Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
So, what we have here ladies and gentlemen, is a classist and philosophical struggle between peninsular Haligonians who want the peninsula for themselves, and suburban Haligonians just trying to get onto the peninsula (using their personal motor vehicles) so that they can go to work and make a living.
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I can see how it can come off that way, but as someone who lives here this seems off in a few ways.
Most of the cyclists are younger people in the lower income brackets. There's this weird notion that the average cyclist is a multimillionaire tenured professor living in a heritage-designated South End estate, more often it tends to be students, retail and foodservice staff, and younger white-collar workers, and sometimes navy and hospital staff. These people would usually be making somewhere in the range of $15,000-50,000/year, and/or living off student loans. Most of the "woke hippie" types fall on the lower end of that range (it would be hard to reconcile a lot of salaried bank/corporate or military jobs, for example, the type of higher-paying job that tends to be readily available here, along with trades - this is a real factor for a lot of people that I think is overlooked), and on average most of the suburbs would be higher-income than that most of these cohorts. Other cyclists include people in public housing, and many of the people suddenly being priced out of mid-century apartment areas like Dutch Village. A lot of these people wouldn't be captured in "commutes by bicycle everyday" statistics (unemployed or retired people, youth, etc) and a lot of people drive or take transit some days and bike others.
Many of the profs associated with the ultra-Liberal Dalhousie type live in places like Bedford or Tantallon and drive SUVs, and a lot of people living in the suburbs don't work on the Peninsula. Most of the Peninsula, in turn, remains untouched by bike lanes. And of course some people do bike in from the suburbs (places like Spryfield and Fairview, not so much Fall River). And other people commute to work by bike within the suburbs, though most bike infrastructure isn't really built with them in mind.
It's a huge stretch to imply that the driver/cyclist dichotomy is a class struggle with cyclists being the "upper class" and suburban drivers being the oppressed working class. The reality is that there's a huge cohort of renters making <$40,000k/year living on the Peninsula, on its fringes, and in Dartmouth, all areas where rents have been steadily increasing, or suddenly skyrocketing, many already can't afford to pay both rent and car expenses, and this will be a larger and larger proportion if things continue the way they've been. If anyone's being forced to ride bikes instead of driving, it's them (well, us).
Of course there are also a lot of road network problems for suburban commuters but a lot of these are quietly being dealt with over time. And the city also puts in traffic calming measures in the suburbs unrelated to cycling that never seem to generate any complaints. Dealing with traffic is one of the main tradeoffs of living in the suburbs and I think most people here accept that as normal here at this point. And the actual impact of traffic tends to be felt more by the people living in high-traffic areas, not in the bedroom communities. These people also are trying to make a living.
A few suburban areas where I would say class and commuting issues intersect would be Spryfield, Sackville, the Highfield-Pinecrest part of Dartmouth, and the Prestons, although I don't think bike infrastructure has been a net negative for people in those areas.
There's no widespread distain for the suburbs or "suburban people" here in 2020
there's this weird conception of the Peninsula-as-a-whole as some kind of wealthy, Westmout-esque ivory tower, but it's very mixed-income, and the majority of people living there are not wealthy. Commute times are low on the list of most people's concerns, on the Peninsula and in the region as a whole.
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