Among the many targets born of the Left’s aversion to Capitalism and the various benefits it has afforded, is the Automobile. Cars are Evil! A May 13 “opinion piece” in Canada’s Leftist Globe and Mail celebrates “how Amsterdam has broken the tyranny of the automobile.”
As is customary, those who engage in such rhetoric feel no need to justify it, any idea or behavior they loathe automatically dismissed as hateful or oppressive. Amsterdam, founded approximately 1000 years ago, is hardly adaptable to the automobile while most of the cities of modern North America were designed to accommodate cars and the free flow of traffic. Yet this perfectly pragmatic goal is now deemed somehow unjust. But of course pragmatism, dealing with the actualities of the real world, is in no way a priority of the contemporary Left. Indeed its fundamental Ideology entails a demented refusal to acknowledge many of the facts of Reality itself!
The “progressive” City Council of the city in which I live, Hamilton, Ont., has been engaged in a war on the automobile for years now. Many of our roads have intentionally been allowed to rot, violently assaulting the suspension system of every vehicle compelled to use them as well as the spinal columns of their drivers. As the article on Amsterdam implies, bicycle lanes designed to entice people to abandon their cars whenever possible have recently become a “progressive” obsession in many municipalities. All decent human beings, apparently, ought to use bicycles whenever possible. But while a significant % of Amsterdam’s population apparently does so, there is not a single chore I perform or destination I visit for which a bicycle is a sane, practical solution. Indeed both the use of bicycles as well as public transit are utterly impractical for 95% of the activities most people pursue in the conduct of their daily lives. Perhaps that’s why I so often see buses in the city where I live that are virtually empty.
This is no place for a detailed discussion of the impact of fossil fuels on our environment. Technology will no doubt soon render the car as we know it obsolete while, as I have stated elsewhere, the global warming narrative is fraught with assumptions which cannot be validated. Literally dozens of prognostications of impending disaster made over the last 50 years or so have proven to be false. But whatever the efficacy of the Anthropogenic hypothesis, the truth is the assault on the automobile is just another aspect of the Left’s loathing for Western Civilization and the tremendous benefits it has produced for the species, benefits which most of our Leftist political elites as well as environmental fanatics such as David Suzuki and Al Gore enjoy to the Nth degree, generally leaving a carbon footprint a thousand times greater than that of the average citizen, even as they hypocritically spew their platitudes.
The irrationality of their perspective pervades most every aspect of the Left’s campaign against the car. A June 11 article in the Toronto Star asks in a blaring headline: “Who can break the gridlock? ” It includes a picture of cars and pedestrians jammed together at a congested Toronto intersection. Several candidates in the approaching mayoral election were asked for their solutions to this problem. The most “conservative: [i.e., rational] of that bunch was Anthony Furey who recommended the elimination of bike lanes on various busy, major thoroughfares. To Furey’s suggestion that pro-bike activists had incited such lanes, the Star’s so-called expert responded they were fully backed by the majority of Toronto’s city council, as if its approval automatically justified their existence.
But here’s the truth about what’s happening in many urban centers across North America. The installation of bike lanes on major thoroughfares generally entails their reduction from 3 and 4 lanes, to 2 or 3. While this obviously exacerbates traffic congestion, gridlock is further induced by successive stoplights synchronized to turn red as the flow of traffic approaches. I could name several streets here in Hamilton where a half mile drive which ought to take 2 minutes, in fact takes more than twice that because every couple of blocks one is stopped by a red light. The ostensible goal of this tactic is to reduce traffic deaths caused by speeding motorists. Yet it is a tactic which, in typical Leftist fashion, simply ignores the fact of Human Evil. Those who drive like irresponsible jerks will continue to do so, accelerating to three times the speed limit in order to beat out the designated lights, while the 90% of us who are decent, law-abiding citizens will sit there idling patiently as the law demands.
What we have, then, are supposedly concerned environmentalists initiating policies which have significantly increased the time spent by millions of cars across North America idling needlessly while spewing their pollutants into the air. Equally absurd is the effort of those claiming to be concerned with public safety who strongly support bike lanes which put often unstable cyclists 3 or 4 feet feet from passing motorists. Just a couple of days ago on a very busy street, I passed two young kids in a bike lane cycling with their father who constantly implored them to watch where they were going. Why he would put them in such peril, I do not understand. Why any city council would support bike lanes on heavily trafficked urban streets, is equally befuddling.
The article on gridlock in the Toronto Star clearly exposes the flawed “logic” of the Left. Its overwhelming implication is that the number of cars on our roads needs to be reduced. It is the cars which are the villains! But of course there is no mention of the fact that the Left’s loathing for the automobile has led it to pursue policies which radically increase urban gridlock and hence automotive emissions, even as it pretends to be concerned with human safety while favoring bike lanes which clearly put people in danger. The hypocrisy of such tactics is truly repulsive, the Left and its brain-dead media accomplices blaming their enemies for the repercussions of circumstances which they have actively endorsed!
My local newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, having been sold to Torstar in 1999, is now unabashedly Leftist in its perspective. Hence its April 4 article celebrating the city’s promotion of 350 rentable electric scooters which will henceforth be welcomed on our streets. Pictured is the article’s young author smiling exuberantly as she rides such a scooter. But in this age where even those who consider themselves good drivers are texting and talking on their phones as they proceed, is this not an open invitation to disaster? Should a scooter operator or cyclist be injured by an irresponsible driver, of course the latter must be held to account. But the predictable result of the Left’s loathing for the automobile, its absurd notion that its presence on our streets is a form of tyranny, has been to inspire all others with a sense of entitlement which is truly absurd. One regularly confronts cyclists using our roads after dark with no lights or reflectors whatsoever; or flagrantly ignoring stop signs and stop lights which few motorists would ever ignore; or going the wrong way on one way streets because the laws, they have come to conclude, really don’t apply to them. Such is the sort of double standard that pervades most every aspect of our culture today, the Left putting its devotion to its highly questionable Ideology before the dictates of simple Common Sense.