Let’s Ban Cars From Main Street

I think we should ban cars from Canton’s Main Street. Before you scoff or sneer, hear me out.  First, I want to address the notion that what I’m proposing is somehow radical. It’s not.

Is it radical to think the center of our town should belong to human beings rather than heavy machinery? Is it radical to want to cross the street without being splattered to death? Is it radical to want one safe, tranquil space for people free from the deafening snarls and suffocating fumes perpetually belched by personal tanks? 

No. What’s radical is keeping the heart of our village a gray asphalt wasteland oppressed by automobiles.

Also, cars are new to the world. For much of Canton’s existence, they didn’t exist. It’s not radical, then, to imagine Canton without them, and think their recent infestation has made our town worse. 

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, there’s a supermarket of reasons to think cars don’t belong downtown. The main ones being economic, safety, and aesthetic. 

Main Street should be the jewel of Canton. But right now it’s just a highway. Don’t you think that has something to do with the fact our economy is wilting like a neglected flower? The space that should be used for people to walk, shop, sit, eat, socialize, and spend money is instead given almost entirely to screeching, dangerous machines that isolate and destroy human interaction. 

It’s madness, and if it were the other way around, and some bureaucrat proposed paving a beautiful pedestrianized street into asphalt, we would rightly see how stupid and evil that is. So why can’t we see it now? 

Oral tradition tells a story of the North Country that parallels Billy Joel’s “Allentown.” As manufacturing giants abandoned us mid-century, it catalyzed the gradual economic depression haunting us today.

There’s truth there, but can it possibly be coincidence that at the same time, we shuttered train services across the North Country, and bulldozed homes and businesses, to make lebensraum for highways and parking lots? 

Like every other community in America, Canton carpet-bombed itself with concrete during crazed “Urban Renewal” campaigns of this period. Now practically every square centimeter of downtown space is for cars or the infrastructure necessary to support them. Imagine how many homes, how many businesses, could fit just in the parking lot by Gamer Craze? Or across from the Tick Tock and the CFC? Or behind Jreck’s? 

These vast oceans of pavement are almost always unoccupied and generate no economic value. If they did, every business beside them would boom, rather than immediately perish. 

Indeed, we need to exterminate the idea that cars create economic prosperity. If that were true, we’d all be Mansa Musa. The truth is that cars don’t generate economic value, people do, and cars prevent people from spending money more than they allow us to. 

Sure, cars connect us with places we spend money. But that’s only because we live in a purposefully spread-out society that requires us to use cars in order to get anywhere. And when we do use them, we typically go from point A to B, meaning cars prevent spontaneous interaction, and therefore spontaneous payment.

If you could walk up and down Main Street like, say, Church Street in Burlington, peeking inside each and every business, I bet you’d spend a lot more money on average than you would just driving to pick something up from one store.

In my mind, pedestrianizing Main Street is a perfect way to defibrillate downtown development. It’s also a good opportunity for those who whimper about stimulating the local economy to put their money where their mouth is. 

Canton, like other decomposing North Country towns, needs a creative and courageous solution for its economic ennui. What better place to start than creating an attractive pedestrian plaza at its heart? 

There’s safety reasons for this, too. It’s astounding to me there’s no national conversation around the need to ban cars based solely on the number of people they kill. Motorists kill about 40,000 people every year. Many of whom are children. Innocent people die non-stop in the North Country in car crashes. Many, many more are seriously and permanently injured. I know because I covered some of them for the news. 

About as many people die from cars each year as from guns. But at least there’s a vigorous debate around whether guns should be as ubiquitous as they are. Bizarrely, nobody seems to make that connection when it comes to cars. Is the convenience they provide worth that many dead bodies? 

I could go on about the asthma induced by exhaust pollution; the tire-particles that have injected microplastics into your and your children’s bloodstream, and poisoned every major water-body on Earth and its fishes; the decline of cardiovascular health due to cars eradicating the lost art of walking, which estimates say contributes to hundreds of thousands of deaths annually.

Instead, I’ll just say this as for the safety of cars: they are the leading cause of CO2 emissions, by far, for transportation. They are accelerating anthropogenic climate change and incinerating our atmosphere. There will come a time, soon, when we have to say goodbye to cars for that reason alone. 

Electric cars can’t save us. We still burn coal to produce electricity, and you won’t sleep if you read about the child-slavery behind cobalt-mining for the batteries. Electric cars will likely kill more people in crashes due to their increased weight, and they produce more pollution in terms of tire particles. Most importantly, they perpetuate the suburban sprawl that devours nature. 

Maybe you don’t care about any of that. Fair enough. I don’t either, really. At least I don’t act like I do. But I do care about beauty. Even if you think cars themselves are art, which I don’t, think for a second about the ugliness cars require of society. Think about the gray, the concrete, the congestion, the tangled maze of freeways, the death, the blood, the fumes, the noise -- oh, god, the fucking noise! 

Once you see all this, you can’t unsee it. You can’t unsee the hideous asphalt next to our babbling Grasse River, which is a crime against nature, or carving through the NoCo’s prairie fields. You can’t unhear the roar of Main Street’s highway that separates us from our neighbors, or unsmell the smog that blackens our sky.

You can’t unremember the yellowing pictures of pre-car Canton, where children played and people congregated in the street, and you can’t unthink that the town we have now, where such things are impossible, is much, much poorer and sadder.

Most of us are asleep to the existence of cars. They and their infrastructure have become as natural to human eyes as blades of grass. But once you are conscious of them, I mean really conscious of their imposing existence, you can never again breathe or hear or think or see without wincing at the hellish dystopian nightmare our communities have become. 

I am not being hyperbolic. Cars have annihilated every community. What even is a town anymore but a maze of roads? Towns should be like a big home, where people live connected to each other. Would you bulldoze the center and sides of your home so other people’s heavy machinery could pass through? If not, then why would you do it to your town?

Why do we make it so easy for passers-by to drive through Canton, yet so hard for the people who actually live here to walk in it?

I’ve always wondered how conservatives, who purport to care about natural preservation and tight-knit communities, can be okay with what cars have done to both? I also wonder how liberals, who whine about everything, have nothing to say about the bloodbath on our streets? 

Think how much prettier Main Street would be if we removed that hideous drag-racing strip and replaced it with something humans can walk on, lined with greenery. Think how much more tranquil an experience that would be of our downtown.

Think how pleasant it would be to sit in Main Street at dusk, eating outside on tables for the Indian restaurant or A1 Kitchen? Think how radical it is we’ve decided against that in favor of hollering, stinking machines that uglify and clog our downtown.

There are those who might agree with all this but still say it’s logistically impossible to ban cars from Main Street. Where would the cars go, they might ask? Well, they can go around town, rather than through it. And they can park off Main Street, rather than on it.

This would of course be frustrating to drivers, but I don’t care. Motorists are accustomed to all the privilege and deference in the world, so even a miniscule step down from that seems like an all-out attack on their rights. 

It’s like when white people get mad at affirmative action. The point isn’t about making cars less equal, it’s about making other modes of transportation more equal! Or equally equal?

Listen, if you like cars more than you dislike the way they kill children, our biosphere, neighborhoods and natural landscape, then say that. But don’t say banning them is quixotic or impossible, because it’s not.

We could rope off Main Street today, and lay cobblestone down tomorrow. Some dork from the Travel Channel would parachute down the next day to declare Canton a tourist destination. 

Overnight, our town could be as charming as those European villages that everyone adores, which prioritize people over cars. For some reason, we act as if it’s impossible to do that here. It’s not. There was a time before cars in Canton, and there can be a time after them. We just need the imagination and courage to demand it.