the ecological damage that will be caused if traffic suddenly increases exponentially in this area that is home to dozens of threatened species. The same effects are already happening in countless heavily trafficated locales around the world.

“A shattered soundscape”

Donald summarizes the wide array of health problems documented in people who live with constant traffic noise. The effects on animals are no less wide-ranging:

“A huge amount of research, from both the field and the laboratory, has shown that animals exposed to vehicle noise suffer higher stress levels and weakened immune systems, leading to disrupted sleep patterns and a drop in cognitive performance.”

Among birds, he write, “even low levels of traffic noise results in a drop in the number of eggs laid and the health of the chicks that hatch.” As a result, “Birds raised in the presence of traffic noise are prematurely aged, and their future lifespans already curtailed, before they have even left the nest.”

Disruptions in the natural soundscape are particularly stress-inducing to prey species (and most species, even predators, are at risk of being someone else’s prey), since they have difficulty hearing the alarm signals sent out by members of their own and other species. To compensate, Donald writes, “animals living near roads become more vigilant, spending more of their time looking around for danger and consequently having less time to feed.”

A few species are tolerant of high noise levels, and seldom become road kill; their numbers tend to go up as a result of traffication. Many more species are bothered by the noise, even at a distance of several hundred meters from a busy road. That means their good habitat continues to shrink and and their numbers continue to drop. Donald writes that half of the area of the United Kingdom, and three-quarters of the area of England, is within 500 meters of a road, and therefore within the zone where noise pollution drives away or sickens many species.

Six-hundred thousand islands

When coming up to a roadway, Donald explains, some animals pay no attention at all, others pause and then dash across, while others seldom or never cross the road. As the road gets wider, or as the traffic gets faster and louder, more and more species become road avoiders.

While the road avoiders do not end up as roadkill, the road’s effect on the long-term prospects of their species is still negative.

When animals – be they insects, amphibians, mammals or birds – refuse to cross the roads that surround their territories, they are effectively marooned on islands. Taking account of major roads only, the land area of the globe is now divided into 600,000 such islands, Donald writes.

Populations confined to small islands gradually become less genetically diverse, which makes them less resilient to diseases, stresses and catastrophes. Local floods, fires, droughts, or heat waves might wipe out a species within such an island – and the population is not likely to be replenished from another island if the barriers (roadways) are too wide or too busy.

The onset of climate change adds another dimension to the harm:

“For a species to keep up as its climate bubble moves across the landscape , it needs to be able to spread into new areas as they become favourable . … In an era of rapid climate change, wildlife needs landscapes to be permeable, allowing each species to adapt to changing conditions in the optimal way. For many species, and particularly for road-avoiders, our dense network of tarmac [paved road] blockades will prove to be a significant problem.”

Escaping traffication

Is traffication a one-way road, destined to get steadily worse each year?

There are solutions, Donald writes, though they require significant changes from society. He makes clear that electrification of the auto fleet is not one of those solutions. It’s obvious that electric cars will not reduce the numbers of animals sacrificed as road kill. Less obvious, perhaps, is that electric cars will make little difference to the noise pollution, light pollution, and local air pollution resulting from traffication.

At speeds over about 20 mph (32 km/hr) most car noise comes from the sound of tires on pavement, so electric cars remain noisy at speed.

And due to concerted efforts to reduce the tailpipe emissions from gas-powered cars, most particulate emissions from cars are now due to tire wear and brake pad wear. Since electric cars are generally heavier, their non-tailpipe emissions tend to be worse than those from gas-powered cars.

One remedy that has been implemented with great success is the provision of wildlife bridges or tunnels across major roadways. In combination with fencing, such crossings have been found to reduce road kill by more than 80 per cent. The crossings are expensive, however, and do nothing to remedy the effects of noise, particulate pollution, and light pollution.

A partial but significant remedy can be achieved wherever there is a concerted program of auto speed reductions:

“Pretty much all the damage caused by road traffic – to the environment, to wildlife and to our health – increases exponentially with vehicle speed. The key word here is exponentially – a drop in speed of a mere 10 mph might halve some of the problems of traffication, such as road noise and particulate pollution.”

Beyond those remedies, though, the key is social reorganization that results in fewer people routinely driving cars, and then for shorter distances. Such changes will take time – but at least in some areas of global society, such changes are beginning.

Donald finds cause for cautious optimism, he says, in that “society is already drifting slowly towards de-traffication, blown by strengthening winds of concern over human health and climate change.”

There’s scant evidence of this trend in my part of Ontario right now,2 but Donald believes “We might at least be approaching the high water mark of motoring, what some writers refer to as ‘ peak car ’”. Let’s hope he’s right.

1 A scathing report by the Province’s Auditor General found that the zoning change will result in a multi-billion dollar boost to the balance sheets of large land speculators, who also happen to be friends of and donors to the Premier.

2 However, there has been a huge groundswell of protest against Premier Doug Ford’s plan to open up Greenbelt lands for car-dependent suburban sprawl, and it remains unclear if the plan will actually become reality. See Stop Sprawl Durham for more information.

Note to subscribers: the long gap between posts this summer has been due to retina surgery and ensuing complications. It’s too early to tell if I’ll be able to resume and maintain a regular posting schedule, but I do hope to complete a post on transforming car-dependent neighbourhoods as promised in May.

ruffled feathers

PHOTO POST

Where have the Herons gone?

Through the month of May I wondered: isn’t the marsh looking and sounding kind of empty?

As I make my local rounds I’m often achingly aware that many bird species are in decline, across the continent and around the world. This year, there has been the added danger of avian flu reducing bird populations.

But from a limited perspective in one neighbourhood, it’s hard to know if yearly changes in activity amount to a trend.

In early May a good crowd of mergansers swam along the lakeshore each calm morning, but soon enough they departed for points north.

Triangle

A Grackle cuts a striking figure on a piece of driftwood at the water’s edge, inflating to maximum girth and belting out a one-note croak.

Crooner

From the marsh the songs of Marsh Wrens ring out from the hiding places in the reeds. In our yard we were treated to a similar huge call from a tiny House Wren.

Between the lines

A solo Trumpeter Swan made several appearances through May, though I’ve seen no sign of a mating pair recently.

Swimming into the sun

Trumpeter Swan Portrait

Looking through a local lens, that’s what matters, really. Will this Trumpeter stay healthy, find a mate, eventually raise one or two or three healthy Trumpeter cygnets?

And will the pair of Killdeer on a nearby mudflat, and another pair on a rocky stretch of beach, keep their nestlings safe through the danger season, successfully luring potential predators with their beautiful diversionary tactics?

Killdeer on mudflat

Semaphore. A Killdeer has the right colours for effective camouflage. It can also use these colours to wave a bright flag, grabbing attention and leading a predator away from a nest.

Will the Spotted Sandpiper, the Gallinule and the Sora and the Virginia Rail, the Green Heron and the Black-Crowned Night Heron, return to safe nesting sites in these marshes year after year?

Steppingstone for Spotted Sandpiper

(For many birds, of course, the “local” neighbourhood extends to the Gulf of Mexico coast, or the jungles of Central America, or Patagonia. If they don’t find safe places all the way along their annual migrations, they won’t be able to return here for another summer. And each time they do return, it’s a blessed miracle.)

Through most of May, the open waters of the marsh were home to very few ducks, and not many geese either. The minnows were jumping, though, frogs were singing, and carp were splashing.

Just when I thought the Herons had gone far away this season, a turtle offered a clue.

Looking Up

I looked up high, and to my surprise six Great Blue Herons circled far above the marsh.

Six Herons Circling

Just a few days later Herons appeared on perches to the north in the marsh, and more often to the south along a lakeshore breakwater.

Where the marsh opens into the lake, gulls were constantly circling and diving. Finally I understood: this is a great place for a Heron to hang out just now.

Where marsh meets lake

A patient slow stride, a sudden strike into the water, a toss of the head; that meal is down the hatch.

Swallow, swallowing, swallowed

Building car-dependent neighborhoods

Also published on Resilience

Car-dependent neighbourhoods arise in a multi-level framework of planning, subsidies, advertising campaigns and cultural choices. After that, car dependency requires little further encouragement. Residents are mostly “locked-in”, since possible alternatives to car transport are either dangerous, unpleasant, time-consuming, or all three.

At the same time, municipal officials have strong incentives to simply accept car dependency – it takes bold new thinking to retrofit such neighbourhoods. Voters are likely to resist such new directions, since it is hard for them to imagine making their daily rounds using anything except private cars.

This post continues a discussion of what car dependency looks like on the map. The previous installment looked at car dependency on a regional scale, while this one looks at the neighbourhood scale.

Both posts use examples from Durham Region, a large administrative district on the east flank of Toronto. With a current population of about 700,000, Durham Region is rapidly suburbanizing.

I’ve picked one neighbourhood to illustrate some common characteristics of car-dependent sprawl. I have chosen not to name the neighbourhood, since the point is not to single out any specific locale. The key features discussed below can be seen in recent suburban developments throughout Durham Region, elsewhere in Ontario, and around North America.

Let’s begin to zoom in. In the aerial view below you can see new subdivisions creeping out towards a new expressway. Brown swatches represent farmland recently stripped of topsoil as the first step in transforming rich agricultural land into suburban “development”. (In the short time since this aerial imagery was obtained, the brown swatches have become noticeably more extensive.)

The neighbourhood we’ll focus on includes a high school, conveniently identifiable by its distinctive oval running track.

Subdivisions here are built in a megablock layout, with the large-scale grid intended to handle most of the traffic. Within each megablock is a maze of winding roads and lots of dead-ends. The idea is to discourage through traffic on residential streets, but this street pattern has many additional consequences.

First, from the centre of one megablock to the centre of another nearby megablock, there is seldom a direct and convenient route. A trip that might be a quarter of a kilometer as the crow flies might be a kilometer or two as the car drives. In the worst areas, there are no available short cuts for cyclists or pedestrians either.

Second, the arterial roads need to be multilane to cope with all the traffic they collect – and as “development” proceeds around them they are soon overwhelmed. “Recovering engineer” Charles Marohn explains this phenomenon using an analogy from hydrology. At a time of heavy rain, a whole bunch of little streams feed into progressively larger streams, which soon fill to capacity. With a pattern of “collector” roads emptying into secondary arterial roads into primary arterials and then into expressways, suburban road systems manage to engineer traffic “floods” each time there is a “heavy rain” – that is, each morning and afternoon at rush hour.1

As we zoom in to our high school’s neighbourhood, note another pattern repeated throughout this region. Within a residential neighbourhood there may be a row of houses close to and facing an arterial road. Yet these houses are on the equivalent of a “service road” rather than having direct access to the arterial. For motorists living here the first stage of a journey, to the arterial road just 50 meters from their driveway, requires driving ten times that far before their journey can really begin. Though the maze pattern is intended to limit traffic in such neighborhoods, residents create a lot of traffic simply to escape the maze.

The residential service road pattern has the effect of making arterial roads into semi-controlled-access roads. As seen in this example, there are few driveways or other vehicle entry points in long straight stretches of such an arterial. This design encourages drivers to drive well above the posted 60 km/hr speed limit … whenever the road is not clogged with rush-hour traffic, that is.

High traffic speeds make crossing such roads a dangerous undertaking for pedestrians and cyclists. True, there are some widely-spaced authorized crossing points, with long waits for the “walk” light. But when getting to and waiting at a crosswalk is not convenient, some people will predictably take their chances fording the rushing stream at other points. How many parents will encourage or even allow their children to walk to school, a playground, or a friend’s house if the trip involves crossing roads like these?

Just across the road. High school is on the left of the road, residential neighbourhood to the right.

Pedestrian access is at best a secondary consideration in such developments. Consider the aerial view below.

Directly across one arterial road from the high school, and across another arterial from a residential neighbourhood, is a cluster of big box retail stores including a Walmart Supercentre. The Walmart has 200 meters of frontage on the street, but in that stretch there is no entrance, nothing but concrete wall to greet the occasional lonesome pedestrian.

From another direction, many people live “just across the street” from the Walmart and other stores. Except … would-be pedestrian shoppers will need to cross not just a multilane urban highway, but also hectares of parking lot, before reaching the doors of a store. These stores are large in retail floor area, but they are dwarfed by the land given to parking. In accord with minimum parking requirements, the stores have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide “free parking”. But there is no requirement to take the convenience of pedestrians into account. The doors open to the parking lots, not to the streets, because the vast majority of shoppers will arrive in large private vehicles that will need to be stored somewhere while the owner goes shopping.

Nevertheless there will be a small minority in such neighbourhoods who get to the store on foot or on bike. A few might be brave, stubborn environmentalists or exercise freaks. But mostly they will be people who can’t afford a car, or who can’t drive because of some type or degree of disability. Disproportionately, they will be elderly and/or in poor health. Particularly when carrying heavy bags of groceries, they will not want to go far out of their way to get to a crosswalk, preferring instead to make the shortest straightest trip home. It is not an accident that high-volume arterial roads in suburbs account for a large proportion of pedestrian deaths in North American cities. It is not an accident, either, that a disproportionate number of these deaths are inflicted on elderly, disabled, poor, or racially disadvantaged pedestrians.2

Lamp posts

Out beyond the beyond

It is now widely recognized that car-dependent suburbia hurts public health via an increase in diseases of sedentary lifestyle and due to the stress of spending many hours a week in alternately frenetic and creeping traffic.3 The environmental costs of sprawl include high carbon emissions, impermeable ground covering that rapidly flushes polluted run-off into diminishing areas of creeks and wetlands, and urban heat-island effects from so much concrete and asphalt. Particularly in Ontario, new tracts of car-dependent sprawl can only be built with the sacrifice of increasingly scarce class one farmland.4 Finally, groups such as Strong Towns have documented the long-term fiscal disaster of suburban development.5 Even though higher levels of government typically pay much of the initial cost of major infrastructure, municipalities will be on the hook for maintenance and eventual rebuilding – and property taxes in low-density suburbs seldom bring in enough revenue to cover these steadily accruing liabilities.

Yet in Ontario the large property developer lobby remains as strong a political force as ever. The Premier of Ontario makes no real attempt to hide his allegiance to the largest property developers.6 In Durham Region, after a long public consultation process recommended intensification of existing urban areas to accommodate growing populations, politicians suddenly voted instead for a sprawl-expanding proposal put forward by the development industry lobby.7

So in 2023, corn fields and pastures beyond the current edge of suburbia are being bulldozed, new maze-like streets laid out, thousands of big, cheaply-made, dearly-purchased, cookie-cutter houses stuffed into small lots. For a brief period new residents can look through the construction dust and see nearby farmland or woodland – until the edge of suburbia takes the next step outward.

Suppose you believe, as I do, that this ruinous pattern of development should not and cannot last – that this pattern will not survive past the era of cheap energy, and will not survive when its long-term fiscal non-sustainability results in collapsing services and municipal bankruptcies. When car culture sputters, falters and runs off the road, can these thousands of neighbourhoods, home to millions of people, be transformed so they are no longer car dependent? That’s a big question, but the next post will offer a few ideas.

For today, the edge

Image at top of page: Bulldozertown (click here for full-screen image). All photos used here are taken in the same area shown in satellite views.

Notes

1 Charles Marohn, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, Wiley, 2021; pages 85–87.

2 For analyses of trends in pedestrian deaths, see Angie Schmitt’s 2020 book Right of Way (reviewed here), and Jessie Singer’s 2022 book There Are No Accidents (reviewed here).

3 See “Suburbs increasingly view their auto-centric sprawl as a health hazard,” by Katherine Shaver, Washington Post, December 28, 2016.

4 “Ontario losing 319 acres of farmland every day,” Ontario Farmland Trust, July 4, 2022.

5 See “The Growth Ponzi Scheme: A Crash Course,” by John Pattison, strongtowns.org.

6 See The Narwhal, “Six developers bought Greenbelt land after Ford came to power. Now, they stand to profit,” November 17, 2022; BlogTO, “All the crazy details about Doug Ford’s controversial stag and doe party with developers,” February 9, 2023.

7 See The Narwhal, “Ontario’s Durham Region approves developer-endorsed plan to open 9,000 acres of farmland,” May 26, 2022.

Recipes for car dependency

Also published on Resilience

A car-dependent society isn’t built overnight. It takes concerted effort by multiple levels of government and industry to make private cars the go-to, all-but-obligatory choice for everyday personal transportation.

If you want to see what car dependency looks like on a map, you need to look at a regional or neighbourhood scale. You need to see the options people have for the kind of trips they make on a routine, everyday basis.

This series looks at the layout of car dependency in my part of Ontario, Canada.

Durham Region is an administrative district on the east flank of Toronto. The Region covers about 2500 square kilometers, but most of the current population of about 700,000 lives in the southern communities bordering Lake Ontario.

As shown below, there is an extensive network of expressways and major arterial roads connecting Durham Region with itself and with the rest of the Toronto megalopolis. Two east-west expressways cross Durham Region, two north-south expressways cover part of the Region, and there are dozens other highways and major arterials.

A region-scale map. The roads with signs circled in blue are multi-lane, controlled-access highways. Other roads shown in grey are major arterials. Downtown Bowmanville and downtown Toronto are about 75 kilometers apart.

The passenger-rail network, on the other hand, is terribly sparse.

Passenger rail routes through Durham Region, shown in thin blue lines.

One commuter rail line runs east from Union Station in downtown Toronto. It currently terminates in Oshawa, though an extension as far as Bowmanville is promised in a few years. (It’s been promised “in a few years” for more than a few years.) A long-distance line, Via Rail, passes through Bowmanville but does not stop. That means rail travel is not a realistic option for most Durham residents, most of the time, in most directions.

It wasn’t always this way. The passenger rail network was much more extensive a hundred years ago. Though I haven’t found a good map of regional rail lines in the 1920s, there is one from about 50 years earlier:  1875.

Ontario railways constructed or chartered in 1875. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

As shown below, in 1875 Durham Region residents already had not just an east-west connection to Toronto, but two passenger rail lines running north-south through the region. Other lines had been chartered and some were actually built and in operation by the early twentieth-century, though they are a faded historical memory today.

There are many reasons society might have chosen to fund extensive networks of highways, while letting rail networks wither and die. But two powerful industrial lobbies benefitted when passenger rail was eclipsed in favour of private cars. The consumption of liquid fossil fuels rose steeply with the ascent of car culture, to the benefit of Canada’s still large and still influential petroleum industry. And at the provincial level, “by the early 2000s Ontario had become the largest auto-producing jurisdiction in North America.”1

Widespread car dependency is now taken for granted in Durham Region – except by the minority who are either unwilling or unable to get into a car every day. We can illustrate why with the aid of a few more maps.

Living right next to a city about the size of Chicago, in a metroplex of some 7.2 million people, many residents of Durham Region commute to work somewhere in Toronto or its suburbs. For most of these commuters public transit is an unattractive choice.

A major commuter rail line, the GO Train, does connect southern parts of Durham Region to downtown Toronto at Union Station. For those who work near Union Station or one of the other stations, the GO Train may be a great commuting option. For all others, public transit gets more complicated and less attractive.

Consider commuting to what is called “north Toronto” – an area now pretty much in the center of the megalopolis. This area is a typical commuting destination for Durham residents. As the map below shows, the trip is straightforward and relatively quick by car.

Driving from downtown Bowmanville to north-central Toronto, a distance of 64 km, takes about 45 minutes.

To make the same trip by public transit, you need to check schedules carefully and hope your connecting routes run at the hours you need them. Plus, you need to allow 2 to 2.5 hours for the trip that could be done by car in 45 minutes.

Taking public transit from downtown Bowmanville to north-central Toronto takes a minimum of 2 hours. Some of the routes run at reduced frequencies on weekends/holidays, and do not operate late at night.

Let’s look at another, shorter, trip. Ontario Tech University is the only university whose main campus is in Durham Region. Suppose you need to go from downtown Bowmanville to the Ontario Tech campus in Oshawa – just 22 or 23 kilometers. It’s easy by car:

But again, you need to budget more than twice as much time to go by transit:

For these and countless comparable inter-region trips, existing infrastructure and services put tremendous pressure on people who travel by transit. They might consider moving to a residence much closer to their destination – but housing costs are more astronomical the closer you go to Toronto. They might look for a different job or choose schooling closer to home – even if that means settling for a second or third choice. More likely, they might start saving for a car so they can become part of the traffic. And if none of these are possible, they need to devote a large chunk of each day to their commute.

Car dependency takes more than one generation to build – but it’s not always easy to escape.

Stalled in the 1950s

A curious video advertisement was produced for General Motors in 1954. Most ads for car companies show their products cruising along scenic and empty highways. But “Give Yourself the Green Light” took a very different tack: it showed motorists sweating in stalled or crawling traffic, on roads packed with other equally frustrated motorists. In this case GM wasn’t selling cars, at least not directly – they were selling more roads. Specifically, the video was part of an intensive lobbying campaign to persuade voters and car consumers to support massive government expenditures for more and wider highways.2

That expanded highway construction effort still continues almost 70 years later. The roads have gobbled up vast tracts of land and vast sums of tax dollars, but haven’t vanquished the dreaded rush hour traffic tie-ups. Today, rush hours are much longer than an hour, and extend much farther out from city centers, through suburbs and exurbs.

But the current government of Ontario, led by Premier Doug Ford, remains under the spell of that 1950s vision of endless, wide, and free-flowing highways. True, they are now budgetting for and planning major, long-overdue subways and commuter rail expansions in the most crowded parts of the Greater Toronto Area. Perhaps they recognize there simply is no room for wider roads in those areas, and so the only way to reduce congestion is to give more drivers a way to leave their cars at home.

At the edges of urban sprawl it’s another story. Far out from the center of Toronto, where there are still no good public transit options, the Premier is pushing hard to build two more expressways along the north and north-west edges of the metro area. These highly controversial routes, if constructed, will augment ultra-expensive privately run toll road Highway 407, recently extended through Durham Region.

These expressways do more than eat up large amounts of space – which happens to be some of the best scarce farmland in Canada – for travel lanes, medians and interchanges. They also facilitate and encourage equally space-hungry housing forms and commercial developments – developments which will need abundant parking since driving will be the only way to get to and from them.

In the next installment we’ll examine car-dependent development patterns at the neighbourhood level, along with the provincial and regional policies that continue to promote this pattern.

Photo at top of page: Restricted Access – Highway 407 toll route in northeast Durham Region, photographed on Feb 17, 2023. Full-screen image here.

Footnotes

1 The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Automotive Industry”.

2 The superb series Not Just Bikes includes many excerpts from the GM video along with commentary by vlogger Jason Slaughter, in the recent installment “Would You Fall For It?”

How parking ate North American cities

Also published on Resilience

Forty-odd years ago when I moved from a small village to a big city, I got a lesson in urbanism from a cat who loved to roam. Navigating the streets late at night, he moved mostly under parked cars or in their shadows, intently watching and listening before quickly crossing an open lane of pavement. Parked cars helped him avoid many frightening hazards, including the horrible danger of cars that weren’t parked.

The lesson I learned was simple but naïve: the only good car is a parked car.

Yet as Henry Grabar’s new book makes abundantly clear, parking is far from a benign side-effect of car culture.

The consequences of car parking include the atrophy of many inner-city communities; a crisis of affordable housing; environmental damages including but not limited to greenhouse gas emissions; and the continued incentivization of suburban sprawl.

Paved Paradise is published by Penguin Random House, May 9, 2023

Grabar’s book is titled Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. The subtitle is slightly hyperbolic, but Grabar writes that “I have been reporting on cities for more than a decade, and I have never seen another subject that is simultaneously so integral to the way things work and so overlooked.”

He illustrates his theme with stories from across the US, from New York to Los Angeles, from Chicago to Charlotte to Corvallis.

Paved Paradise is as entertaining as it is enlightening, and it should help ensure that parking starts to get the attention it deserves.

Consider these data points:

  • “By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.” (page 71; all quotes in this article are from Paved Paradise)
  • “The parking scholar Todd Litman estimates it costs $4,400 to supply parking for each vehicle for a year, with drivers directly contributing just 20 percent of that – mostly in the form of mortgage payments on a home garage.” (p 81)
  • “Many American downtowns, such as Little Rock, Newport News, Buffalo, and Topeka, have more land devoted to parking than to buildings.” (p 75)
  • Parking scholar Donald Shoup estimated that in 1998, “there existed $12,000 in parking for every one of the country’s 208 million cars. Because of depreciation, the average value of each of those vehicles was just $5,500 …. Therefore, Shoup concluded, the parking stock cost twice as much as the actual vehicles themselves. (p 150)

How did American cities come to devote vast amounts of valuable real estate to car storage? Grabar goes back to basics: “Every trip must begin and end with a parking space ….” A driver needs a parking space at home, and another one at work, another one at the grocery store, and another one at the movie theatre. There are six times as many parking spaces in the US as there are cars, and the multiple is much higher in some cities.

This isn’t a crippling problem in sparsely populated areas – but most Americans live or work or shop in relatively crowded areas. As cars became the dominant mode of transportation the “parking problem” became an obsession. It took another 60 or 70 years for many urban planners to reluctantly conclude that the parking problem can not be solved by building more parking spaces.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century parking had eaten American cities. (And though Grabar limits his story to the US, parking has eaten Canadian cities too.)

Grabar found that “Just one in five cities zoned for parking in 1950. By 1970, 95 percent of U.S. cities with over twenty-five thousand people had made the parking spot as legally indispensable as the front door.” (p 69)

The Institute of Transportation Engineers theorized that every building “generated traffic”, and therefore every type of building should be required to provide at least a specified number of parking spaces. So-called “parking minimums” became a standard feature of the urban planning rulebook, with wide-ranging and long-lasting consequences.

Previously common building types could no longer be built in most areas of most American cities:

“Parking requirements helped trigger an extinction-level event for bite-size, infill apartment buildings …; the production of buildings with two to four units fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021.” (p 180)

On a small lot, even if a duplex or quadplex was theoretically permitted, the required parking would eat up too much space or require the construction of unaffordable underground parking.

Commercial construction, too, was inexorably bent to the will of the parking god:

“Fast-food architecture – low-slung, compact structures on huge lots – is really the architecture of parking requirements. Buildings that repel each other like magnets of the same pole.” (p 181)

While suburban development was subsidized through vast expenditures on highways and multi-lane arterial roads, parking minimums were hollowing out urban cores. New retail developments and office complexes moved to urban edges where big tracts of land could be affordably devoted to “free” parking.

Coupled with separated land use rules – keeping workplaces away from residential or retail areas – parking minimums resulted in sprawling development. Fewer Americans lived within safe walking or cycling distance from work, school or stores. Since few people had a good alternative to driving, there needed to be lots of parking. Since new developments needed lots of extra land for that parking, they had to be built further apart – making people even more car-dependent.

As Grabar explains, the almost universal application of parking minimums does not indicate that there is no market for real estate with little or no parking. To the contrary, the combination of high demand and minimal supply means that neighbourhoods offering escape from car-dependency are priced out of reach of most Americans:

“The most expensive places to live in the country were, by and large, densely populated and walkable neighborhoods. If the market was sending a signal for more of anything, it was that.” (p 281)

Is the solution the elimination of minimum parking requirements? In some cases that has succeeded – but reversing a 70- or 80-year-old development pattern has proven more difficult in other areas. 

Resident parking on Wellington Street, South End, Boston, Massachusetts. Photo by Billy Wilson, September 2022, licensed through Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0, accessed at Flickr.

The high cost of free parking

Paved Paradise acknowledges an enormous debt to the work of UCLA professor Donald Shoup. Published in 2005, Shoup’s 773-page book The High Cost of Free Parking continues to make waves.

As Grabar explains, Shoup “rode his bicycle to work each day through the streets of Los Angeles,” and he “had the cutting perspective of an anthropologist in a foreign land.” (p 149)

While Americans get exercised about the high price they occasionally pay for parking, in fact most people park most of the time for “free.” Their parking space is paid for by tax dollars, or by store owners, or by landlords. Most of the cost of parking is shared between those who drive all the time and those who seldom or never use a car.

By Shoup’s calculations, “the annual American subsidy to parking was in the hundreds of billions of dollars.” Whether or not you had a car,

“You paid [for the parking subsidy] in the rent, in the check at the restaurant, in the collection box at church. It was hidden on your receipt from Foot Locker and buried in your local tax bill. You paid for parking with every breath of dirty air, in the flood damage from the rain that ran off the fields of asphalt, in the higher electricity bills from running an air conditioner through the urban heat-island effect, in the vanishing natural land on the outskirts of the city. But you almost never paid for it when you parked your car ….” (p 150)

Shoup’s book hit a nerve. Soon passionate “Shoupistas” were addressing city councils across the country. Some cities moved toward charging market prices for the valuable public real estate devoted to private car storage. Many cities also started to remove parking minimums from zoning codes, and some cities established parking maximums – upper limits on the number of parking spaces a developer was allowed to build.

In some cases the removal of parking minimums has had immediate positive effects. Los Angeles became a pioneer in doing away with parking minimums. A 2010 survey looked at downtown LA projects constructed following the removal of parking requirements. Without exception, Grabar writes, these projects “had constructed fewer parking spaces than would have been required by [the old] law. Developers built what buyers and renters wanted ….” (p 193) Projects which simply wouldn’t have been built under old parking rules came to market, offering buyers and tenants a range of more affordable options.

In other cities, though, the long habit of car-dependency was more tenacious. Grabar writes:

“Starting around 2015, parking minimums began to fall in city after city. But for every downtown LA, where parking-free architecture burst forth, there was another place where changing the law hadn’t changed much at all.” (p 213)

In neighbourhoods with few stores or employment prospects within a walking or cycling radius, and in cities with poor public transit, there remains a weak market for buildings with little or no parking. After generations of heavily subsidized, zoning-incentivized car-dependency,

“There were only so many American neighborhoods that even had the bones to support a car-free life …. Parking minimums were not the only thing standing between the status quo and the revival of vibrant, walkable cities.” (p 214)

There are many strands to car culture: streets that are unsafe for people outside a heavy armoured box; an acute shortage of affordable housing except at the far edges of cities; public transit that is non-existent or so infrequent that it can’t compete with driving; residential neighbourhoods that fail to provide work, shopping, or education opportunities close by. All of these factors, along with the historical provision of heavily subsidized parking, must be changed in tandem if we want safe, affordable, environmentally sustainable cities.

Though it is an exaggeration to say “parking explains the world”, Grabar makes it clear that you can’t explain the world of American cities without looking at parking.

In the meantime, sometimes it works to use parked cars to promote car-free ways of getting around. Grabar writes,

“One of [Janette] Sadik-Khan’s first steps as transportation commissioner was taking a trip to Copenhagen, where she borrowed an idea for New York: use the parked cars to protect the bike riders. By putting the bike lanes between the sidewalk and the parking lane, you had an instant wall between cyclists and speeding traffic. Cycling boomed; injuries fell ….” (p 256)

A street-wise cat I knew forty years ago would have understood.

Photo at top of page: Surface parking lot adjacent to Minneapolis Armory, adapted from photo by Zach Korb, August 2006. Licensed via Creative Commons BY-NC-2.0, accessed via Flickr. Part of his 116-photo series “Downtown Minneapolis Parking.”

bumblebee and scilla

PHOTO POST

Which is prettier, a Wood Duck or a Bumblebee? The reddish orange of a Robin’s breast, or the orangey red of Staghorn Sumach fruit? The sunrise or the sunset?

This April there’s no need to pick answers to silly questions – there’s a different beauty around every corner.

Closest to home, at just a few meters from my office window, a Downy Woodpecker makes quick rest stops on convenient branches.

Downy Woodpecker takes a pause

The Red-Winged Blackbird is named for two simple colours flashed by the male, but on an early-spring evening the female shows a richer palette.

Blackbird Evening

Long-Tail Ducks are beginning to show some of the rich colours they will wear when they arrive in their breeding grounds far north of here.

Long-tailed Duck times two

Though only scattered hints of green are visible in the marsh, life is stirring.

Muskrat Wave Mirage

A recently-arrived Killdeer checks out a muddy island in Westside Marsh.

Killdeer on mudflat island

Across the marsh a black-and-white Ring-necked Duck catches sunlight and reflects back red and brilliant green.

Ring-necked Duck in Westside Marsh

Mute Swans are establishing territories and building nests, but not all of them have paired off.

Two-Swan Takeoff

McLaughlin Bay landing

A pair of Red-breasted Mergansers have lingered close to the lakeshore on several recent mornings. Even in monochrome backlight they cut striking profiles …

Merganser pair in monochrome

… while in another light their colours really sing.

Mergansers swimming in colour

Still, in this area no other water bird competes with the Wood Duck in the colour olympics.

Wood Duck says Wake Up

The unseasonal warmth of early April brought a few flowers into full bloom. You need to get right down to ground level to fully appreciate the beauty of Scilla.

Scilla above and below

Will any pollinators be awake to visit these early blooms? I wondered. But in the afternoon warmth a huge Bumblebee hovered near, grabbed onto a tiny blossom, rode the swing down, then quickly moved to another and another.

Bumblebee and Scilla may sparkle together again next spring.

Bumblebee swings with Scilla

Photo at top of page: Robin feeds on Staghorn Sumach (full-screen image here)

waves of spring

PHOTO POST

Spring comes with a splash, and it comes with a sigh.

The first Red-winged Blackbirds and Robins arrived several cold weeks ago. On calm mornings the air rings with the songs and screeches of many recent arrivals, but nest-building is just beginning.

Even the cold-weather stalwarts – gulls, the winter ducks, geese and swans – are picking up the pace of activity.

Searching the waves

A quick bite

Scaups, long-tails, ring-necked ducks and goldeneyes dive in the marsh, the creek and the lake.

Winter Duck Medley (Long-tailed Ducks, and Ring-necked Duck at lower left)

Stiff afternoon breezes shape sand into waves that shape the sunset.

Perpendicular Log

In sheltered, sunny spots succulents like Autumn Joy Sedum are poking through the leaf litter.

Autumn Joy in Spring

Some of that leaf litter may soon be part of a Robin or Grackle nest.

Just One Robin

Goldfinches compete at the feeder just as they did all through the winter – but now their plumage is taking on much brighter colour.

Five Finches

Still, each warm spell is followed at this time of year by another quick reminder of winter. With two days before April another fierce snow squall brought a coating of white. There are some around here who pray this will be the last snowfall for many months.

Westerly wind on beach

Goldfinch, gold grass, snow

The Snowdrops take it all in stride, having lived through several winter reruns in just the past six weeks. By an hour past dawn they are already melting off the previous night’s snowfall.

Snowdrops in March sunshine

Hooded Mergansers show their spring colours against the backdrop of the marsh.

March’s Mergansers

On this beautiful morning in this beautiful place, the music of a Song Sparrow sounds just about right.

Reaching for a high note