My battle with blacktop

My mother-in-law sent me one of those widely forwarded emails full of facts you MUST know. I rarely read them but this detail caught my attention:

Chances that a road is unpaved in the U.S.A.: 1%, in Canada: 75%.

The USA/Canada comparison doesn't interest me. We all know that Americans love to drive, and paving roads is the ultimate sign of progress in many congressional districts.

What is intriguing to me is that Canadians have avoided paving so many of our rural roads. Perhaps it's an opportunity in disguise...

My personal battle with blacktop, and the physical lengths I'm taking to turn blackspace into greenspace compels me to think about transportation, urban living and how we design our streets and cities.

In my neighbourhood, in fact behind my house, is a project the City of Vancouver calls a Country Lane. (Read more about our lane on our neighbourhood blog.) Country Lanes are a style of so-called "sustainable" street surface. Plastic grids and thin concrete tracks bear the weight of vehicles, and grass & gardens grow where otherwise a lane would be paved.

Water that would channel into overburdened storm sewers (think of the squalls we often get in Vancouver), soaks back into the ground.

Simple concept, but apparently expensive to implement. This is supposedly why we're not seeing a greater application of the Country Lanes.

A local business that builds country lanes for other cities argues they can be built for the same cost as asphalt paving. We've kicked off the debate this week, with a good story in the Vancouver Courier on the Country Lanes.

Because of our reliance on cars and trucks for transportation, we'll still be paving a good part of the world to come. But asphalt is nasty stuff.

I'm all for seeking new and affordable ways to design our streets, and choosing to say no to more blackspace whenever we can.