We can't fight climate change with old ideas

When you motor down a newly widened stretch of The Queensway by yourself, you tend to think of marketing guru Seth Godin. At least I do. “The hard part isn't coming up with a new idea,” he's famous for saying. “The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea.” How well he knows us.

Here's a very old, debunked idea: People need to move a lot and the best way to do it is for them to use individual cars on paved roads. We pour incredible sums of money into this while at the same time insisting we can tackle climate change by switching to electric cars. It won't work.

On a quiet Sunday night, the brand new lanes on Highway 417 between Maitland Avenue and Island Park Drive make you feel like a tiny speck of metal with 12,000 feet of asphalt on either side. It's huge, and punishingly expensive at nearly $100 million. The worst part? It won't make rush-hour traffic any better.

That's because of a well-known phenomenon called “induced demand.” Every time you widen a road because it's too choked up with vehicles, you encourage more people to use it, and in no time you're back to Square 1 with traffic that goes nowhere slowly and a lot less money in your collective pocket. It's the saddest old idea I've ever driven on. The Australian satirical show Utopia produced a memorable episode on the subject that I encourage you to watch — unless of course you prefer dry academic texts. You do you.

But what about electric cars? The Quebec government released its new green plan last week, announcing a ban on the sale of new gas vehicles by 2035. The federal government's goal is to do that in 2040 and now that target might be reviewed.

Basically, what we need to do is revolutionize how we use the space we have.

This is debunked old thinking again.

I have nothing against electric cars. It's just that they target the wrong problem. It's true that electricity produces fewer emissions than petrol, but there is a significant environmental cost to building batteries, to producing electricity and to disposing of old batteries when they die.

Also? A sleek fleet of EVs won't get rid of all the other problems, starting with congestion and car crashes that kill and maim too many people. Plus all that asphalt.

New thinking would have us take a long hard look at land use. It's a topic that can be made unnecessarily complicated, and frequently is, but a piece entitled “To save the planet, the Green New Deal needs to improve urban land use,” by Jenny Shuetz on the Brookings site, despite being American-centric, explains it simply and well.

Basically what we need to do is revolutionize how we use the space we have so we don't have to move around so much every single day. Currently most of us live in one place, work in another, and enjoy the rest of our lives (play, social life — you know, in normal times) in other locations. Our houses are far from everything else, and we're constantly on the go. Who wants to take transit to run errands for a busy family when everything is five kilometres away from everything else? Not me.

That doesn't mean everyone needs to relocate downtown. Of course not. But we could move jobs and other businesses to the suburbs. Why should living in Barrhaven sentence you to a life of endless horrid commutes? Why shouldn't your job be in the suburbs, too? If you didn't have to drive so much to do the things you want to do with your life, would you? Me neither.

We can embrace new ideas about how we organize our lives in the space we have. But not until we fall out of love with old, debunked ones.

Tinkering with the juice that powers our cars and spending hundreds of millions of dollars widening roads in a demonstrably futile effort to reduce congestion are old ideas that will do very little to help us tackle climate change, which we all say we want to do. It's hard to let go of old habits, but very much necessary.