A commentary by an architect and urbanist.
Growing up in a small town, getting a driver’s licence was a rite of passage — a moment that marked the transition to adulthood. For a self-proclaimed car lover, it was more than just a legal milestone; it was a key to freedom and adventure.
My driver’s licence opened up a bigger world, transforming familiar pathways into an extensive playground ready for exploration.
Over time, I traded that life for a suburban one, where the vehicle of adventure now carries my cleat-clad children to soccer practice. We squeeze in grocery stops and Home Depot runs between drop-offs and pick-ups.
My world is compact: The kids navigate between our home near Uptown to their elementary, middle and secondary schools. But the centre of our world is Braefoot Park’s Lakehill Soccer Association.
Our lives revolve largely around the Quadra and McKenzie corridors.
When the District of Saanich announced plans to redesign these primary corridors we depend on daily, they had my attention. Thankfully, Saanich has invited its residents to look under the hood of their planning and engineering schemes, welcoming feedback and opinions on the envisioned “transit-oriented density” and “multi-modal complete streets.”
I must profess that by profession, I deal with these issues daily, and dwell on them in my free time. An architect and urbanist by day, I practise a healthy dose of armchair planning by night.
While I approach these topics as a professional, I experience them first-hand as a resident navigating the streets daily.
I draw from the works of influential urbanists such as Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl and Leon Krier, but I also look for the easiest, most convenient path to get my kids to and from activities. Because I empathize with both perspectives, I am simultaneously supportive and critical of the Saanich Official Community Plan and the Quadra McKenzie Plan.
Ultimately, I believe we all want similar outcomes for our cities. We want to live where daily services and amenities are easily accessible because most of our lives are spent connecting one need to another.
We whisk around the city in our cars, linking our daily to-dos. Now, Saanich is suggesting we do this by bike or bus. But how will a bicycle pannier hold a family-sized pack of toilet paper?
To make the city’s vision of multi-modal transit a reality and truly replace car use, it must connect our homes with the shops and services in our commercial centres, which includes the last mile of our journey.
Once expanded bus networks, safe bike routes, and sidewalks penetrate deep into our suburban neighbourhoods, we can start considering them as alternatives to the car.
Unfortunately, it’s a chicken and egg situation.
sa国际传媒 Transit hesitates to expand this network until threshold ridership is established, which is unlikely in the low-density reaches of our municipality.
Making our Saanich neighbourhoods walkable and bikeable is a work in progress, as only 2.5 per cent of the needed sidewalks are constructed each year (per Saanich’s website).
Bike infrastructure has taken a giant leap forward in the past year, but the distances are still great, and many busy roads are barriers to casual riders, reflected in the current ridership of around eight per cent.
I want to propose a different approach: Bring the services and amenities into our neighbourhoods, where they are close enough to avoid going through the McKenzie and Quadra corridors regularly.
Instead of driving to a major shopping centre for a milk carton, we could walk to a local corner grocer. The type of grocer you’d find in what locals would call a “village.”
Before I moved to the Island, I knew these places as “main street.” But village is a term I’ve come to enjoy, as it suggests a space filled with people. It’s not a “complete street” that raises a child.
Historically, villages developed naturally throughout a town, with local entrepreneurs recognizing how far people were willing to walk for services. As a result, businesses were set up at regular intervals.
Basic needs were usually available within a five-minute walk, while more specialized services required a longer journey.
Neighbourhoods included a mix of uses, so within a 15-minute walk from almost anywhere in the city, you could access a variety of amenities for everyday needs.
This convenient distribution of services, along with the walkability, naturally provided a sense of place, because residents were connected with their surroundings.
Villages provide easily accessible services and amenities, and more importantly, they provide what sociologists call a “third place.”
This is the part of the city that isn’t your home, nor your workplace, but a place where you spend time with friends or run into neighbours. Places like barber shops, pubs, cafes, bookstores and restaurants.
Third places are particularly strong when coupled with public open spaces like plazas and parks.
So, what is stopping these villages from forming in Saanich? It has to do with zoning: a modernist concept adopted to make our cities orderly, dividing land uses into distinct, colourfully zoned areas on a map.
In zoned cities, cars eliminate the need for regular shops, and zoning bylaws focus on tidy, centralized shopping centres, excluding smaller businesses like grocers and cafes from residential areas.
This top-down planning strategy doesn’t allow neighbourhoods to grow organically, stifling the type of local entrepreneurship that makes communities resilient, inclusive and vibrant.
Reviewing the plans for the McKenzie and Quadra corridors, I admire the ambitious goal of achieving a 15-minute city, which aspires to village-like environments.
Currently, the core and neighbourhood hubs are restricted to a small geographical region to relieve “development pressure” on traditional residential neighbourhoods.
A bargain seems to have been struck between policymakers and residents; increased density is concentrated in Saanich cores coupled with corporate services, leaving the remainder of Saanich to rely on vehicles to access these areas, bottlenecked in areas like Quadra and McKenzie.
Small-scale multi-unit housing (SSMUH) will add to this volume of vehicles without local commerce.
Dense cores along transit routes are needed to help solve the housing crisis, but when coupled with large swaths of homogeneous residential land use (the primary source of vehicle trips), it’s a recipe for debilitating congestion.
Evident in letters to the editor, Saanich residents understand this issue intuitively.
A more community-oriented approach would involve land-use zoning reform, encouraging a widespread mix of services and amenities within neighbourhoods.
This would activate walkable neighbourhoods with authentic destinations. As local commerce and employment flourish, sidewalks, separated bike lanes, and buses would naturally become attractive alternatives to the car.
And for the few folks who still need or desire to use a car, a vehicle trip won’t burden them or the city.
The Quadra McKenzie plan represents the sweeping change that has to anticipate everything. I argue for the opposite: adopting rapid incremental changes to test ideas, minimizing risk and allowing for adjustments based on real-world feedback.
As a principle, we need to enable locally minded entrepreneurs who build half the city and focus less on engineer-minded planning policies.
Ask, “What is the next smallest thing that can be done?”
If you are interested in this line of thinking about our cities, I recommend the following:
• About Here www.youtube.com/ @AboutHere
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
• Cities for People by Jan Gehl
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
