Whiny Cabbagetown not to blame
The last thing Cabbagetown, or Toronto at large, needs is more cars, Christopher Hume writes.
The lynch mob never showed up at Carlton and Parliament, but the anger unleashed when Cabbagetown residents refused a daycare in their neighbourhood last week was visceral. Normally mild-mannered Toronto and polite media had no problem venting their rage at yet another outrageous display of NIMBYism, worse still, one that involved the rich and powerful.
Who can blame them? If it’s not whiny Cabbagetowners, it’s Annexers Margaret Atwood and Galen Weston or smug North Torontonians kvetching about loss of privacy or threatened property values.
But before anyone throws that first stone, it’s worth recalling that there’s another side to Toronto’s growing army of backyard guardians. It was NIMBYs, after all, who stopped the demolition of Old City Hall, who saved Union Station, who killed the Spadina Expressway and helped keep the city livable.
One person’s villain is another person’s urban hero.
Children, of course, are untouchable. Any effort to thwart something as sacred as a daycare is guaranteed to raise hackles. Our failure to provide affordable daycare and adequately fund the education system speak of a larger indifference to youth, but if anyone asks, we care deeply about kids.
The hypocrisy notwithstanding, it’s worth looking a little more closely at what happened in Cabbagetown. Was the neighbourhood rejecting daycare because it dislikes children? Or was it something else? It’s true a lot of nonsense has been spouted about everything from noise to loud colours, but what else is new? Every neighbourhood has its share of fools and Cabbagetown is no exception.
The problem with kids is cars. In a city where many parents drive little Zack and Zoe to school or daycare, even the quietest residential streets are transformed into congestion zones twice a day. To make matters worse, a good percentage of these parents feel the need for tank-sized SUVs. Every morning and afternoon, they show up in their obscenely large vehicles, clogging roads and sidewalks, fouling the air and endangering pedestrians, including their own children.
The last thing Cabbagetown or any other part of Toronto needs is more cars, especially the vehicular mastodons popular with pathologically overprotective parents. Even strollers have ballooned to Hummer-like proportions. Cabbagetown is a 19th-century neighbourhood that predates the car; its streets are narrow and its houses close together. Little wonder it would be illegal under Toronto’s existing planning regulations, which are designed around the needs of cars and drivers.
But even in suburban areas where roads — wide, straight and fast — encourage speeding, the daily drop-off and pick-up can be a nightmare. What this says about modern-day planning and city-building efforts is not reassuring. Our failure to grasp even the most basic elements of the livable city is another topic, but clearly Official Toronto’s efforts to handle complex situations such as this have accomplished little. If anything, they have made conditions worse. Requests for city hall to install a crosswalk or assign a crossing guard are greeted with hostility and can take years.
Little wonder that NIMBYism flourishes in every corner of the city, especially those built when the prevailing urban design values were compactness, connectivity and coherence. Acting councillor Lucy Troisi’s argument that Cabbagetown is “delicate” shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but neighbourhoods can be easily damaged. This has nothing to do with kids and everything to do with our willingness to sacrifice the public realm to the demands of traffic. Though, like every neighbourhood in Toronto, Cabbagetown could undoubtedly use more daycare facilities, the area already has its share.
Sadly, Cabbagetowners make it all too easy for the rest of Toronto to sneer at them. They confirm everything people love to hate about entitled downtown elites who care about nothing but themselves. But if this episode says anything, it is that the city must come to grips with its traffic problem. And despite what Tory would have us believe, that won’t be accomplished simply by enforcing rules that drivers routinely ignore, getting rid of double parkers, illegal turners, speeders and the like. What’s needed is a reduction of the number of cars and a wholesale reorganization of the streets that reflects the priorities of a city where people come before cars and where being livable takes precedence over being driveable. Christopher Hume
is a former Star reporter who is a current freelance columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @HumeChristopher