The 3rd annual transportation roundtable, hosted by Â鶹´«Ă˝Ířվ’s Sustainable Growth Initiative (SGI) and sponsored by , explored mobility from both technical and conceptual perspectives. This year’s discussions focused on the normalization of automobile culture, with keynote speakers, student presenters and panelists showing how public and active transport can advance key societal goals, including reducing GHG emissions and other pollutants while improving health and safety.
Opening remarks
Kevin Manaugh, head of the SGI’s Office of Sustainable Mobility and a professor in the Department of Geography and Bieler School of Environment, opened the day. He highlighted a recurring disconnect between engineers and everyday users of infrastructure. For engineers, improving a street often means increasing efficiency—more cars, faster movement and greater throughput. For residents, on the other hand, improvement might mean reduced traffic, increased safety and a more livable environment. These reflect fundamentally different ideas about what makes a street “better” and, particularly in car-centric urban planning environments, can lead to outcomes that align with technical objectives but not necessarily with residents’ everyday experiences.
He also pointed to the contrast between imagined futures of transportation—often depicted as high-tech, futuristic and visually spectacular—and the more grounded reality of sustainable mobility, which frequently returns to older forms such as walking, cycling and transit. For thousands of years, cities were organized around walkability; in this sense, the “future” of transport may involve rediscovering past logics rather than inventing entirely new ones.
Keynote: The War on Cars, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon
The keynote speakers, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon, co-hosts of and authors of the recently published , approached these questions through a mix of historical analysis and cultural critique.
They began by noting that no one alive today remembers a world before cars. The dominance of the automobile makes alternatives difficult to imagine. Yet this dominance is historically recent, concentrated roughly within the past century.
To illustrate this, Gordon referenced a 1939 Superman comic. In the story, Clark Kent witnesses a pedestrian killed by a reckless driver. Frustrated by the mayor’s inaction, Superman goes vigilante-mode and declares “war on reckless drivers,” destroying a car factory, and forcing political leaders to confront the human toll of traffic violence. The comic vividly illustrates the fact that, at the time, automobile fatalities were perceived as a new and alarming form of mechanized death—incomparable in scale, outside of war.
Goodyear and Gordon argued that this level of ongoing violence has been normalized, particularly in the United States, where road death rates (14.2 per 100,000 people in 2021) far exceed those in Canada (4.7). They argued this normalization contributes to a broader tolerance for violence.
The conversation turned to Donald Appleyard’s 1967 study Appleyard compared streets with light, medium and heavy traffic in San Francisco, finding that residents on low-traffic streets had significantly more social connections—up to three times as many friends and acquaintances—than those on high-traffic streets. Residents on heavily trafficked streets were less likely to venture outdoors spending time on the streets, and notably identified traffic, rather than crime, as their primary concern.
The keynote speakers extended this analysis to childhood, arguing that car-dominated environments have fundamentally altered children’s ability to move independently. The point resonated with the broader concerns of the event, co-organized by Owen Waygood, a professor in the Department of Civil, Geological and Mining Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal whose research examines children and transportation. Referencing developmental psychologist Louise Bates Ames, the speakers noted that earlier benchmarks for child development included the ability to walk several blocks independently by age six. Today, this can be seen as neglectful, sometimes with legal consequences. They suggested this shift reflects both increased traffic danger and changing social norms.
Bruce Appleyard, building on the work of his father, Donald Appleyard, further illustrated these differences through his research with children. Children in low-traffic environments produced more detailed and expansive maps of their neighbourhoods, identifying more places of play and demonstrating greater spatial awareness. In high-traffic environments, children’s maps were more constrained, often centered narrowly around the home, reflecting both physical and psychological limitations on mobility. The constriction of automobile-centered streets has a measurable effect on the independence and development of children.
Questions and comments from the audience about contextual relevancy, policy-making and alternative transport solutions followed. Road pricing, parking costs and segmentation of traffic networks (as in Ghent, Belgium) were discussed as mechanisms to reduce car use. Participants noted that many technological solutions, such as speed-limiting systems, already exist but are not widely implemented due to political constraints.
Professor Richmond Aryeetey, a public health nutrition expert and audience member, reflected on how paradigm-shifting the discussion had been for him, particularly as a citizen of Ghana, where similar ideas could be implemented. Aryeetey was visiting Montreal as a panelist for the inaugural Nkabom Africa Case Competition, hosted by SGI’s Office of Sustainable Africa the day before. His intervention underscored the value of cross-border knowledge exchange—an idea at the heart of the Nkabom competition itself, which examined how information silos impede food security.
Panel 1: Nature and cars
Lenore Fahrig, Chancellor’s Professor of Biology at Carleton University, presented research estimating that 15–20 billion vertebrates are killed annually on roads worldwide. Beyond immediate mortality, roads fragment habitats, reduce genetic diversity and disrupt ecosystems. While mitigation strategies such as wildlife crossings exist, she emphasized that reducing traffic volume remains the most effective intervention.
Catherine Guastavino, a professor at Â鶹´«Ă˝ÍřŐľ and co-director of the AIRS network, addressed noise pollution and its impacts on physical and mental health, including stress, sleep disruption and cardiovascular disease. Unlike visible environmental harm, noise accumulates gradually and lacks clear catastrophic events, making it more difficult to prioritize in policy.
Panelists emphasized that water pollution, roadkill and noise are interconnected and extend beyond emissions. Electric vehicles were discussed as a partial solution; however, they do not address issues such as microplastics and pollutants from tire wear, roadkill, or spatial dominance. Noise reduction is limited at 50 km/h, a common speed for vehicles to travel at, where tire-road interaction becomes the dominant source of sound. Additionally, artificial sounds added to EVs for safety may introduce new forms of auditory discomfort. Examples of environmental impact included tire particles contributing significantly to microplastic pollution, particularly during rainfall events, and the impact of noise on animal communication and human well-being.
Lunchtime conversations
Informal conversations over lunch reinforced the event’s broader commitments. Conversations at my table reflected a similarly wide-ranging engagement: a documentarian, an MBA student and an NGO worker exchanged perspectives on the less visible impacts of automobility, bringing different lenses to the same set of problems. In a separate conversation, Manaugh also noted that this diversity is precisely what makes the roundtables so energizing, drawing together people who care deeply about environmental issues from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines.
Lightning talks
Following lunch, a series of lightning talks by engineering, geography and planning students from Â鶹´«Ă˝ÍřŐľ and Polytechnique MontrĂ©al were presented. They focused on research findings across safety, infrastructure and mobility. Road safety research emphasized the link between speed, mass and kinetic energy, highlighting the increased risks posed by heavier vehicles, while surveys in Montreal suggested that residents prioritize safety over travel time. Studies on cycling infrastructure revealed uneven political support, with opposition concentrated among right-leaning respondents, even as broader research showed strong overall support for public transit, walking and cycling despite backlash to specific projects. Work on commuting and well-being linked active modes to higher productivity and improved mental and physical health. Other studies challenged conventional approaches to accessibility, noting that static, location-based measures often misrepresent lived mobility patterns. Finally, research on planning culture pointed to resource constraints and burnout among transit planners, and analyses of shared mobility systems suggested they often fall short on equity, concentrating services in high-demand rather than underserved areas.
Panel 2: Transport and marginalized groups
The final panel focused explicitly on equity, examining how transportation systems affect marginalized populations, including children, seniors and caregivers.
Panelists explored the concept of “level of stress” as a measure of accessibility, particularly in cycling environments, where high-stress conditions—marked by poor infrastructure, heavy traffic and inadequate lighting—can effectively exclude more vulnerable users. Alejandro PĂ©rez Villaseñor, a postdoctoral researcher at Â鶹´«Ă˝ÍřŐľ specializing in road safety and active mobility, situates these conditions within broader questions of how urban environments enable or discourage movement. Marie-Soleil Cloutier, a geographer and director of the Centre Urbanisation Culture SociĂ©tĂ©, emphasized the cognitive demands of navigating streets, noting that existing infrastructure often assumes faster walking speeds than many users—particularly children and seniors—can achieve. Small adjustments, such as extending crossing times by a few seconds, can significantly improve safety.
Questions of access extended beyond infrastructure to participation. Meredith Alousi-Jones, a PhD candidate at Â鶹´«Ă˝ÍřŐľ whose work focuses on the mobility of underserved populations, highlighted how public consultations frequently exclude those most affected—parents, seniors and low-income individuals—due to barriers such as timing, accessibility and language. Panelists also noted that transportation data is often incomplete or biased, with surveys skewed toward higher-income respondents. This makes it difficult to identify and address inequities, including higher collision rates in marginalized neighbourhoods.
Broader structural patterns further complicate planning. Owen Waygood argued that transportation engineering and planning in Canada remains deeply adult-centric, producing environments that diminish children’s quality of life and independence. Gendered differences in mobility also remain underexamined: women, particularly caregivers, are more likely to make multi-stop trips, while men tend toward direct commuting. Cultural context further shapes mobility choices, with participants noting that in some communities, car ownership is tied to social status, while public transit may carry stigma.
Conclusion
By the end of the roundtable, the discussions had expanded far beyond transportation as a technical problem. Cars emerged as a central organizing force shaping social life, environmental systems and public health. The central challenge, as articulated throughout the day, is not simply to replace one technology with another, but to rethink the systems—physical, institutional and cultural—that underpin mobility. If there was a consistent throughline, it was this: many of the harms associated with automobility are already known but have been normalized to the point of invisibility. Addressing them requires not only new infrastructure, but a shift in how problems are framed, measured and understood.
Sustainable Growth Initiative (SGI)
The SGI is dedicated to building practical, constructive, and applies solutions for key issues challenging sustainable growth. SGI was launched in 2022 as a cross-faculty partnership that presently also involves the Faculty of Law, the Department of Economics, and the Max Bell School of Public Policy, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Department of Geography.
