Getting more people in the area to be active is an admirable idea, but no amount of community planning is going to change our ingrained lifestyle.
Local Health Unit and In Motion representatives talked to county councillors recently about creating an Active Community plan for Wellington County. More than half the local population doesn't drive, and community design that focuses on vehicles is creating barriers to those non-drivers becoming active, they said.
Current street design is unfriendly to cyclists and pedestrians, sidewalks are often uneven - in some places they don't exist, and we have to get kids off school buses and out of cars, they said.
The impression was that we'd all be walking or cycling everywhere, if only towns weren't designed for cars. But it's not a lack of smooth trails that keeps people here dependent on vehicles, but geography - and pressure of time.
No matter how many friendly trails we build through Centre Wellington, people are not going to walk from Elora to Fergus to do their weekly grocery shopping. It's too far; it takes too long.
They're not going to bicycle to work in Guelph or Waterloo or Mississauga - for the same reasons. Seniors who don't drive are not waiting eagerly in their Fergus homes for smooth trails so they can walk over to Elora for lunch.
Some parents already complain about the distances their children have to walk to school, safety issues of young kids out on the street by themselves, or concerns over weather conditions, getting across busy streets, or simply the time it takes to walk (or even bike) to and from school.
Canada is a vast country, settled effectively only when first public and later private transportation was developed to eat up those distances. Even in the relatively small confines of southern Ontario we've created a society built on personal transportation, the ability for any one of us to hop in a car and get anywhere within a couple of hours. People in Fergus think nothing of going to dinner in Toronto, taking a day-trip to Niagara Falls, or driving for over an hour to work every day.
We don't even like the idea of waiting a few minutes for public transit - where it's available.
While it's a great idea to make communities like Elora and Fergus more friendly to walkers, joggers and cyclists, it's unrealistic to believe large groups of people are going to give up their cars and start walking or cycling to work, to shop, to entertainment - even within the community. Those who work, shop, or get their recreation outside Centre Wellington certainly won't.
Developing a plan for walking trails and other human-power-friendly initiatives is a good idea, but county and township councillors should be wary of throwing bundles of money into projects that won't yield much benefit.
Paving hundreds of miles of county road shoulders to create bicycle lanes is a luxury project that might look good to the environmental and fitness lobby, but there just isn't the volume of cyclists on county roads to warrant it. Suggesting that cyclists and pedestrians would use the roads in numbers if there were paved shoulders is a flawed argument. (By the same token, one could argue that building a multi-million-dollar sports stadium in Fergus would attract NHL, CFL and NBA teams.)
Upping the winter sidewalk maintenance budget, creating some cross-country skiing trails, helping groups create themed hikes on existing trails, sponsoring more community-wide In Motion-style activities, encouraging park use ... that would be money well-spent and should all be properly part of a realistic "active community" plan.
But it's going to take major changes to a lifestyle that demands a frenetic pace of work, recreation, shopping, and visiting, to get people to slow down enough to consider walking or cycling as anything other than recreation periods crammed into a busy schedule.