"We need to look at the opportunities to focus on building transit ... realizing that the things that have driven us in the past, particularly related to the automobile, are things of the past," Caldwell said.
"It's not to say that automobiles won't be important in the future, but I think we all have an awareness and appreciation of the increasing energy costs and the congestion that flows out of that and the need to do things differently in the future."
Institute president-elect Sue Cumming said communities should work to make everyday life more pedestrian-friendly so people can go about there lives without having to rely on cars.
The report, entitled "Healthy Communities, Sustainable Communities," suggests about 2.4 million Ontario residents live in areas where they have few options for transportation beyond a car because that's just the way many communities have been designed.
The report also suggests fewer children are likely to walk to school today compared to past generations, and that has an effect on their health.
"In terms of our children's abilities to live a long and full life, that is now at risk," Cumming said.
"As we've learned from the public health officials that we've been working with, this is very much determinate on your postal code."
The Ontario Professional Planners Institute's more than 2,700 members work for governments, private industry and academic institutions.
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OPPI Says Communities Must Prepare For Car-Less Future
Posted on Sunday, November 11 at 12:57 by N SayContributed By
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Look at your newest Big-Box shopping complex near you. Or look at arial photos of cities, especially NEW parts of cities. If You were an alien looking down from a spacecraft you'd logically think cities were inhabited by multi-coloured 4-footed hard-shelled buffalo, roaming between gathering places...with smaller parasites fleeing the host everytime it stops. The new mall near me, in the middle of the indutrial area surrounded by residential neighbourhoods has just laid the sod, and there are no sidewalks. Daily i see people, mothers with kids and carriges, being dodged by dump-trucks and buses along this newly fashioned main artery. Winters comming and im afraid there will be pedestrian deaths.
The personal automobile is the world standard in transportation. That will never change. You might as well tell people on bike to walk to save rubber. Forgetaboutit...nobody accepts regression of freedom. We need to focus that problem sovling chat on new energy sourses, like Hybrids, hydrogen, or atomised eggshells, whatever. Its the people who drive the car, not the otherway around. Oil has always been handy, but combustion technolgy is still comparatively primitive. There will be a new feul, eventually. The market will decise. Necessity is the mother of Invention, Laziness is the father. This isnt Denmark, you cant bike across it or to the cottage in an afternoon. Cars are here to stay, Getoverit.
But we need to take a vital first step and really visualise a cityscape of neighbourhoods where people can do things without having to use massive transportation networks. I live downtown, just outside the core and its almost heaven. Theres so much more density and diversity of goods and sevices I can walk to everything i need. ya I have a Nissan Exterra for getting to the lake, but i can walk to get a coffee and a paper and almost everything else.
In the new sprawling subdivisions i have to drive down a small hiway to a strip mall just to get a paper and a movie. They are ecconomically sterile and void of character. Every neighbourhood needs a simple corner store...not a big strip mall 20 min away near the transit terminal. Stop designing Mega-cities and Mega-transportaion systems and all their Mega-taxes, focus on liveable walkable neighbourhoods with ecconomic diversity to support it with goods and services.
I think planners could learn a lesson from planners of 120 years ago....when there were no cars. Cities were made for people back then. Ironically, those older parts of todays cities are STILL the most convienient part of a city to live in.
Hal,
Ottawa
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"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
-Max Planck
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