I grew up near the centre of Calgary, living a fairly urban lifestyle through high school. While my family relied heavily on a car, I personally didn’t. I took public transit, biked, rollerbladed, and walked everywhere, only getting my driver’s licence in my mid-20s. My first real experience with suburban living came in 2019, but COVID masked how the community actually functioned for a few years. It wasn’t until 2023, when my wife and I started navigating the world with our young kids, that I finally clocked what was happening. Once I saw it, I went right down the urbanism rabbit hole.
Today, I live in Orléans, a suburb of Ottawa filled with single-family homes, parks, and pathways. In terms of the suburban dream, we hit the jackpot: directly across the street from us sits a massive park with playgrounds, a splash pad, a baseball diamond, and three soccer fields. It’s an incredible asset for a family with young children.
Living near great amenities like this should be an unquestionable positive. But the car-dependent design of our neighbourhoods and city creates a frustrating trade-off. Because driving is built as the default way to get anywhere, any desirable destination automatically becomes a magnet for vehicle traffic and a parking crunch. My issue certainly isn’t that people want to use the park, nor is it that we live so close to something worth visiting. The issue is that our transportation system forces almost everyone coming from any further than a block or two to arrive in a car. This chokes our street with parked cars simply because driving is the only convenient choice available to them.
This is by far the most evident during soccer season, when on most weekday evenings dozens of cars line our street. Taking my kids across the road to the park, a place they love to spend time that is literally on our doorstep, becomes probably the most dangerous part of their day. Due to limited visibility and traffic moving too fast around corners and parked cars, a space built for children becomes an anxiety-inducing traffic zone, purely because of how people arrive there. This feeling also shapes how I feel about the areas around schools, which should be places where children should always have their movement prioritized over any vehicle traffic.
This concern about traffic and parking on a residential street exposes a striking contradiction for me. In the suburbs, we expect our own streets to remain quiet, safe, and free from outside traffic. Yet the moment we leave our driveways, our expectations flip completely. We demand guaranteed, free, front-door parking at every business, arena, community centre, or park we visit across the city.
When every neighbourhood exports its traffic while fiercely guarding its own peace and quiet, we force the city to treat every destination as a parking lot, or just literally build more parking lots. We are trapped in a false choice: either live in an isolated, boring place where nothing ever happens, or live near fun things and interesting places, and watch cars ruin it.
It’s very easy to misdiagnose what makes these busier places feel stressful. Most people think that density and community activity make streets loud and dangerous. But human activity isn’t inherently stressful or dangerous, it’s the cars that are making us uneasy. The noise and hazards don’t come from the park, the local cafe, or nearby housing; they come from our insistence on accommodating and prioritizing cars in every square metre of our shared public space.
As a parent, you probably notice the physical relief you feel when arriving at a place that isolates cars to the perimeter, like Proulx Farm or a pedestrianised street. The moment you step out of the parking area, you can finally drop your guard and let your kids wander and move around more freely. That baseline feeling of safety shouldn’t be a weekend luxury we drive half an hour to reach. It should be the default condition of all our neighbourhoods, the places we live every day. We can still have places that are designed for cars to enable fast, convenient travel and other things like deliveries, but extending that design to our entire road network makes our city fundamentally worse.
We shouldn’t have to choose between quiet streets and vibrant, well-served communities. When we build neighbourhoods with safe, viable options to walk, cycle, or take transit for short daily trips, having amenities nearby stops feeling like a threat. Living across from a park goes back to being what it was always supposed to be: a genuine blessing.
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