Thanksgiving reminds us to be thankful for cars

It’s Thanksgiving weekend and hundreds of thousands of cars are out on the roads, taking their drivers and passengers to family reunions, or restaurants for a holiday dinner, or just out for simple, old-fashioned drives in the countryside.

The critics of the car — you know, the types who spend much of their lives complaining about automobiles and how the planet would be so much better off without them — forget about times like these when their beloved public-transit systems are inadequate when it comes to moving so many people around in so many different directions.

Public transit in metropolitan areas is terrific Monday to Friday when it comes to taking millions of people downtown to work in the morning and home again in time for dinner. But it doesn’t cut the mustard in the middle of the night. The subways aren’t running then and the buses that are out there are few and far between.

Or on Saturday afternoon, when the QEW, DVP, Gardiner and 401are all backed up and the parking lots at the Dixie Outlet Mall and Yorkdale (and all the other shopping centres too numerous to mention) are jammed solid. I shudder to think what disaster would unfold if all those people left their cars at home and got on the subway or the GO instead.

And that’s one of the many problems about the war on the car. City councils, mayors and transportation critics all seem to think in terms of the Monday-to-Friday commute and few of them think about weekends or holidays, when having access to a car is pretty much essential.

And if those people could stop being negative and start looking beyond the ends of their noses for a change, they would come to the conclusion that the car is a necessity for most people and the time has come to build more roads to accommodate them and to stop trying to discourage their use.

Instead of talking about taking down the Gardiner, why not doubledeck it? Same for the DVP. I think it was a few years ago when the CAA came up with a brilliant idea: an expressway into downtown Toronto from the western suburbs that swung out into Lake Ontario from (I think it was) Oakville. You could do the same thing from the east.

The reason governments have to cater to the car rather than trying to kill it is because people obviously are not going to give them up any time soon and, if complete paralysis of the current roads is to be avoided, then more roads have to be built.

I congratulate the Ontario government for the work being done northeast of the GTA in the Durham Region, where Hwy. 407 is being extended to eventually hook up with Hwys. 35 and 115 and expressways are being built to connect the 401in the Whitby area to the 407.

Most of the new roads will be toll roads and that’s fine with me. And a double-decker DVP-Gardiner combination could also be tolled, as could the pie-in-the-sky Lake Ontario Expressways. It’s fair game to toll new roads. It’s the arbitrary decision to put tolls on roads that have already been paid for, or to even consider a charge for the privilege of driving into downtown Toronto, that upsets most drivers.

The automobile is part of our culture and I expect it will be for years to come. A study conducted by the Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (a lobby group for automakers) involving 14,000 people in 18 countries suggested that a majority could not even conceive of living their lives without a car.

Those people contribute to the economies of their countries by purchasing automobiles built by workers and then spending thousands of dollars each year on maintenance and gas and oil, all of which is taxed. People who do not own cars, and who seem to be getting all the attention these days, do not.

In the end, car people deserve consideration and respect. I suggest we’re not getting our share. nmcdonald@thestar.ca