Our city, like most cities, loves to talk about traffic. We complain about congestion, poorly timed traffic lights, and the “terrible drivers” who seem to be everywhere. But these conversations miss the bigger picture. To truly understand why traffic is such a headache, we need to step back and ask a more fundamental question: Why do people drive in the first place?
The answer, at its core, is simple: people drive to get somewhere. A person leaves their house, drives to the grocery store, and then drives home. But if we look closer, we start to see how the design of our city—our neighborhoods, our streets, and our destinations—forces this behavior.
Let’s start with the hypothetical driver’s home. Like most of our city, their neighborhood is zoned for single-family detached housing. This means their house is surrounded by other houses, with little to no mixed-use development nearby. There’s no corner store, no café, no pharmacy within walking distance. Everything they need is somewhere else, and “somewhere else” is almost always designed to be reached by car.
Now, picture the grocery store they’re driving to. If you’ve been to our local Superstore (or Walmart, Sobeys, Canadian Tire—take your pick), you know exactly what it looks like: a massive building set back from the road and surrounded by a sea of parking. The store isn’t just designed for cars—it’s designed to exclude anyone who isn’t in one.
Think about it: if you’re on foot or on a bike, this space is hostile. A parking lot that takes seconds to cross in a car becomes a sprawling, exposed trek on foot. There are no signs explicitly banning pedestrians or cyclists, but the message is clear: You don’t belong here. This is why drivers scramble for the closest parking spot—they’re trying to minimize their time in an environment that’s actively discouraging them from using their own two legs.
And here’s the kicker: when we design our spaces this way, we’re not just encouraging people to drive—we’re forcing them to. If the only practical way to get to the grocery store is by car, then of course people will drive. And when everyone drives, we shouldn’t be surprised by the consequences: congested roads, distracted drivers, and the endless chorus of complaints about traffic.
The thing is though, it doesn’t have to be this way. What if our neighborhoods were designed so that people could walk or bike to the grocery store? What if we built places where daily necessities were within easy reach, instead of forcing everyone into a car for every errand? What if we stopped designing our cities exclusively for cars and started designing them for people?
The traffic we love to complain about isn’t the result of bad drivers—it’s the result of bad design. If we want to fix our traffic problems, we need to stop blaming the drivers and start rethinking the system that forces them to drive in the first place.
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Photo by Golden West Broadcasting