roads are not places r. wayne guy
driving inhospitality time slowing down
Wayne Guy
This past summer, my wife and I headed across the continent on an epic road trip between Halifax and Yellowknife. We were hoping to find pleasurable routes through fertile valleys at the edge of the world, where the experience favours the unencumbered driver. Though we found this through Gaspe the Ottawa Valley, Prince Edward County and northern Alberta, our experiences through the larger centres of Toronto, Chicago, and Cleveland left a lot to be desired. Finding pleasurable driving experiences has become exceedingly rare, denigrating the once wide-open road to congestion in asphalt rivers travelling at speeds that are at times slower than that of a pedestrian. In urban areas, lives are clocked in hours on the road rather than with family or in nature; our lives are now dictated by the metronome of the commute. Hostile corridors strangle cities in multi-lane highways, harsh, dangerous, brutal and loud. The cost of personal mobility to neighbourhoods and communities has far exceeded the benefit promised by suburbia, which now devours farmland, rivers, forest and grasslands at an ever- accelerating rate. The automobile, conceived as a novelty of the late nineteenth century through mass production and marketing, has become a ubiquitous force and the nightmare of the twenty-first, transforming our environment into a sea of pavement permeating our towns, cities and continents — an environment that shackles our citizens to expense, injury and time lost in gridlocked cities. What if this were not the case?
Let’s describe new possibilities in which suburbia’s cul-de-sacs are turn into common green spaces for food and recreation. with the automobile relegated to the periphery. Where urban parking lots which rip and weaken the urban fabric, can been amended through bylaw revisions to become mixed-use developments that create places and spaces for people to live, work and meet. Let’s imagine highways giving way to linear parks connecting cities, and over them conveniently available high-speed public transit runs. Time is then returned to the individual, to spend it reading, walking, biking and living. For those who love the experience of pastoral drives, let those experiences be enhanced with the narrowing of roads, the slowing of speeds, the placement of road-side attractions, services and amenities. In this transformation, wide bare pavement gives way to spaces and places which have meaning and value to us. As such intentional interventions put people and community first, trumping the perceived convenience of having machines taking you to your door, we emerge from our metal chrysalis, an interaction is shared, and a community is born. This is possible anywhere and only subject to community will. Let’s make the getting there as worthwhile as the destination, as roads are not places. £
WAYNE GUY is an architect in Yellowknife, NWT
56 on site review 46 :: travel
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