Changing Society's Attitudes Towards the Automobile

Attitudes

cars = freedom
Therefore, cars are a necessity.

The automobile is what made the suburbs possible. It allowed people to live further away from their employment resulting in urban sprawl. However, the negative effect of  urban sprawl was increased traffic congestion, environmental pollution and other transportation problems. Public transit is not very reliable, customer friendly, or even available in many places within the GTHA.

Toronto suburbs (e.g., Beaches) were built because people wanted bigger lots; they wanted to live in areas of Toronto that were not as dense in order to raise families. However, people within these former Metro Toronto suburbs (now part of the greater City of Toronto) still had the ability to use transit, bike or drive because these developments were of mixed-use (i.e., residential, commercial, and industrial).

However, much of the 905 area is different. Bicycle use is often impossible due to the enormous distances between home and work. Although local transit service in many parts of the GTHA outside Toronto is improving, there are still not many options available for travel across the region as a whole. Intermunicipal travel across the GTHA via public transit is usually a very slow and cumbersome process. As a result, automobile use continues to climb throughout the region.

How can we change people's attitudes toward the use of the automobile?

• Would their attitudes change by themselves as the price of fuel continues to rise?
• Which alternatives to automobile use should be provided?
• Which method for changing peoples attitudes would be more-effective:
  1. rewarding good behaviour (i.e., the carrot approach)?, or
  2. penalizing bad behaviour (i.e., the stick approach)?
• As a carrot approach, should transit be free or subsidized to a greater degree than it currently is? If yes, how much free service could be provided, or by how much could the service be subsidized before it is taken for granted/abused?
• As a stick approach, would the introduction of a carbon tax, congestion tax, or tolls effectively deter people from using their cars?

Among the affluent, there is the attitude that transit is a "welfare service":

• Buses and streetcars are often perceived as dirty, old, and decrepit; as such, they do not appeal to this crowd.
  

The reality is, that although there are some old buses still in service within the GTHA, their numbers are dwindling as more of them are retired; there are also many modern fleets equipped with the latest in technology. A perfect example is the TTC's fleet of hybrid-electric buses. Most TTC vehicles, old and new, are now equipped with electronic stop announcers, which automatically announce the next stop to riders via visual display and voice synthesis.

• How do we change this attitude and perception among affluent members of the public, so that they would be more-willing to use public transit?
• How do we change this attitude among politicians, so that they would be more-willing to provide enough funding to bring public transit into the so-called main stream, where it would be perceived by all to be a mode of transportation worthy of consideration?

How Attitudes Are Shaped

People's attitudes towards automobile usage are shaped by the realities that they face when trying to use public transit. Buses and streetcars are often ill-equipped for people with large items ( i.e., groceries, bikes, luggage, children in strollers). There is also the public perception that the transit system is designed to serve the working commuter (in terms of schedules) as opposed to serving the public-at-large throughout their week. For example, outside of the City of Toronto, people are not free to take public transit whenever they want; 24-hour service is virtually non-existent. Where it does exist, many people remain unaware of it due to the fact that it is not widely publicized.

The Time Factor

• Time is a premium commodity in peoples' lives; as such, they tend to guard it.

• There is a public perception that transit takes longer than driving does.

• Toronto residents have the fastest transit system in the GTHA; however, transit service in the 905 region is infrequent and a slow means of covering the same ground/distance that a car can cover in a fraction of the time.
• People in the 905 need fast, frequent, regular, and reliable transit service in order to fulfil their needs before their attitudes towards automobile use will change.

Changing Perceptions

In order to encourage more commuters to use it as opposed to their cars, public transit needs to be perceived by all members of the public (i.e., including the affluent) as a clean, comfortable, stress-free, friendly, and desirable mode of transportation.

• How do we ensure that transit vehicles and facilities are kept clean?
  • by introducing fines for people caught littering on transit vehicles or within transit facilities,
  • by better-enforcing the bylaws that currently exist by hiring more enforcement personnel,
  • by hiring enough caretakers and cleaning staff,
  • by ensuring that caretakers and cleaning staff perform their jobs as required through proper supervision.
  
  
• How do we ensure that rides via public transit are comfortable?
  • by equipping all transit vehicles with ergonomic seating,
  • by addressing the crowding issue on some routes through the use of larger vehicles, more-frequent service, or the introduction of LRT or subway service within heavily travelled corridors,
  • by providing frequent service so that riders are not left waiting in the cold for extended periods,
  • by providing shelters wherever possible
  
  
• How do we ensure that rides via public transit are stress-free?
  • by providing accurate and up-to-date route status information (e.g., via the Internet or text messaging),
  • by keeping route changes to a minimum in order to minimize confusion for riders--especially kids,
  • by keeping transit vehicles running on-time so that riders do not show-up late for work,
  • by addressing the crowding issue, so that riders are not forced to wait for long periods before boarding a transit vehicle, thereby showing-up late for work,
  • by declaring public transit an essential service throughout the province, and removing transit workers' right to strike, thus ensuring that a situation similar to what occurred recently in Toronto (i.e., many riders finding themselves suddenly stranded) does not occur again, and that riders are never again used as pawns by transit unions.

      

  In addition to the economic hardships that would be faced by riders, emergency vehicles may not be able to arrive at their destinations quickly enough due to the added gridlock that a transit labour dispute would cause; this could result in loss of life. Therefore, although a transit vehicle operator's job may not be as skilled or dangerous as that of a police officer, fire-fighter, or paramedic; it is every bit as essential in the fact that it helps to ensure that emergency personnel are able to do their jobs.

      

• How do we ensure that public transit is friendly?
  • by eliminating stress among riders, so that they have no reason to complain to drivers,
  • by educating drivers as to the importance of good customer service,
  • by hiring secret customer service auditors to pretend to be regular riders in order to investigate customer complaints of rude or obnoxious behaviour among drivers, or perform random audits on individual drivers; transit authorities should fire drivers who habitually behave this way according to multiple auditors' reports.

      

  Employees within the private sector are usually fired for rude and obnoxious behaviour towards customers; it would only be fair that rude and obnoxious transit vehicle drivers should suffer the same fate.

      

• How do we make transportation via public transit more-desirable?
  • Many subway stations in Toronto are dull, old, and decrepit; give them a facelift where necessary, in order to provide more visual-appeal to commuters, thus turning them into places that they want to be as opposed to their automobiles.
  • Provide perks for public transit use, such as free wifi Internet access for riders that have laptop computers.
  • Provide news and entertainment on transit vehicles.
  • Introduce a transit lottery, whereby monthly pass purchased anywhere within the GTHA would be numbered for lottery purposes; the number that is then drawn each month would win the jackpot.

To ensure that lottery prizes do not eat into revenue, increase the price of the passes as necessary (e.g., by increasing it by two dollars per ticket, 500,000 passes would need to be sold for each million-dollar prize).

Shaping Attitudes Through Education

People may be educated about the benefits of public transit as follows:

1. by introducing a marketing campaign to advertise "transit as your ticket to freedom" which compares the cost of the car to the cost of transit,
2. by marketing transit value by branding and by visually differentiating service (e.g., different vehicle colours for different levels of service),
3. by forcing car dealers and vehicle licensing offices to inform the consumer about the true costs of owning and operating a car (i.e., including environmental costs in "real dollar" terms, the economic costs of gridlock, in addition to the obvious costs, such as insurance, fuel, maintenance, licensing, etc.)
   
4. educating young people at school about the health and environmental costs of taking public transit vs. driving.
   

Urban Development and Planning

• By building bedroom communities (e.g., Cornell) across the GTHA as opposed to mixed-use developments, developers are further-encouraging growth in automobile use; this practice is not sustainable, and should therefore not be allowed to continue.

• The province should strictly adhere to its Places to Grow Strategy in order to discourage growth in automobile use; it should set minimum standards of density for new developments, and encourage the construction of transit-friendly medium- and high-density communities, as opposed to low-density ones consisting of single-family dwellings.
• Auto-share infrastructure should be encouraged in order to allow for easy automobile sharing within communities.