Raise the Hammer

My experience as a driver and watching other driving, as well as being a cyclist, is that I noticed it is SUPER EASY to get comfortable behind a wheel while driving in Hamilton, due to the sheer car-optimizing of Hamilton. I now take a coffee before driving onto the roads.

European downtown roads, in contrast, easily wakes you up as you need to be conscious. To some, that's stressful, and to others, it's just a Lazy Sunday Drive in traffic not being the least stressed trailing behind a car (often a North American make-it-on-time rush hour stress mentality).

Having choices other than driving (pleasant transit, pleasant walking, biking amenities, etc), makes it far less stressful when I do indeed to choose to drive behind cars in traffic. But Hamilton isn't currently designed that way; any slowdowns to status quo feels more stressful here than elsewhere. I wonder why -- and I think it's because one gets easily used to the ease of driving in Hamilton, and that's kinda an unsustainable thing in the big picture. My car was purchased as a weekend driver, to cottage, but it has become an unwanted commute vehicle when we permanently moved to Hamilton nearly two years ago. Slowly I am now able to leave it behind at home (instead of spending a third of its life parked at Aldershot GO) with the now-increasingly-convenient SoBi+GO commute.

Both the LRT and all-day GO will start up nearly the same time, and I might not need to buy a car again (instead doing a Presto-style tap-and-go in a carshare similar to Car2Go which is like SoBi for cars!) and instead renting something lovely like a camper or hatchback for the occasional long drive. With just a tiny fraction of Hamilton (10%) going that mentality, much more parts of the city can re-urbanize, lower tax burden, and increase tax base. It may take a couple of decades, but already read a statistic that less than 50% of kids are getting driver licenses nowadays.

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2015-12-08 14:25:08