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Citizen Hern — Page 3
WE’RE ALMOST ALWAYS wrong when we calculate the
risks of city life, insists Hern. Take driving the kids
to school. Why do we do it? Because it’s not safe
for them to walk. But do we know where the danger lies?
It’s not in the legion of child abductors (almost
all abductions are committed by parents). And it’s
certainly not in the flurry of bullets from the gang
wars (gangsters generally shoot other gangsters).
“Your child probably faces the greatest risk of
being hurt by another parent, rushing to drive their
own kid to school,” admitted Constable Tim Fanning,
the Vancouver Police Department’s media liaison.
Car accidents are the top cause of death for youth between
13 and 21 across the province. Of those 25 people who
died here last year in car accidents, more than half
were pedestrians.
That’s Hern’s point: we obsess over violent
crime, when the greatest danger comes from regular folks
driving their cars. “So why aren’t Vancouver
Sun columnists getting hysterical about cars?”
Hern asked in a recent essay. “Why aren’t
there 90-point headlines screaming about this?”
If we really wanted to tackle the main cause of death
and injury among citizens, he argues, we’d pour
money into traffic reduction.
Vancouver police learned this lesson in a curious way
last summer. More than 70 closed-circuit cameras hadn’t
stemmed the rising tide of late-night drunkenness, punch-ups,
and stabbings on Granville Street. So, on the August
long weekend, the police tried banning cars from the
strip. The effect was magical. Instead of having to
break up brawls, police spent their nights posing for
photos with happy revellers. All it took to turn the
chaos into a love-in, said Fanning, was a bit more elbow
room on the street.
Hern got his own car-bashing experiment rolling back
in 2005. When he and his friends heard of B.C. transportation
minister Kevin Falcon’s plan to super-size Highway
1, they decided to fight back. On the morning of Father’s
Day, 2005, Hern and a couple hundred pals closed off
eight blocks of Commercial Drive. Gradually, the cars
drained away. Neighbourhood children were the first
to leave the sidewalks, dashing out with balls and bikes.
The Commercial Drive Car-Free Festival had begun. “We
literally had no idea what would happen,” recalls
Hern. “When 25,000 people showed up, we were walking
up and down the street grinning, amazed.” The
next year, twice that number attended. Last summer the
party grew to two days. The Commercial Drive Business
Society cringed at the anti-car message—requesting
last year that the festival make room for a display
of fuel-efficient cars—yet its members nearly
double their receipts on car-free days.
For Hern, the street party was an exercise in participatory
urbanism. With dozens of organizers and hundreds of
volunteers, he says, the fest bound residents in common
purpose, making the neighbourhood stronger in a way
that no army of security guards could ever do. It also
raised a rude middle finger at the province’s
highway scheme.
By international standards, the Drive fest is hardly
radical. Paris covers a downtown freeway with sand for
a month every summer. Bogotá, Colombia, turns
its main streets into linear parks on Sundays, and London
is planning to permanently close a few of the West End’s
busiest streets. These initiatives offer fuel for Hern’s
plan to wrestle streets back from cars right across
Vancouver. He’s cleaned up his vocabulary and
won over planners, councillors, and neighbourhood leaders.
On a crisp evening this winter, he gathered a clutch
of neighbourhood types in the West Side kitchen of Amy
Robertson (wife of MLA Gregor Robertson). They nibbled
on carrot cake, sipped Gato Blanco, and studied Hern’s
nine-point plan to reclaim their streets. “If
all you do is block off a street, you’ll have
succeeded,” he reassured them. By the time the
wine was finished, Hern had convinced them to hold simultaneous
car-free days this June on Cambie and Main streets,
and in Kitsilano, Marpole, and the West End.
The effect is viral. A week later, he’d charmed
city councillor Suzanne Anton, the mayor’s EcoDensity
lieutenant and a budding climate activist. Anton enthused
that she could help spread the fest to Kerrisdale and
Killarney. “It’s time we started reducing
road capacity in the city,” she said after meeting
Hern.
Bingo. Changing the way we divide and share our public
spaces—that’s the pot of gold at the end
of Hern’s festival rainbow. It would squeeze thousands
of Vancouverites out of their cars, yes, and require
a massive patch on our frayed transit system. And it
would be excruciatingly painful for suburban commuters.
But it would transform some of our streets back into
places for living, where stepping from the curb would
no longer be an act of risky extremism.
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