By Tristin Hopper
To start, our suburbs are needlessly far from downtown. In a city of only 26,000 people, it’s not uncommon for residents to commute 15 or 20 minutes to work. Every morning, thousands of Whitehorse residents start up their trucks and traverse several kilometers of open country before arriving downtown. This isn’t Toronto, where commuting is a harsh reality for anybody who wants a backyard. Whitehorse could easily have been one of Canada’s most walkable cities. Instead, it’s an automaker’s wet dream.
Our major institutions are built at ridiculous distances from one another. The Canada Games Centre, Yukon College and the Yukon Arts Centre - two institutions that should logically be easily accessible to any normal member of the public – were built at the top of steep hills. Since transit doesn’t run late enough to accommodate evening soccer or concerts, ride-mooching is a cultural necessity for the carless. Even within our neighbourhoods, we seem to waste space for the sheer thrill of it. Our streets are so wide they could safely accommodate a drunken tank parade. The parking lots are similarly huge. Every summer, convoys of RVs pile into the Wal-Mart parking lot – all without disrupting the normal parking habits of Wal-Mart shoppers.
What it all adds up to is city where the automobile is king. You need a car to get to work. You need a car to get to school. You need a car to get to the bar. You need a car to drop off your recycling. What could be accomplished with a short stroll in Yellowknife or Iqaluit requires a 20-minute drive in Whitehorse. And the consequences aren’t just environmental. Every weekend, at-risk youth are forced to finagle rides with sketchy car-owners just to get home.
Like most government towns, Whitehorse prides itself on its greenness. We’ve got a sustainability plan. We’ve got public transit. But whatever we do, there’s no escaping that Whitehorse is hard-wired to be constantly saturated with car traffic. We can install four-pane windows. We can build more bike lanes. We can try carpooling in Priuses. But short of a post-apocalyptic rebuild, we’ll never turn Whitehorse into anything that could even be remotely considered sustainable.
Legend has it that whenever a country builds a nuclear bomb, they receive a cautionary letter from the mayor of Hiroshima, Japan. In the same spirit, every year Whitehorse should invite busloads of young urban planners to take a closer look at the Yukon capital. They’ll gawk at our streets, they’ll gape at our empty transit buses, they’ll goggle at our under-attended Games Centre – and they’ll make a solemn vow that this never, ever happens again.
