Liberate our neighbourhoods

Quebec City is a funny place. Known by outsiders as a Europeanesque city with narrow, cobblestone streets, cozy cafés and four deeply-experienced seasons of great weather, I’m always struck by how different the city looks from outside the walls.

Inside the walls, the streets are narrow. Drivers are forced to go slowly thanks to streets designed to accomodate humans and animals rather than monstrous machines. They’re going to shut down St-Jean inside the walls this summer more permanently to allow pedestrians to spread themselves out.

That’s great, though it hardly helps those of us who actually live here. Sure, there are residents in the Vieux, but without an actual grocery store or public schools, living there isn’t ideal for most people.

Move outside the walls and you find a city that is as obsessed with accommodating cars as it is with building a giant ice palace for a pretend autonomous snowman.

On Saturday, I saw two very funny things. First, I saw a massive tour bus try to turn from one street that it isn’t allowed to be on, onto another street that it absolutely isn’t allowed to be on. The turn took 20 minutes. My kid tugged at my arm begging me to leave and I stood there howling as I watched the bus scrape past a Tesla parked in a way that is extremely Québec City — too close to the corner of the intersection.

This is a street where businesses, when polled, cried fowl at the idea of partially closing the street in the summers. The same businesses who take up parking spots for terraces and then force us to navigate sidewalks as their waitors rush past with platters of croque-monsieurs or poutine or tartars or whatever. It’s a nightmare.

At least when the streets are closed on Saturday and Sunday, we can avoid the gauntlett of these restaurants.

But this tour bus. It made a 37-point turn to turn left. Another tour bus waited behind, planning how to make the turn in just 32 points. It was a work of art. Oncoming traffic on this virutal one-way street came head-to-head with a bus with a quarter of its wheels in four feet of snow. Beautiful Quebec City and its beautiful tour buses trying to drive down a street that was built for horse and carriage. Patrimoine.

Then, I saw a women driving a car from Massachusettes. She, and I don’t know why, just had to drive down the closed street. A man who looked like he owned a restaurant on the street and who probably filled out that survey to say he hated closed streets (I have no idea) accompanied her down the closed street, telling her in broken English to take her foot off the gas. She didn’t and so he had to jog beside her with his arm hanging onto the side of her door.

Our obsession with cars is ridiculous.

Whenever we have snow removal nights, all cars must be moved off our streets and it’s then that we can see just how much space these massive hunks of trash metal take up. Sidewalks that are no wider than four feet buttress forty feet and more of road. When cars are parked on either side, it looks like the streets are smaller, because they are. They are no longer sidewalk-street-sidewalks but instead sidewalk-parking lot-street-parking lot-sidewalks.

Our sidewalks are too narrow with the snow to walk past someone, so we are constantly jumping into snowbanks just to let others by. Or, we walk on the roads because our sidewalks are never as clear of snow as are our roads. If you use two wheels to get around, you can power through the streets and banks. If you use four wheels? Forget about it.

There is no greater risk to children than being struck by one of these things. Kids cannot heedlessly play in the ruelles or on the sidewalk, lest someone plough into them with their useless car. Kids can’t walk to school alone unless they are lucky to not have to cross a major road with no crossing guard. They are prisoners of their own neighbourhood — one that locks up children to ensure that Ford 150s have the right to full use of our streets, run red lights, crawl past stop signs, park on sidewalks, tell us all to fuck ourselves while thumbing their giant truck noses; regardless of whether or not they live in Montcalm or Saint-Sacrement or Saint-Raymond or Beauport or Brossard or Gatineau or Scarborough.

They take a shit into our air and we breathe it in. Maybe we’ll be lucky and it will kill us before next winter makes us live it all again. Maybe we’ll be unlucky and the resulting respiratory injury will leave us in agony in an ER for 36 hours straight.

The snow purifies. It clarifies. Snow blankets the imperfections of city life. It renders road and sidewalk the same: impassable. It turns cars into snowbanks. Windshields into slides. Plain into mountain. Snow is the reason to live in this place. We remove it for the cars but leave it for the rest. Snow exposes our destructive reliance on these machines that kill — kill, maim, injure intently, injure by accident, destroy community, destroy walking, destroy rolling, destroy destroy destroy.

If entitlement were an object, it would be … No, entitlement is an object. And it’s got a gas tank, or big new battery, four doors or five or two, it costs the owner too much and costs society even more.