I live in Dundas, Ontario, Canada, a lovely town West of Hamilton, a city of approximately 600,000 people. Unfortunately I need to venture into downtown Hamilton 2 or 3 times a week. I say “unfortunately” because Main Street, the only logical west to east thoroughfare through the city, is basically little more than a parking lot for much of every day. This was not the case 10 or 12 years ago when it was a free-flowing, four lane street. That it no longer is so is the product of the stratagems of various local politicians for whom the automobile seems to have become a symbol of everything that is wrong with Western Civilization. The politicians in question, of course, are almost exclusively on the political Left. Ontario’s Premier Ford, on the other hand, is a “conservative” who recently introduced legislation which would give the province the right to veto plans in various municipalities to actually increase their traffic gridlock by continuing to add bike lanes on even the busiest of their streets. I have several articles before me condemning him for the ignorance of this attempt to thwart the policies of those who apparently have nothing but the best of intentions for their constituents. Let us take a common sense approach to this debate.
I can hardly begin to enumerate the various ways, aside from the addition of bike lanes [and the horrific condition of many of our roads], in which our city planners have conspired to slow down the flow of traffic. I shall mention but a few. Speed limits in many areas of the city are significantly lower than the 30 m.p.h. that was standard years ago. On many streets, stop lights are programmed to halt traffic every 2 or 3 blocks. Also, as curbside parking interferes with bike lanes, parking is now allowed on some 3-lane streets well out from the curb, thereby reducing them to but a single lane. Herkimer, a one way street that leads directly to St. Joseph’s Hospital in our downtown core, has been so reconfigured. Almost from the day it was reduced to a single lane, ambulance drivers were complaining that lives were being put in jeopardy because they could hardly move at certain times of the day.
Typical of the mentality behind this agenda is a statement by Hamilton City Councillor Maureen Wilson who said succinctly that she was “not interested in the supremacy of vehicular movement as the No. 1 determinant” of her policies. She and most of her fellow City Councillors, in other words, don’t really care about the whining of Hamilton’s drivers. Yet as I considered this apparently “progressive” viewpoint, I could not help but remember a letter to the editor in my local newspaper by a concerned citizen who confessed that while he and his wife had subscribed to the productions of Theatre Aquarius for 25 years, they had decided to terminate their subscription because the drive to its downtown site had become just too long and irritating.
The logic of individuals such as Maureen Wilson is eminently debatable. While her belief that bike lanes enhance the safety of cyclists may have some merit, their increased presence adjacent to fast flowing traffic may in fact increase their users’ vulnerability. A couple of weeks ago I witnessed a father ranting at his 2 young kids, 10 to 12 years of age, in a bike lane by a busy street, imploring them to be very careful. Why, I thought, would he even consider putting them in a situation where a slight wobble of their bikes might leave one of them dead?
The delusions of people like Maureen Wilson are the delusions of the Social Engineer, those who feel they can control us like lab rats by manipulating the world around us. What is utterly beyond their control, of course, is the Inner Life of the individual, an impenetrable reality that is ultimately the determinant of all human outcomes. The father who put his kids 5 feet from fast flowing traffic was to me utterly irresponsible. And while stop lights synchronized to slow us down may seem to make sense, the fact is they incite self-centered jerks to roar away from one light in order to beat the next. These same jerks, of course, are hardly constrained by the lower speed limits in school zones, etc.. The Reality to which social engineers are impervious, in other words, is the Reality generally ignored in the narrative of the political Left, the Reality of our capacity as Intelligent, Volitional beings to live our lives with integrity or to simply wallow in the mire of our self-indulgence with no respect for the Law whatsoever. Marxism, DEI, etc., are rooted in the belief that all disparities in human achievement are the result of one form of oppression or another, and never of the actual “merit” of those under consideration. This idiotic vision of the species in fact informs the Left’s disdain for the automobile.
Part of that disdain, of course, relates to the harm our gasoline fuelled cars are apparently doing to the environment. While this is hardly the place for me to make the case that the Global Warming narrative is Conjecture rather than Fact, is it not absurd that the policies of Leftists such as Wilson are causing millions of cars in North American cities to languish in traffic gridlock, thereby spewing 2 or 3 times more emissions into the atmosphere than is actually necessary? Is there something fundamentally irrational about the Left’s eagerness to punish those of us whose quality of life is inestimably enhanced by the automobile? Yes, cars are not just a minor convenience, they are integral to the richness and variety of achievements and experiences made available to those in the Western World each and every day by the simple fact of their utility. When council woman Wilson says she is not really concerned with the free flow of traffic within her city, she is actually expressing her indifference to the quality of life available to those who elected her!
You may perhaps have noticed the frequent use of the word “privilege” in the rantings of many on the contemporary Left. Given their obsession with Inclusiveness, they simply refuse to admit that some ethnic groups have clearly outperformed others through the course of history. The Athenians, 2500 years ago, engaged in speculations about the nature of reality, the values most conducive to human fulfillment, and the political system most likely to foster that end, with a level of intelligence that utterly supersedes the level of thought evident in many cultural milieus today. As is evident in such architectural wonders as the Acropolis, they felt perfectly comfortable in using the raw materials of the natural world to the benefit of the species. Technology, it seemed to them, was a perfectly rational application of Man’s capacity as an intelligent being. I am not suggesting Western European Civilization to be the only one so inclined. The amazing Chinese, for example, invented the printing press in approximately 700 A.D.. But the inarguable technological superiority of Western Colonialists to, let us say, the Indigenous of the Americas, is highly problematic to the contemporary Left which insists they had no right to feel in any way superior to those they were encountering on their various expeditions. The Left’s devotion to Inclusiveness, in other words, demands it marginalize the significance of Human Intelligence and Achievement in order to validate its simplistic Neo-Marxist conviction that all the joys of life in the Capitalist West are the product of greed, violence, oppression, disdain for the environment and indeed a genocidal indifference to all non-White races. The use of the word “privilege” in this context is clearly meant to imply we are in no way entitled to the freedom and material comforts granted us by what up until a few decades years ago we proudly celebrated as the brilliance of our cultural heritage.
And what a gift is the Global Warming narrative to those who loathe the technological magnificence of the West. Everything we have is tainted. Given that there are many top-level scientists who question that narrative, one might of course conclude that the Left embraces it fanatically precisely because it validates its world view. Those who point out that the Earth’s temperature has been fluctuating wildly throughout all of history, are mere “deniers.” Debate on the issue is taboo! Dissenting opinions are mere “misinformation!” While I certainly do not have the expertise to make any definitive statement on the climate issue, I do know that the earth’s supply of fossil fuels is due to expire in 40 to 50 years. New sources of energy, that is to say, will inevitably be cultivated without the intervention of our “progressive” governments.. And yet here in Canada the Trudeau government has engaged in a relentless war with the Alberta oil industry, putting many out of work and imposing taxes on fossil fuels which have almost doubled the cost of driving a car for the average Canadian. The automobile, you see, has become a symbol of everything the Left hates about Western Civilization. Hence the introduction of policies which, rather than dealing rationally and pragmatically with the issue of our energy needs over the next few decades, seem designed to make driving a car little more than a form of punishment.
I know that Covid has had something to do with the problems confronting many inner city businesses. But the couple cited above who chose to terminate their 25 year support of Theatre Aquarius are certainly not alone. Traffic congestion in downtown Hamilton has caused dozens if not hundreds of small businesses to close their doors, this as a result of the utterly irrational, decidedly unpragmatic policies of Leftists who don’t seem to care about the welfare of the decent, tax paying citizens who elected them.