Car Free with Kids

What's that in the driveway?

Yes, it's a car.

We're approaching the time of our move to a patch of land adjacent to a small town west of Ottawa. We knew that would mean becoming car owners again. My husband likens this to taking up smoking again after having successfully quit and kept off the vile things for a long, long time. And he's right. It's shaming and strange.

We're making a trade of sorts - we once again will have the responsibility and guilt associated with running a car, but we've deliberately situated our new home in a place where we will still be able to walk and cycle to most of the day-to-day places we need to go (school, dentist, bank, post office, farmer's market, library, coffee shop, etc.). We're expecting to look at the car sitting idle in the driveway quite a lot. The other part of the "trade" is the fact that we'll be able to grow more of our own food and we'll be living in a house that is much, much greener and energy efficient than our current drafty 1940s model.

And, as our monthly budget will never tire of reminding us, we made sure that we paid more so that we could drive the greenest car available at the moment (that would be a VW diesel, folks, and not a hybrid). My dream would be to go back to car sharing, and we've discovered that our nearest neighbours are also former Vrtucar users and Ottawans, so who knows where that might lead? (We've actually asked Vrtucar about whether they'd consider expanding West of Ottawa to our town, but that hasn't gone anywhere at this point.)

Speaking of paying more for the necessities of life, I invite you to walk on over to my new blog to read about paying more for clean energy in your home.

UK's Royal Mail to park its bikes

This news makes me want to hang my head and cry. The UK has provided a lot of leadership on climate change and sustainability , but this is a real blow.

The UK's Royal Mail has used bikes since 1880 to deliver the mail, one of many ways in which this island nation has always had a natural tendency towards sustainability. Small electric milk floats for daily home milk delivery are another great feature of the UK's transport profile. Inventions borne out of necessity are usually pretty sensible.

The Guardian has published another in a long string of recent articles on the planned demise of the Royal Mail's bike service. Read it here. What a shame is all I can say, what a shame.

Take turns, the new traffic sign we need

Ted.com has a wonderful five-minute talk by Gary Lauder proposing the Take Turns traffic sign, which I absolutely love. Lauder very sensibly outlines the benefits of traffic circles or roundabouts, but also acknowledges that they are not always possible to implement, as at a three-way intersection. I won't trouble you with a clunky description of what Gary Lauder says so well - hop over to Ted.com and take a listen.

But a final thought on traffic circles or roundabouts. They are sorely needed in North America and I've seen new ones cropping up here and there in Eastern Ontario. Ottawa doesn't stand a chance of implementing this model properly, however, until someone sorts out the ridiculous excuse for a roundabout at the Central Experimental Farm. Joining traffic takes precedence over vehicles already on the roundabout, which is a bizarre reversal of the whole concept.

Edited to note: Gary Lauder himself has pointed me to a good comparison website for traffic circles vs. roundabouts, having noticed that I made an unintentional mistake in describing Ottawa's existing roundabout above (I was short on caffeine when I wrote this earlier today). The description above is now correct.

In transition

I've just been reading on Green Living Ottawa that Canada's capital became a Transition Town last fall. Sheesh, how did I miss that? Transition Towns first got traction in the UK and are now appearing in different spots around the globe, including about a dozen Canadian communities. Such towns possess a citizenry (usually a small group) committed to dealing with climate change, peak oil, the whole deal. Transition Ottawa has carved out a space for itself on the Ning community platform and shares this self-description:

Transition Ottawa is an informal place where those interested in a more sustainable, more self-reliant way of living, can gather to exchange ideas, share resources, learn from what others are doing, become inspired, encourage each other, and come together as part of the larger 'Transition' network. It is a grand and ambitious social experiment. None of us pretends to have all the answers. But we're learning. Fast.

This is welcome news, long overdue. I'd love to see Ottawa join the vanguard and take the steps needed to become a sustainable place to live, work and play for all of its inhabitants. Getting on top of suburban sprawl and the mistakes of suburban development has to be job #1.

Our family is also in transition, as we're getting ready to leave Ottawa for a more rural existence. We've purchased a piece of land on the edge of a small town outside of Ottawa where we intend to keep doing many of the things we love (walking and cycling most places that we need to go or want to explore, growing some of our own food, providing our children with access to nature and the time and space in which to discover the world) along with some new ones.

I'm in the process of building a new blog, Starting from Scratch, which isn't quite ready yet. I love this oft-used quote by Carl Sagan:

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." There are apple trees on our bit of land, so I'm hoping to take something of a shortcut, but you get the idea. Inventing a universe sounds pretty cool anyway.

Portland's Bicycle Plan for 2030

Portland, Oregon has a bicycle plan. Already known as a centre for acting on sustainabile living ideas and as a bike-friendly place, Portland has a vision for how it should look in 2030, and bicycles feature very large. I'm wishing I lived in Portland right now, but that would be too easy. I'm wishing Ottawa's mayor, city council and leaders could adopt the thinking of Mayor Sam Adams of Portland, who says in the Executive Summary to the 2030 plan:

"Our intentions are to be as sustainable a city as possible. That means socially, that means environmentally and that means economically. The bike is great on all three of those factors. You just can't get a better transportation return on your investment than you get with promoting bicycling."

That's a very strong statement. That's a statement that gets me really excited.

Hey Ottawa - we could do this too. We already have some great infrastructure in parts of the city on which to build and a cycling culture. Surely we can do what Portland is doing and do so with success?

Putting bikes front and centre in our transport planning would be good for our health and general wellbeing, our productivity, our economic performance, our efforts to tackle climate change and much more. Can we do it?

Well, Ottawa has a cycling plan and has recently allocated something like $16.7 million in the preliminary budget for implementing the plan (I'm not clear on how much of this 20-year plan would be covered by the 2010 budget). I know that the local group Citizens for Safe Cycling have responded favourably to this and you can read more about it here. These are good things, very good things. What I don't see, is a much of a vision for Ottawa.

There is a vision statment buried in the plan, but it's kind of uninspired. I guess that's what I'm griping about, the passion, clarity and vision that seems oddly absent from everything Ottawa does at the government level. I've no doubt that Ottawa is full of folks passionate about cycling who want Ottawa to become a leader in sustainable transport, but I just don't see those voices translated into what comes out of the city. Why is that?

My fear is that without a strong vision, we won't achieve these goals or grow and expand on our goals. So, how do we build that vision?

Winter Walk to School Day in Ontario

Wednesday, February 10th will be Winter Walk to School Day across Ontario. Is your school registered? Are you planning to walk? And if you or others at your school can't walk to school for some reason, can you arrange for a walking activity during the day? Active & Safe Routes to School suggests an outing on foot to a local skating rink or park.

Because 2,000 pounds isn't enough of an advantage?

What is it about getting behind the wheel of a car that makes people feel that they must go, go, go? That they must have the right of way? As in, "get out of my way!"

Even though we don't own a car, I'm still a driver thanks to our occasional Vrtucar usage, and I was a regular driver until just last year. I've been behind the wheel plenty. And I know there is an urge to GO, keep moving, no matter what, although I've always been conscious of that urge and generally been good at taming it. But some people, man, they just got the urge and no control over it!

This sad reality was - pardon the pun - driven home for me tonight when I went racing off to Scouts with our older son. After an evening spent on homework and tidying, we suddenly realized that he was half an hour late. Oops! We weren't going to bail on the evening entirely because his group is going on a winter camping trip next weekend and we knew they'd be doing some prep for that tonight. So off we raced, around the corner and up the hill. The hill in question is very short; it runs less than half a block, a half block along which three houses sit closely together, so you get the idea. No sooner had we started up the hill than some fool in a Mini Cooper (cute car) came up behind us and started honking at us. As in, "get out of my way!"

Whoa! It's winter and the streets are already half as narrow as they normally are. The sides of the roads are sloped with ice. The road we were occupying has no sidewalk and is naturally quite narrow. And tonight there was a car parked on one half of it, partway up the hill. So, it was us or the car. Gee, we were there first. And we were running full out. This Mini Cooper driver couldn't wait the 3.5 seconds it was going to take us to clear the hill and "get out of his way"!

I did what any self-respecting mother would do and swung round with a fist in the air, calling "piss off!" or something like that. Right in front of my eleven year old. And am I ashamed? No bloody way. This prompted Mr. Mini Cooper to honk more and rev past us. Nice. Very nice. Definitely someone who should have legal rights to be behind the wheel of car.

I'm not jumping to any big conclusions here, but I suspect that Mr. Mini Cooper was a youngish fella (or gal). Not sure, about that, but fairly certain. But it's not as though such infractions are the exclusive domain of youngsters.

I remember one winter a couple of years back when I was trudging (not running this time) up the very same hill with my then four year old. We were walking to school, pretty much at a four year old's pace, but not too slowly. When I heard the car behind me, I fought the urge to ditch both of us in the snowbank, which is frankly my usual reaction. I thought "no, we were here first, it's a short stretch of road and we've every right to get to the stop sign as reasonably quickly as we can". This driver squeezed past us anyway, within mere inches (which really angers me; when the roads are icy and snowy, all you need is one slip and a pedestrian can easily end up under the wheels of your car when you're that close). This driver then promptly drove the remaining 20 feet to the stop sign, crossed over the road, and parked immediately on the other side. When she got out, I was somewhat taken aback that she was an older woman (ie my mother's age, likely somebody's grandmother). She looked right by us and hurried on foot, back across the road to the church, where she must have been attending a meeting or club.

I called out to her what I'd like to say to all drivers right now: "What is it about getting behind the wheel of the car that makes you think you should go first?" She didn't answer.

The greening of aviation

Most parents have to grapple at one point or another with children nearing the legal age to drive a car. But an airplane?

We're the kind of parents who deliberately under-program their kids. Lots of free time in which to just be a kid and discover the world is a good thing, we believe, plus family time is not to be underrated (and it's often in very short supply when kids are in loads of activities outside of school). That's our philosophy anyway. Without the demands or commitments imposed by hockey, gymnastics or fill-in-the-musical-instrument, our kids have been coming into their own slowly, by degrees.

For our oldest, who is rapidly approaching 12, his interests are now focused quite tightly on books, computing, cycling and what I'd call "wilderness living" (he's a Scout and loves all things about the great outdoors, including trekking, camping and using tools of all kinds, including matches). There are other secondary interests that round him out nicely (he's got an arty streak, is naturally entrepeneurial and makes a mean nanaimo bar and divine chocolate cake), but the short list above really illustrates his "defining" interests. Outward Bound or a similar program is just shouting out at this boy and we've been doing our research to decide "what next" with him. So where do the planes come in?

A love of planes from World War II has gradually evolved into a near encyclopaedic knowledge of aircraft from that period and most of his computer time these days is spent playing something called Combat Flight Simulator (there are no handheld gaming devices, Wiis or other such things in our family, just a regular computer with computer games). He is moving away from the fun of crashing and more into a need to master the various aircraft that he gets to "fly" in this program. It has been slowly dawning on us what a passion has developed here and we finally realized that this kid will want to fly the real thing some day. He is only two years away from being able to apply for a student pilot permit, which is both terrifying and amazing to realize. Which leads me back to my opening statement.

And then there's the fact that flying is hardly a climate / planet friendly activity to undertake. Which is why he and we are now keenly reading up on the latest research and developments regarding biofuels and other options for replacing aviation fuel in the future. If you're interested, you could do worse than start with this article on aviation and biofuels.

When I started this blog, this is one topic that I never imagined I would be exploring with quite this level of personal interest.