A Sewer Socialists update

Happy Leap Day! May Leap Day William shower you with all the candy and rhubarb you could ever want!

This is the 48th edition of The Sewer Socialists! Apparently there isn’t any fancy gift or saying associated with the 48th anniversary of something, which makes sense because that would be a strange milestone to celebrate. But I raise this because you’ll have to wait a little longer to get the 49th edition.

I will be off next week for some very minor health stuff (to use a technical term), but should be back on March 14th with a new edition. Here’s hoping the city’s weird cybersecurity conundrum continues for a bit so I don’t have to catch up on too much news when I return. So enjoy this week’s edition and then take a week off yourself! I give you permission. I’m technically a doctor, so just tell anyone who asks that I “prescribed” it.

On with the newsletter!

Driven to death

Ellen’s nightmare

The incident stayed with her for a long time. She spent many sleepless nights revisiting the events in her mind. She was hounded by accusations. People called her at all hours of the day, silently whispering into the phone. “Murderer,” they called her. Yes, the man had died, but police said it wasn’t her fault. Still, a woman of her profile was bound to attract critics. And this was just one more way they could get to her.

On the evening of October 20, 1949, alderman Ellen Fairclough was rushing back home from Toronto. The Ward 3 representative (at that time, the ward included Ainslie Wood, Kirkendall, Strathcona South, and Durand West) had been at a meeting all day, but needed to hurry home to attend a memorial for her friend, Nora Frances Henderson, the trailblazing and controversial former municipal politician who had passed away a few months prior.

Fairclough drove back and forth from Toronto to make her trip easier. Most of the drive home was uneventful. She sailed along the quiet, new roads and crossed over Hamilton city limits on schedule. Once in the city, she turned from York, up Locke Street North, intending to make a quick stop at her home at 214 George Street before heading to City Hall for the memorial. She did not anticipate the delay that she was about to encounter and the impact it would have on the rest of her life.

Between Florence and Peter streets, in her words, “an elderly man suddenly appeared in front of my moving car, rolled over the hood and fell back again onto the roadway.”1 She ran into the Park Grocery at the corner and called the police, who carted the man off to the hospital. She wrote later that, at Henderson’s service, “I was so preoccupied that I could hardly sit still.”2

The police later told Fairclough that the elderly man had been walking through Victoria Park on his way to the Park Grocery. He stumbled on the curb and fell into the road, where Fairclough struck him with her vehicle. She inquired after the man in the hospital and was told he had suffered only minor injuries, but the doctors wanted to keep him for observation. There were problems brewing.

The man’s nieces told Fairclough that he was poor and alone, living in a small room by himself and doing what he could to get by. Some years earlier, he had lost his teeth and could not afford dentures, so was forced to spend what little money he had on select soft foods. While he began to improve slightly after admission to the hospital, the combination of his health and his age took their toll and he died a few months later without ever being discharged.

Fairclough was cleared from responsibility by the Hamilton Police. The injuries he suffered when she struck him were just enough to get him into the hospital, allowing doctors to care for his other ailments. Despite this, some of Fairclough’s anonymous detractors began harassing her over the phone, calling her in the dead of night to remind her of the role she played in the old man’s passing.

We can only speculate as to what would have happened had Fairclough not struck the man with her car. He may have lived for many more years, or may have passed away just as quickly. But, no matter the outcome, he was one of the many Hamiltonians struck by motorists since the first car arrived in the city in 1898.

A paper in the newest edition of the academic Journal of Transport Geography highlights just how deadly automobiles are to humans. Over 1.6 million deaths a year are attributed to the automobile. 1 in 34 people will be killed by cars (meaning in a car, struck by a motorist, or in some other car-related manner).

But, by far, the most staggering number is the author’s estimation as to how many humans have been killed by automobility since the invention of the personal automobile in the 19th century.

By the author’s estimates, somewhere around 80,000,000 humans have been killed by cars and automobility. That is double the total number of people killed in World War I and within the range of estimates for all people killed in World War II.

And, yet, we have warped and altered our landscape to accommodate the personal automobile. Some of the first considerations municipalities make when faced with a proposal for a new housing development or commercial investment or community asset is “how can we accommodate cars?” Any efforts to slow their free flow are opposed with passionate intensity by proponents of the personal automobile.

American conservatives have begun testing a new line of attack on public investments in transit and cycling and active transportation that Canadian conservatives will gobble up, sure as the sunset will be photographed from a million supermarket parking lots: the car is freedom. And anyone who wants to restrict your use of the car, be it through bus lanes or bike lanes or sidewalks or speed cameras or bumpouts or asking you politely to not drive a 7,000 lb. truck at 80 km/h through a school zone, is an enemy of freedom. Because consumerism is freedom and a true patriot is an obedient consumer and a car is the ultimate consumer good, designed to help you transport more consumer goods. All you’re good for is buying things and a car makes buying things so, so, so much easier. So shut up and drive to the store or the woke libs win.

The way we move is killing us. Cars are killing us. But they are held up as so essential, as so fundamental to who we are, as so needed in our modern world, that they are placed above scrutiny. These private consumer goods, which cost around $65,000 for new models, are considered items for regular, everyday people, while active transportation is framed as a pleasure pursuit of the wealthy and out-of-touch. The automobile industry, estimated to bring in around $2.6 Trillion in revenue each year, is considered essential and can’t be expected to change, while municipalities tasked with keeping people safe and healthy are slammed as radical and unreasonable when they propose something as simple as slowing the free flow of traffic.

So let’s unpack that paper in the Journal of Transport Geography and put it into the context of the greater Hamilton region. Let’s look the impact of cars, what we’ve lost because of policy choices that have centred the car, rather than humans, and what we can do about it.

And, since it appeared in The Spec after I started writing this, I guess we’ll throw in a little analysis of Scott Radley’s alarmist opinion piece designed to whip up motorist rage. Oh, and, to Hamilton’s paper of record: I’m still more than happy to provide a regular opinion column, free of charge. You know where to find me.

Let’s drive in:

Hamilton motor city

Before we take a look at the paper and how it applies to Hamilton, it would be fun to take a quick look at Hamilton’s connection to the automobile. And because I was obviously going to do a history section.

The first gas-powered automobile in Canada was owned by a Hamiltonian. An eccentric, wealthy, adventurous Hamiltonian, to be exact.

John Moodie Jr. was part of a rich and powerful family. His father, John Moodie Sr., was one of the founders of the Cataract Power Company, the organization that would eventually run the HSR and, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, become part of today’s hydroelectric utility, Alectra. John Jr. was an investor in his father’s enterprises, which afforded him considerable wealth, which he channeled into his obsession with new technology. At only 19 years old, he brought the first penny-farthing bike to Canada, riding it along the bumpy Hamilton streets of 1878, likely garnering baffled looks from curious onlookers. When “low-rise” (aka modern) bikes were popularized, he was the first person in the city to own one and would eventually enter the first ever bicycle race at the Canadian National Exhibition. A record he claimed, but that cannot be substantiated, is that he piloted the first motorboat in the Harbour. That accolade does not detract from his involvement in the construction of the Turbinia, the workhorse of a ferry that ran the Hamilton-Toronto route from 1904 to 1937. Even the ferry’s name reflects Moodie’s obsession with advancement; the original Turbinia was the world’s first steam turbine ship, that, when it launched, was the fastest vessel in the world.

But it was his 1898 purchase of a six-horsepower Winton Motor Carriage from Cincinnati that had the biggest impact on Hamilton. Moodie’s purchase brought the first gasoline-powered motor car to Canada. Shortly after his purchase (and the purchase of similar vehicles by other wealthy Hamiltonians), he established the “Hamilton Automobile Club” or HAC. The HAC was focused on safety and enjoyment of these recreational vehicles, but also maintained other responsibilities. At the time, neither the province nor the municipality considered the operation of motorized vehicles an issue of concern, so the task of determining the rules of the road, speed limits, and even erecting road signs was handed to the HAC. Hobbyists making rules for other hobbyists, and all. With only a few automobiles on the roads, that made sense. And this regime lasted for a long time; according to the Spec, there were only 18 licenced motor vehicles in Hamilton 5 years after Moodie’s big purchase.3

Even when the HAC began hosting charity events where members would show off their automobiles to the public, the idea of owning a motor car was outrageous to most Hamiltonians. The machines were expensive, delicate, and usually went little faster than the affordable and efficient streetcars that moved the city. This photo from the HAC’s 1910 charity event at Gore Park shows just how many people showed up to see what all that car fuss was about (and how comparatively quiet Main Street was pre-widespread adoption of the automobile).

It wasn’t long before the personal automobile took off. Government records indicate that, around the time of the above photo, there were 4,230 registered personal automobiles in Ontario. Just 10 years later in 1920, there were 155,861. That’s a 3585% increase. As more and more people purchased personal automobiles, the rules and organizations around them changed. Moodie’s HAC had, by 1913, joined with other pro-car groups to become an organization we recognize today: the Canadian Automobile Association. And, contending with the increase in car use, the City of Hamilton began implementing one-way streets in certain areas in 1924.

While car ownership in Ontario fluctuated notably between the Great Depression and the end of the Second World War, the year 1945 would mark the last time there would ever be a decrease in the number of personal automobiles in this province. By 1946, there were nearly 587,000 personal cars on the road - approximately 1 car for every 6.5 people. By the 1956, there were over 1.4 million cars on the road, dropping the ratio of cars-to-people to 1 for every 4 Ontarians (today, there’s 1 car for every 1.6 people in the province).

It was that year that Hamilton’s civic leaders realized there was a problem. The city had ripped out those affordable streetcars 5 years earlier and the province had seen personal car ownership increase by 50%. So Hamilton’s urban renewal-obsessed council retained the services of Wilbur Smith and Associates to devise a plan to solve this issue. The solution was a winding, weaving, web of one-ways and arterials that sliced through the city like the knives an enthusiastic butcher. The ultimate one-way street plan.

The plan faced stiff opposition from residents who worried about the confusing layout, the expropriations necessary to clear the way for wider roads, and the overall increase in traffic in Hamilton. Candidates in the 1956 municipal election expressly discussed dealing with the traffic nightmare in the city. Candidates in Westdale wanted less traffic on Longwood (which, at the time, connected to York and would soon connect to the highway). Ward 6 alderman Joseph Lanza had to defend his record as chair of the one-way sub-committee to frustrated constituents. Candidates in the relatively new Mountain ward - Ward 8 - all bemoaned the lack of adequate transit to the suburban communities on top of the escarpment.

But the plan went through anyway. By the next election, things still hadn’t improved. The mayoral contest was relatively quiet, with incumbent Mayor Lloyd Jackson facing off against the bowtie bedazzled, Liberal Party-affiliated, former four-term Ward 7 alderman William Harris. The Spec hosted “frank chats” with both candidates to understand their backgrounds and motivations. While Harris had almost no platform (and, by his own admission, no campaign staff or infrastructure), Jackson was concerned about the transportation situation in the city.

He told the three Spec reporters conducting the interview:

Jackson’s proposal for solving that problem? Building the Chedoke Expressway, a proposed Beach Road Expressway, and pondering out loud: “I think we need another expressway up the Mountain.” And, when asked about rapid transit, he answered “We are exploring the possibility of creating an elevated expressway over the top of the railway rights-of-way.”5

A delightfully 1950’s approach to the problem. Too much traffic? Let’s build some more highways and, you know what, let’s put some of them in the sky while we’re at it!

Hamilton kept leading the way in automobility. The Centre Mall was built as one of Canada’s first shopping malls, pushing out the Jockey Club and bringing a drive-up shopping experience to residents of the lower city. A few years later, work began on levelling the city’s core to build what would become Jackson Square, another temple to automobility, this time in the heart of the city that Jackson himself half-heartedly pledged to save (all while doing what he could to relocate city hall and push forward with destructive, car-centric renewal schemes).

Construction on Jackson’s Chedoke Expressway had actually begun a few weeks before his “frank chat” with The Spec. The first portion would be open by the end of 1963 and was completely finished by 1969. The calm creek running through the Chedoke Valley was diverted and run through ugly concrete channels. Westdale and Ainslie Wood were sliced off from the rest of Hamilton. The landscape had been changed to accommodate the personal vehicle.

The Chedoke Expressway’s sister road - the Red Hill Valley Parkway - was proposed at the same time, but faced more sustained pushback, and did not open until 2007 (I wrote about the recent findings of the commission set up to study the accidents on the RHVP in November).

The Lincoln M. Alexander Parkway (or “Linc” for short), the Mountain’s east-west portion of the city’s perimeter roads, went through a few different iterations, with some proposals hugging the Escarpment and some running along Rymal Road. By the mid 1980’s, plans were in place, and the whole project got underway with backing from both Bob Rae’s NDP and the Harris Tories, opening in October of 1997.

Mercifully, a few planned highways were abandoned before they could rip through our landscape. A speculated Lawrence Road expressway never came into being, nor did the proposed Waterfront Perimeter Road, planned to link the Chedoke Expressway to Burlington Street with a series of tunnels and car channels that would have cut through the North End and would have made waterfront access near today’s Bayfront Park impossible. The latter project did leave a mark on the landscape; the “Strachan Linear Park” which was the site of so much controversy during the debate over HATS last year was created when homes were demolished to make way for the Perimeter Road. Even though the project was abandoned, the greenspace remained.

But, still, by 1985, Hamilton’s core had been strategically and ruthlessly destroyed to accommodate extra vehicular traffic. This aerial photo from that year, just after the new Copps Coliseum was finished, shows just how much of the core had been demolished for parking and wider one-way roads:

Car harm. Harm caused by cars. Carm.

The paper at the centre of all this is called “Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment”. Authored by a team of five researchers from universities in the United Kingdom and Germany, the paper examines the impact of the car on human health and wellbeing through the lens of mobility justice. The general focus of mobility justice is on the safety (or lack thereof) that people feel while simply being on the street. Do you feel safe while walking on a sidewalk? How might someone who has previously been a victim of harassment feel in the same situation? Or someone who has been targeted by authorities because of the colour of their skin, their appearance, their gender identity, their financial status, or their political opinions? There are a lot of ways people can approach the idea of “justice”, but the goal is to ensure we all feel safe while moving from place to place. City streets are still the public realm. They are a place where each and every one of us, as residents, as visitors, or as anything in between, can simply be without unreasonable restriction or hinderance.

A central concept in the paper is that of “automobility”. This is a word taken from a 2018 book by Professor Mimi Sheller, who teaches sociology at Philadelphia’s Drexel University. Dr. Sheller defines automobility thus: “an interlocking system of cars, highways, fueling infrastructure, automotive companies, government policies, and car cultures”.6 That last part effectively captures an essential component of automobility in Hamilton, namely Spec opinion columnists.

The paper looks at “the negative consequences of the system of automobility, or car harm,” creating four categories of harm:

• Violence (bodily harm caused by crashes, both accidental and intentional),

• Ill health (everything from pollution to “sedentary travel” and the dependence and isolation caused by overreliance on the car),

• Social injustice (the unequal distribution of harm), and

• Environmental damage (the emissions caused by cars and what we’ve done to our environment to facilitate cars).7

What do each of these negative consequences in the context of Hamilton?

A History of Violence

Well, on the violence front, we have a pretty clear picture. As the paper notes, “violence” is the term they use “to mean ‘bodily physical harm’ related to motor vehicles.”8 That makes sense. “Violence” means using force to hurt, and, when someone is struck by a motorist who is in their vehicle, that causes hurt.

A report to the city’s Public Works Committee from last October indicated that, between 2018 and 2023, one person was injured on Hamilton’s roads every eight hours. One person was killed every 23 days. In those five years, there were over 40,000 collisions and 70 deaths on Hamilton’s city streets.9 For context, the exact same number of people were killed on Hamilton’s streets as were the victims of homicide in the city for the same time period.10 Simply put, over those five years, Hamilton’s murderers and drivers claimed the same number of victims.

The picture presented to the Public Works Committee shows an interesting dichotomy: total number of collisions is trending downward, but the number of fatal collisions is trending up. And the reasons for fatal collisions are heartbreaking: drivers speeding, drivers making improper turns, drivers losing control of their cars.

And there’s the issue of intentional harm. Cases of road rage are hard to capture, as only the most extreme are usually reported to the police. But there are other ways car-related violence has impacted Hamiltonians. There are now massive bollards in front of City Hall, installed as a response to the bus incident of 2019. The summer before COVID-19 was a time of intense anger in Hamilton, with the far-right Yellow Vest movement staging regular, hate-filled protests in front of City Hall. When a group of residents sought to push back against their anti-gay and anti-immigrant rhetoric, a far-right protester from Alberta drove a modified school bus into the forecourt. The bollards went up this year in an effort to prevent anything like that from happening again.

For your health

What about ill health? That’s a little harder to capture. The paper notes that cars impact “physical and mental health through a variety of mechanisms including pollution, sedentary travel, and social isolation.”11 Some of these are harder to capture on a local scale, but we have some facts and figures on this.

Hamilton has plenty of things that can contribute to poor health, but a recent study by The Atmospheric Fund indicates that Hamilton’s yearly carbon dioxide emissions amount to 16.2 tonnes per person (calling back to a terrible analogy I used in “Children of the Plume”, that’s slightly less than the average mass of one blended Gray Whale. Yum!). Nearly 1/5 of that comes from transportation-related emissions.

Studies on isolation tend to focus on seniors, but that’s still an important statistic to consider. In a car-centric community, seniors are particularly impacted by isolation; losing access to a car because of declining health means being cut off from resources, supports, and services you once accessed and navigating busy roads can be challenging for those of advanced ages. A Statistics Canada study of motor vehicle-related deaths from 2000 to 2004 found that such incidents were responsible for 13 out of every 100,000 deaths for people over the age of 65, a rate that is statistically significantly higher than the Canada-wide rate.12

And we’re in the unique position of actually having research on senior’s isolation in Hamilton. A research team led by Amanda Grenier of the University of Toronto published a peer-reviewed study of social isolation among seniors in 2022. The study involved focus groups and personal interviews, digging down into the relationship between place, spatial relations, and the factors that impact isolation.

The quotes from the seniors who participated highlight how Hamilton’s car-centricity impacts their daily lives. People spoke about not being able to access programs that were far from where they lived, having difficulty finding drivers willing to accommodate their walkers, and feeling unsafe on city sidewalks.

The authors raise an important consideration for addressing isolation in the future:

This isn’t even taking into account the isolation felt by everyone in car-dependent places (how many times have I complained about my adolescent ennui in the ‘burbs?) or the health impacts of what the authors of “Car harm” call “sedentary travel”, which they describe as a kind of “inactive” transportation. Further study required on that in the Hamilton context, certainly.

The Unjust Society

One of the most profound observations in the entire paper actually appears in the abstract. It is clear and moving: “While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it.”14 Sweet, simple, stirring.

Their evidence is moving: children and the elderly drive less than people of other age groups, but are disproportionately killed by cars. Car-related deaths are “highest in Africa and Southeast Asia and lower in predominantly white regions despite the presence of more cars per person in predominantly white regions.” Cars are even sexist; cars are designed to fit the “average male” physiology, meaning women are 47% more likely to be harmed in an accident than a man.15 The stats go on like that in the paper for some time.

Here in Hamilton, it is a little harder to directly tie things together, but by examining two stats - income and high-collision intersections - we can start to see how automobility impacts different people in different areas.

The city has identified 10 intersections with the highest frequency of fatal and injury-inducing collisions from 2018 to 2022. Four are in the western lower city, three are in lower Stoney Creek, and three are on the central mountain. When we overlay them on a map of Census Dissemination Areas (CDA) and isolate each CDA’s annual household median after-tax income, we get an interesting picture:

I ran some basic numbers on this. Hamilton’s overall median after-tax annual income for households is $86,000. The median after-tax annual income for households in the CDAs that border 1 of the city’s top 10 high-collision intersections? $62,000. While not everyone living in these communities will be directly involved in a collision, their quality of life is still impacted from living near these sites. There’s the transportation chaos caused by cleaning up after these events, the fear and concern about using intersections, and the emotional toll caused by seeing serious accidents on a regular basis. I can personally attest to this; I live near the intersection of Dundurn and King West, the 8th worst intersection in the city. Crossing each street is harrowing, with speeding cars regularly ignoring pedestrians in the intersection. I have seen a half dozen accidents at that intersection over the years and, on occasion, actively avoid the area if I get the feeling drivers might be too angry on a particular day or time (after school, right before holidays, if it’s rainy, snowy, foggy, etc.). Part of my community is off-limits to me because of how we’ve prioritized the free flow of cars over the safety of residents.

It isn’t just intersections. Isolating the CDAs that border Hamilton’s major highways - the Chedoke Expressway portion of the 403, the Linc, and the Red Hill Valley Expressway - shows a disproportionality; the median household income in those CDAs is $4,000 a year lower than the city’s overall median after-tax annual income for households.

The paper mentions other forms of injustice, like the reduction in space for those with mobility issues to better accommodate cars, virtually eliminating the possibility that those with differing abilities can use active transportation. That was demonstrated in the Grenier paper on isolation among Hamilton’s seniors, with one of the participants in the study telling the research team: “…the sidewalks are getting pretty rough to walk on. I have my walker and there are times it’s so difficult…”16

This isn’t even considering the impact of car-dependency on people of differing backgrounds or the elimination of reasonable choice in transportation for everyone. If your doctor’s office is at an intersection of two six-lane roads in the middle of the suburbs and the bus, which will drop you 15 minutes away, only comes every hour, do you really have transportation choice? Or is everything designed to put you in a car?

Once again, it would be great to better understand all this in the context of Hamilton, so…further study required.

Environmental concerns

As I already observed, nearly 20% of the Gray-Whale-slurry’s worth of carbon dioxide produced in Hamilton comes from burning fossil fuels for transportation. That has a huge impact on our environment. And, while a move toward electric cars will decrease the direct emissions related to regular travel, it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve paved so much of our landscape to better accommodate personal vehicles.

My reference photo of the Chedoke Expressway should highlight how much damage we’ve done to the environment to facilitate car flow. There’s the untold damage caused by gasoline leaks, oil spills, runoff from disused cars, etc. etc. etc. The paper notes the impact of resource extraction, tire waste, poor land use, and even things like noise pollution as being some of the negative aspects of automobility. Even if we aren’t exposed to the direct impacts every day, we are collectively feeling the impact of climate change, to which cars and automobility are directly contributing.

A car-conscious future

The paper concludes by mentioning a few “existing interventions” that are working to reduce the harm caused by automobility. There are some state-based solutions like congestion charges and replacing parking minimums with parking maximums. Hamilton has actually started to consider a scaled-down version of the latter, floating the idea of reducing parking minimums in the city’s urban boundary.

Set out in the city’s zoning by-law, parking minimums (meaning the minimum required number of parking spaces per housing unit) vary across the city. Downtown, any building over 13 units has to provide between 0.3 and 1.25 parking spaces per unit. It then varies for larger buildings or multiplexes, but Hamilton actually does cap the number of parking spaces at 1.25 per unit. Outside downtown, between 0.3 and 1 parking space is required per unit (depending on the kind of building), with greater numbers required for commercial, office, institutional, and industrial uses.

Last August, proposals were floated to reduce or eliminate parking minimums in urban areas in an effort to better utilize space. This move was even backed by the developer lobby group, the West End Home Builder’s Association.

There are other interventions raised in the paper, like ciclovía (the Spanish-language term for permanent or temporary “Open Streets” which ban all vehicular traffic), car-limited areas, and changes to on-street parking availability. And the authors raise the point that other changes, like increased use of car-sharing programs and the promotion of “micromobility” devices can reduce the reliance on a personal automobile.

As the authors note:

One great way to ease into these interventions or build public trust in alternative transportation arrangements is to slowly start changing the way we move.

Like converting dangerous one-ways back into calmer two-way streets.

The revenge of the motorists

That brings us to last Tuesday’s Scott Radley column in The Spec. Entitled “Brace yourself for Hamilton's looming perma-gridlock”, the opinion piece is a automobility propaganda tour de force.

Let’s just set aside the specific arguments (which read like they were prepared for Radley by the shadowy folks over at “Concerned Hamiltonians”) for a minute and consider the central argument: that cars are the paramount method of transportation and the goal of the municipality should be to ensure personal automobiles have as few impediments to their speed, movement, and goal of reaching a specific destination as is possible.

Radley does not do the hard work of taking a step back and considering the problem from a different angle. He doesn’t stop to ask if the problem is the road design or the number of cars on the road. He starts from the position that the car is supreme and builds his argument from that.

Radley’s column demonstrates the kind of automobility-based privilege that I mentioned at the onset of this piece: cars are considered to be so essential and fundamental to who we are that they are placed above scrutiny. You cannot question the car, so you must question what happens around the car.

That gives us the logical flow of his column: People drive cars → council wants to convert one-ways to two-ways → that will slow traffic → the proposal is bad.

A deeper, more meaningful analysis would follow a different trajectory: People drive cars → is that necessarily a good thing?

The specifics of the piece get even more frustrating. He writes: “More vehicles pass through the intersection at Dundurn each day (39,000 according to 2019 numbers) than travel eastbound on the Linc (35,000).”18 And then he takes issue with the plan to reduce the number of lanes and the traffic calming measures being proposed for the intersection, rather than asking if 39,000 cars passing through one intersection in a densely-populated urban centre is a good thing.

May as well say “You want to stop all these radioactive spiders from getting into my house by filling the gaps in my windows? But what about the nice breeze I get?” without any effort to ask if radioactive spiders should be entering the house in the first place.

Radley rattled off a series of issues he sees with the two-way conversion without recognizing that each of the issues he fears already plague those of us in the lower city: increased pollution, blocked emergency vehicles, residential streets jammed with traffic. Ask any lower city resident living on a street within a few blocks of Main or King or Cannon or Bay or Wellington or Sherman or Victoria or any of the city’s gaping, chasm-like, death trap one-way arterial roads what happens when there’s a minor accident anywhere in the city. Ask them about the parade of cars speeding down streets where seniors and children and humans live. Ask them if our present system of singular traffic flow is working for them.

And then, his ominous conclusion:

This is an interesting comment coming from a champion of the taxpayers. While the city’s current budget should be handed over to Jack The Ripper for a good slashing, a future council of ultraconservative fiscal hawks should invest public money to ensure private vehicle owners can move throughout the city with ease? We’re all expected to subsidize the inefficient, dangerous, and harmful transportation choices of wealthy suburbanites who, as Radley says, will look at downtown’s two-way streets and “quickly decide going to the core simply isn’t worth the hassle”?20

Though there’s one observation in his column with which I really took issue. One of the problems with two-way conversions, according to Radley, would be “a further division of urban and rural — or upper and lower — Hamilton…”21

I’d counter that the conversion of downtown’s dangerous one-way streets will not be the cause of further division in Hamilton. Rather, Radley’s column will do more to divide us than road conversions ever could.

Everyone deserves to live in a safe community where they have real transportation choice. Everyone deserves to feel okay walking down the street. Cycling to work. Using a scooter to get to the store. Making their way to a friend’s house using an assistive device. Everyone. Not just those with money. Not just those in the suburbs. Not just conservative Spec subscribers. Everyone. From Strathcona to Lawfield, from Normanhurst to Fessenden, from Highland Park to Riverdale. Every Hamiltonian. And that means we can’t sacrifice the safety and security of some for the automotive enjoyment of others. As the authors of “Car harm” wrote: “While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it.”22 At the same time, everybody can benefit from a reduced reliance on the personal automobile.

We have to get more people out of their cars. That means building complete communities where the necessities of life are within reach for those using active transportation. That means ensuring it is not only possible, but preferable to do daily errands using active and public transportation. That means stopping our over-reliance on big box stores and incentivizing small-scale, community-focused enterprises. That means making it harder for cars to speed through residential areas and encouraging those who instinctively pick up their car keys to run an errand to consider an alternative. That means converting large, dangerous one-ways into calmer two-way streets with ample space for public transit and active transportation.

If folks like Radley are worried about “perma-gridlock” downtown, that’s the solution. It’s just five simple words: Fewer cars means less gridlock. As the authors of “Car harm” point out, fewer cars on our roads will improve our personal health, the stability of our communities, and help protect our fragile environment.

An incident with a car led to a nightmare scenario for Ellen Fairclough. Cars have taken the lives of 70 people in this city since 2018. The over-use of the personal automobile has encouraged civic leaders to warp our landscape and hand precious public space over to a dangerous and harmful private consumer good.

But a better world is possible. And that’s a world with fewer cars.

I’m sorry.

I have a confession. The burden of holding this secret is just too great for me to bear any longer. I’ve wrestled with this for a long, long time and know that it is finally time to speak my truth. I know that some of you will be offended by this. Some of you will be hurt by this. Some of you may never trust me again because of this. But I have to be honest with you and with myself.

Okay, here goes.

I don’t like Roma Pizza.

And I am so sorry for the hurt and pain I am causing by saying that.

I have never understood the appeal. I like my pizza hot, with plenty of cheese, covered in olives and mushrooms. Bonus points if it has a stuffed crust.

But Roma Pizza? I don’t know. Maybe my skepticism dates back to elementary school, when my teachers would announce we were having a pizza lunch. I’d start to salivate, my young mind dreaming about stretchy, golden brown cheese, adorable little triangles, and the warm blend of grains, vegetables, and dairy all mingling together in one perfect slice of wonder. And then my juvenile fantasies would be dashed when those boring Roma Pizza boxes entered the classroom.

It is something I’ve always avoided talking about for fear of people doubting my…Hamiltonianness.

But I am much more comfortable saying what I feel now that I know Roma Pizza has thrown their lot in with Pierre Poilievre.

The future PM made a stop at the Roma Bakery in Stoney Creek to do a combo campaign speech/Roma advertisement on Saturday, before swinging by a car wash on the east Mountain to talk about the real issues Hamiltonians care about, namely cutting funding to municipalities, slamming safe drug supply which keeps people from dying of overdoses, and restricting trans rights.

Roma Pizza and the culture wars. What a fun way to spend a Saturday in Hamilton!

Anyway, if the folks over at Roma are okay with Poilievre, then I’m okay without Roma Pizza.

Paradise lost, parking lot found

On Wednesday, February 21, council’s General Issues Committee debated what remained of a staff report on speeding along the construction of affordable housing by discarding inefficient municipal surface parking lots.

Most of the report was approved back in December, instructing staff to move forward with changes to four parcels of land across the city. Three of those would either be sold to non-profits or partnerships and one was to be reassessed to ensure it would be used for affordable housing instead of selling it to some developer. But two parcels at 5 and 13 Lake Avenue South in Stoney Creek were striped out and deferred until last week.

Those two parcels of land in downtown Stoney Creek aren’t anything special. They’re just parking lots. As the staff report notes, they “have been owned by the city since pre-1970’s, and have direct access to transit, and other amenities. Both sites have C5-Mixed-use Medium Density zoning in place.”23 These are natural spots for intensification. They are not being used to their full potential, instead sitting mostly empty as temporary storage for private automobiles.

Problem is, the local councillor and some angry residents are absolutely enamoured with those parking lots.

Ward 5 Councillor Matt Francis says (without evidence) the parking lot is “absolutely necessary” for the success of local businesses.24 A Stoney Creek resident sent a letter to council preemptively dismissing accusations of NIMBYism, writing:

Again, no real proof provided. Just an assumption that cars = good business. The Stoney Creek BIA delegated to council, also preemptively rejecting a NIMBY label, saying that the plan for housing on the site, which is called “Veteran’s Lane”, would be destroying something that exists “in honour of those who made the ultimate sacrifice” and that, contrary to assertions, the parking lot “is a busy, important, and useful part of our community.”26

A cavalcade of delegations, a petition submitted to council with 1,318 signatures, another petition on change.org with 964 signatures, a chorus of right-wing councillors - each and every one of them standing in defence of the humble parking lot.

And, at the end of the day, they won. With grit and determination, those stalwart champions of the status quo were able to prevent desperately-needed affordable housing for vulnerable people from taking away 57 of their beloved parking spaces.

Fifty-seven parking spaces. Which could have been replaced with over sixty units of housing and another 30 parking spaces, meaning the total parking loss would have been just 27 spaces.

The CBC Hamilton story on the decision made it into the CBC’s most read articles list across Canada. From coast to coast to coast, Canadians read about how half of Hamilton city council wanted 27 parking lots more than housing, which should be more than a little embarrassing for the 8 councillors who now have the nationally-applied label of “woefully out of touch” applied to them.

To put the decision in perspective, the entire parking lot would have lost just under 1/3 of its total area. Only 29% of “Veteran’s Lane” would have been converted to housing, leaving the remaining 71% of the alley (around 80 metres worth) open as an access to the remaining parking lot behind the Legion and various health care-related businesses on King St. East.

There’s a lot that can be said about this. There’s the complete inability to think beyond the steering wheel, the knee-jerk reactions of business owners who equate car traffic with profitability, and the shameful attempts to frame the proposal as some kind of “affront” to veterans. I mean…we’re talking about some pavement, not the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

But the person who shoulders the bulk of the blame here is Councillor Matt Francis.

This was an instance for Francis to show real leadership. An ideal politician must be many things. They need to be a legislator, a negotiator, a problem-solver, a critical thinker, and an educator. In this case, Francis needed to embody the latter role with gusto.

Hamilton’s wards are (overly) large, with diverse populations and a variety of perspectives and opinions in each community. In a case like this, a municipal politician must not simply vote in favour of or against a project, but do the hard work of informing people about a project’s benefits, justification, and drawbacks. They have to distill the complicated staff reports, reach out to those with concerns, and explain the benefits of a project to people who might have serious questions.

Councillor Francis had a choice. He could have worked to understand what staff proposed. He could have taken a look at the rental housing situation around Lake Avenue and realized there are presently no apartments available for under $1650/month. He could have reconsidered his own comments during the encampment protocol debates and connected the fact that a lack of affordable housing in Hamilton is contributing to the crisis. He could have picked up a copy of Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise and read the first couple pages, which include the lines:

He could have strapped on his running shoes, wandered on down to the stores in the Stoney Creek BIA, and brought the same gumption he brought to keeping the Canal Piers open to explaining to concerned business owners that a loss of parking does not necessarily mean a loss of business, especially when that parking is replaced with new residents. He could have explained that studies show people who cycle or walk to businesses spend more and are more loyal to that business than motorists or that business owners all too often overestimate the number of customers who arrive by car. He could have even pointed out that 2/3 of the parking lot would remain intact, with only small parcels on Lake Avenue South turned into housing and the other 4,450 square metres of parking lot remaining dedicated to the car.

But he didn’t. He noticed there was mild resistance and fed into the fears of residents and business owners, rallied council’s right wing around the idea that those few parking spaces under threat were absolutely essential, and pitched a half-baked plan to build housing on the site of an existing community centre. At the end of the day, Francis thought more about his own political career than the wellbeing of the thousands of Hamiltonians stuck on housing waitlists.

Francis’s actions stand in stark contrast to the efforts of those councillors who voted in favour of the report. Following the proposal’s defeat, Hamilton’s progressive councillors sprung into action, launching an evidence-based campaign to provide people with the facts surrounding the site.

Right after the vote, Ward 1’s Maureen Wilson posted on X/Twitter: “Today's decision to prioritize 57 free parking spaces ahead of 67 new affordable hsg units is a breach of civic leadership.” Ward 2’s Cameron Kroetsch and Ward 3’s Nrinder Nann both posted maps from the staff report (the latter of which was reposted by Ward 8’s J.P. Danko) that showed just how much of the lot would remain parking to highlight the shallowness of the opponents’ arguments. Ward 12’s Craig Cassar went further, zooming out and showing just how much available surface parking there is in downtown Stoney Creek, which was reposted by Ward 4’s Tammy Hwang and Ward 13’s Alex Wilson. Each of these posts was an effort to educate the public about the reality of the situation. Even just one of these posts did more than Francis bothered to do during the weeks of lead-up to this vote.

To her credit, Mayor Horwath even posted a statement that read, in part, “I am extremely disappointed in Committee’s decision to put parking lots before desperately needed affordable housing in Hamilton.”

Now, as Joey Coleman has pointed out, Mayor Horwath has an opportunity to do something entirely unprecedented in Hamilton’s history. She can use her newly-granted mayoral veto powers to override the decision, as it can be interpreted as contravening the province’s “priority” of building 1.5 million residential units before 2032.

But this would be an extreme response. Joey points out that such a decision might further divide council, making the conservative block more “solid” than ever before. At the same time, the national attention and community anger around the decision to save a handful of parking spaces in a housing crisis means Horwath will be skewered either way. Progressives won’t let her live it down if she lets Francis bully his way to victory and conservatives won’t forgive her if she overrides their votes. All that said, it would be nice to know what the mayor would do in this situation. If I wore her chain of office, I’d make abundantly clear days would be numbered for those 57 parking spaces.

Ultimately, it shouldn’t have come down to this. Matt Francis put his own political career before the interests of Hamiltonians. He was the motivating force behind this terrible decision. If anyone should wear a badge of shame over how this played out, it should be the Ward 5 councillor, not the mayor.

The final decision on the matter has been delayed, pending resolution of the city’s cybersecurity incident, but the hope is that the Canada-wide humiliation caused by the first vote will encourage some of the naysayers to come around.

Being Concerned wit da fishes

As was to be expected, last Saturday’s Spec came with its weekly A5 special: another “Concerned Hamiltonians” ad.

This ad was their 20th in the paper since September 23rd, 2023, meaning they’re up to about $31,000 in spending on these screeds. Sharing the top of A5 (prime newspaper real estate) with another boring anti-choice ad featuring a stock photo of a baby, the “Concerned Hamiltonians” ransom note was wildly different than anything we have seen before.

This ad criticized the police. Not just a mild critique, either. This ad accused the Hamilton Police Service of being in bed with organized crime.

There really isn’t any other way to take the incorrectly formatted bullet list:

• POLICE

• ORGANIZED CRIME

• or BOTH [missing a question mark]

There are a lot of questions that go along with this ad (Violence unparalleled to what? How many unsolved murders are there? Didn’t you mean $207 million? Where are you getting your money from, you strange people!?), but it is the general tone that is weird with this one. It takes a special kind of conspiracy theorist to claim there’s some kind of 1920’s-style friendship between organized crime and the police force.

Grandpa fell asleep watching old timey gangster movies on TV and now he says Chief Bergen is in bed with Rocco Perri!

Before this ad, “Concerned Hamiltonians” had been furiously grabbing at low hanging fruit. Council, the mayor, bike lanes, two-way streets, all manner of hippy dippy crunchy granola left-wing stuff. But this ad really changes things.

It is still generally accepted that mainstream conservatives are mostly pro-police. There haven’t been very many good studies on political position and support for the police since the ruckus around the whole Defund movement died down, but the provincial Tories have released a few statements since 2018 highlighting their commitment to “always respect veterans, soldiers, and police” and their commitment to “providing police services across the province with the tools they need to combat crime and keep our communities safe.” Safe to say, Ontario’s PC Party is the party of pro-police voices (see: the PC-aligned block on the Hamilton Police Services Board).

This “Concerned Hamiltonians” ad reads less like it came from a supporter of the provincial Tories and more like it came from a person on the fringe of the People’s Party. As I’ve written about before, right-wing populism is a little “thin” as an ideology, meaning it can be layered on top of other “thicker” ideologies. Doug Ford’s ideology is a folksy, nostalgia-laden kind of Canadian colonial conservative-liberalism (basically: free market and the way things always were = good), which incorporates a healthy dose of support for authority figures. This ad signals a dramatic departure from that and into the kind of right-wing stuff you see in the deep, dark, conspiracy-tinged, Convoy-esque, Q-Anony corners of the internet.

This doesn’t necessarily change my theory about the ads coming from Mountain-based Tories keen to build a mailing list to hinder the political careers of people they don’t like. But it does broaden the pool of suspects and their motivations. If you’ll remember, there were a couple of fringe right-wing candidates in the 2022 election that spent loads of their own money trying to win school board seats so they could Make Hamilton Florida Again or something. Though, if it were one of those PPC/New Blue Party affiliated people, they’d likely lean heavily into attacking “woke” stuff because their brains have been rotted by watching too much Newsmax or One America News or whatever weird MAGA outlet they have on permanently in the background while they complain to people on the internet about their divorces.

This ad alters my feelings on the group slightly. We’ll have to wait until Saturday to see if this ad was a one-off or if it signals a change in strategy for Hamilton’s number one dark money outfit.

Oh, one last fun thing. Remember how I said their QR codes were “bricked out” because of that blue bar? Turns out the blue bar doesn’t appear in print, just on the Spec’s “PressReader” service, which allows you to look at PDF copies of the paper online. It isn’t a blue bar at all…it’s a hyperlink. So I clicked on the QR code and it sent me to a Google Forms page where “Concerned Hamiltonians” asks people to:

Oh yeah? So anyone who wants to provide that group a little feedback can do so at their Google Form, which is right here at this link? Anyone can provide any comments they want? Interesting.

Have fun!

Cool facts for cool people

• Every age group in Canada is less satisfied with their standard of living than they were 17 years ago. Innovative Research recently released a poll conducted last month on satisfaction with standards of living across age groups. Us millennials are super unhappy with things. 39% of us say we are “somewhat” or “very dissatisfied” with our standard of living, which has us equal to the kids these days in Gen Z. Only those born before 1965 (Boomers and older) report more satisfaction than dissatisfaction with their standard of living. But even they have seen a noticeable decline in the past 17 years. Ahh, what a time to be alive.

• The Turkeys Have Eyes. And what they’re seeing has made them mad as hell. The residents of Louiseville, a small town outside Trois-Rivières, must have done something to make the turkey gods mad, because there have been a rash of turkey-related attacks over the past few days. The town’s mayor says that around 6 turkeys have been “circling” the town, leading to a handful of “incidents” where residents have battled it out with the birds. The mayor has vowed to crack down on the turkey terror, saying that he’ll enact a bylaw if need be because, and I quote, “Turkeys don't make the laws here in Louiseville.” I invite you to create your own jokes from that line.

• A town in Alberta was so mad that efforts were made to make queer kids feel safe that they initiated a plebiscite on a by-law that would paint over the Pride crosswalk that was created for them. The small town of Westlock is 90 kilometres north of Edmonton. There wasn’t some massive push by the queer community for flags and community centres and drag brunches - just one little crosswalk that was painted 8 months ago. The idea of a rainbow coloured crosswalk so incensed some members of the community that they created the Westlock Neutrality Team, dedicated to Making Westlock Bland Again. They petitioned the town council with a binding request to ban Pride flags and crosswalks. The town council realized the petition was stupid and didn’t proceed with it. But, Alberta being Alberta, because of how they did it, the petition then went to a binding plebiscite of town residents. In the end, 663 voted for the bylaw (against the crosswalk) and 639 voted against the bylaw (for common sense). At the end of the day, anger won out, and the town of Westlock told queer kids “we don’t want your kind around here.”