By Kevin Potvin

Shortly after being elected to the board of the Grandview Woodlands Area Council, a neighbourhood representative body in East Vancouver, I was interviewed on Michael Smyth’s Nightline show on CKNW radio, “the most listened to radio station in western Canada.” The topic of conversation was to be East Vancouver’s popular opposition to provincial plans to double the capacity of the Port Mann Bridge and Highway One up to the First Avenue exit in East Vancouver.

Strong opposition to freeway expansion extends far beyond the issue of how more traffic will affect day-to-day life in the East Vancouver neighbourhoods that lie between the Highway One exit and downtown Vancouver—although that is a major issue too. There is also a strong and growing sense among the people of this community and indeed across the country about personal and community responsibility toward the environment, and in particular, toward the amount of greenhouse gas emissions adding to the increasingly alarming global warming phenomenon.

Most media commentators and political leaders and advisors still insist on heavily discounting this apparent altruism, preferring instead to continue believing in Thomas Hobbes’ and Adam Smith’s narrow view of mankind as strictly economically self-interested individuals. There is, say all economists, the insurmountable problem of the “free-rider” syndrome, wherein individuals, they are sure, will try to benefit from investments in the common good without paying their share, if they can get away with it, a fact they are certain will doom most community and society-wide projects, like any organized efforts to reduce a region’s greenhouse gas emissions, for example.

But that’s not what I hear in my discussions with people all over the city. When the topic of global warming comes up, as it does an awful lot in these days of brutal storms, record warm temperatures, and breaking ice caps, most people express a deeply felt desire to contribute what they can, alone and in concert with others, toward drastic reductions in our collective greenhouse gas emissions. The scientists who have been jumping up and down yelling their warnings for ten years or more by now may finally have begun to turn the tide, and most people, I think, are listening and have heard the message: we have to cut way back on the fossil fuels we burn, and fast, or all sorts of very nasty things will begin happening to the fragile layer wrapped thinly around the big rock called Earth which we know as our living environment.

People in all walks of life from the top-drawer executive to the bottle-collecting cart pusher, and from every community in Canada from the most urban and dense city cores to the most far-flung—and car-dependent—villages, are coming together to form one single and huge consensus: global warming is happening now, it is mostly caused by greenhouse gas emissions, these are mostly released by private cars, and we need to stop driving them so much. We need buses and trains to get around more, and we need communities planned differently so we don’t need to move around so much.

Both of these ready-made and obvious solutions require provincial government leadership, with federal and municipal levels of government closely following in line. Massive new public investments are required to re-tool our entire transportation and community economic infrastructure, and intelligent, non-ideological, non-patronage spending plans need to be developed. It’s not too late and the task is not too enormous. It’s made especially easy, in fact, by the breadth of consensus among the population about the seriousness of the issue and where changes are needed.

So, where does more than half my time being interviewed about this serious issue on the air in prime time with Michael Smyth go? Into helping him put aside his unbelievably juvenile fears that if the freeway is not doubled in capacity, all those cars now idling in congestion will add far more to greenhouse gas emissions than if they were all moving at highway speeds. There had been some opinion essay published in The Vancouver Sun a couple months earlier that made this amazing claim, made all the more amazing by the fact it ever got printed, and even more amazing still that anyone believed it. When Smyth first posed this “challenge” to me, a hundred possible replies played through my head, all of them taking more than one minute, and so dispensed with, because the silly notion doesn’t deserve more.

I could have said, look, that’s like saying a bus is the most expensive form of travel in the world, for that one minute after you pay to get on and the bus doesn’t leave the stop yet. I could have said that it’s like saying the Concorde is the cleanest form of travel, because for a couple of hours in mid-flight, you’re moving at a 1,000 miles an hour, never mind the getting off the ground or landing parts. I would have used the whole half hour explaining to him grade 8 math, wherein one learns to average out the overall speed of an entire trip to find how long it takes, or how much gas will be burned. The car may be stopped here, and traveling fast there, you average it out, and you’ll find anyway that a slower overall speed burns less for the same distance than a faster speed, so it might be less gas burned in congestion, but then there are the stops and starts, which burn more, so the matter of congestion or not probably doesn’t change the amount of gas burned for a trip from Langley to downtown very much one way or the other, it’s a totally irrelevant question, Ahhh!

No matter, when I finally did get this point dealt with, he only brought up another equally misunderstood point that has derailed even more useful discussion of the issue. Some months ago, a Greater Vancouver Regional District report found that the traffic between suburbs of Vancouver was growing at a faster rate than the growth in traffic from those suburbs to downtown Vancouver. But by the time the incompetent Vancouver Sun reported on it, many people believed it said that there was absolutely more traffic between the suburbs than between suburbs and downtown Vancouver, a whole different, and very astonishing thing, if it were true.

It is amazing that such a mistake could be made, for anyone who travels either between suburbs or from suburbs to downtown Vancouver would have a wealth of their own experience and observations to draw on to counter any misconception the Vancouver Sun might have placed in their head about the direction of travel of most traffic. The fact that growth of traffic between suburbs is higher than growth between suburbs and downtown Vancouver results from the already much higher volumes of traffic going from suburbs to downtown Vancouver in the first place, which of course still remains some multiple of traffic between suburbs. Add one car to a route another single car takes and you produce a 100% higher level of traffic; add one car to a route a hundred already take, and you only add one percent, but you still have 101 cars going here and only two cars going there, despite the 100-times faster rate of growth on the latter route, Ahhhh!

There I was, stumped again by the CKNW talk show host: what have I got to say about the GVRD report that clearly shows more traffic moves between suburbs than moves downtown, which, he surmised, made my community’s worries about more traffic in our neighbourhood unfounded, since all those extra cars coming over the doubled bridge and highway will probably turn off before getting to Vancouver—since Vancouver is not where most traffic goes anymore, he posed as challengingly to me as he did his point about wider highways reducing emissions.

Then came the commercial break, an ad for cars. Then came a traffic report: congestion on the highway is up, or down, who even listens to those? Then came a phone call, a guy who drives trucks for a living and who felt it was necessary to the economy to build way more highways. And then time was up.

So, in my ongoing explorations of what it takes to create positive and significant political change, I can add, in addition to duplicity, greed, and mendacity, that word for whatever that feeling is you get when you’re trying to point out a cookie to a dog who keeps staring, tail wagging and saliva dripping, at the tip of your finger instead and never the cookie. What is that feeling called, besides “Ahhh!”?

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