One More Lane, as a Treat

I come to you with a modest proposal, as all terrible proposals prefer to arrive.

The city, I have decided, should be designed primarily for those who do not live in it. This is only fair. The resident has many advantages already: proximity, sidewalks, neighbours, shops, transit, parks, the small daily indignity of being able to buy bread without first consulting a traffic report. The outsider, by contrast, has only a vehicle, a deep sense of grievance, and a God-given right to park directly in front of brunch.

This right is ancient. It dates back at least to the invention of the suburban plaza, perhaps earlier.

The first principle is simple: there must be one more lane. Not because one more lane will solve congestion, exactly. The literature has been annoyingly persistent on this point. Duranton and Turner’s “fundamental law of road congestion” found that vehicle-kilometres travelled rise roughly proportionally with roadway lane kilometres in U.S. cities [1]. But this is precisely why the policy is so spiritually satisfying. If more road creates more driving, then more driving proves the need for more road. The argument is not circular. It is infrastructurally round.

The second principle is that parking must be free, abundant, and located exactly where I have chosen to arrive.

It is sometimes said that free parking is not actually free, but merely paid for through land, rent, construction cost, public subsidy, degraded urban form, and the conversion of useful places into asphalt storage for privately owned machines. Donald Shoup made this point rather forcefully, arguing that minimum parking requirements subsidize parking demand, raise development costs, encourage automobile dependency, and worsen sprawl [2]. This is all very interesting, and I look forward to considering it once I have found parking.

Until then, I must insist that every curb is a human right.

The third principle is that cyclists and pedestrians are best understood as decorative obstacles. They give the city charm, like trees, but should not be permitted to interfere with serious movement. Serious movement is when I sit alone in a car occupying several square metres of public space while complaining that everyone else is traffic.

Ontario’s Bill 212 offered, in its own way, a magnificent tribute to this worldview by directing the removal of bike lanes on Bloor Street, University Avenue, and Yonge Street in Toronto and restoring those lanes for motor-vehicle traffic [3]. One must admire the clarity. Where others see a street as a public realm, a corridor of movement, commerce, danger, encounter, and civic life, the true suburban visionary sees only a delayed left turn.

This is why pedestrian streets are so suspicious.

Montréal, in summer, commits the offence openly. The city describes its pedestrian streets as festive places with activities, terraces, local shops, and distinct character [4]. Worse, they work. People appear. They linger. They eat outside. Children fail to be run over. The street becomes not a pipe for cars but a place, which is urbanism’s most dangerous gateway drug.

I confess that I love this.

I love the summer pedestrian streets, the festivals, the absurd luxury of walking after dinner without negotiating with a turning SUV, the metro arriving like a civic promise, the feeling that a city is not merely something to pass through on the way to a parking spot. I love that Montréal, at its best, allows one to exist at human speed.

This is politically inconvenient for the suburban persona I have been cultivating here.

He wants the city to behave like a destination with valet infrastructure. He wants cafés, nightlife, density, street life, festivals, old buildings, and charm, but also no traffic, no cyclists, no bus lanes, no delivery constraints, no paid parking, no walking, and no evidence that anyone lives there. He wants urbanity without urbanism. He wants the city as a theme park for drivers, every door fronted by a temporary stopping zone and every public square available for overflow parking if the vibes demand it.

He is, in short, a serious man.

But the city is not improved by surrendering itself to the convenience of people passing through. A good city cannot be measured only by how quickly a car enters and exits it. It must also be measured by how well one can remain: sit, walk, meet, browse, eat, protest, listen, get lost, find shade, make eye contact, avoid death, and return the next day without needing a small personal highway.

So let us be honest.

The suburban demand is not really for access. Cities already provide access in more forms than the car allows. The demand is for dominance — for the right to make every other mode wait, shrink, justify itself, and apologize.

I reject this, except when I am late, in which case I request one more lane, briefly, as a treat.
Then please pedestrianize the street again before I become any worse.