Once reviled, now 80,000 private vehicles drive P. E. I.
Once, way back, automobiles were roundly reviled in Prince Edward Island.
Historians note that the first car appearing on P. E. I. in 1905 raised such a ruckus that a law was passed in 1908 outlawing the operation of any motor vehicle.
Automobiles were strictly illegal in the province until 1913.
At that point, owners paid a $ 5 registration fee and the owner provided the markers. The marker carried the registration number and “P. E. I.’’.
A front page article in The Guardian on July 10, 1913 informed that “residents of Charlottetown and Royalty who may have motorcars stored away in hiding may bring them out today for an airing, and more than that indeed, without any fear of transgressing the law and risking a prosecution and the infliction of a heavy penalty.’’
Even without the seasonal influx of thousands of motoring tourists, the roads here are busy with traffic. Almost all Islanders of driving age seem to feel a reliance of owning or having access to a set of motorized wheels.
There are currently 100,339 Islanders licensed to drive a motor vehicle, up from 92,146 in 2000, up from 88,750 in 1990 and up from 77,500 in 1980.
Among the vehicles registered in P. E. I. are 71,193 passenger cars, 23,987 trucks, 4,090 motorcycles and 495 buses.
Three Islanders aged 99 still have a valid driver’s licence, while 3,308 P. E. I. residents aged 90 or over remain eligible to hop behind the wheel.
A major campaign began years ago to bring public transit to the capital city with the hopes of eventually expanding the service provincewide — both to provide motor vehicle transportation to those not possessing their own, but also to encourage others to leave their rig at home or perhaps abandon their car, truck or motorcycle altogether.
Since it started in the fall of 2005, Charlottetown Transit has enjoyed phenomenal growth within the capital city and has expanded into the adjacent communities of Stratford and Cornwall. It has grown from 6,000 passenger fares a month in 2005 to more than 22,000. The service itself has also grown. Buses and bus routes have been added, and shelters have been erected throughout the area to encourage passengers.
Jim Munves, a board member of Public Transit Coalition P. E. I., was a, well, driving force, behind the initiative.
Today, he is still left shaking his head over what he views as excessive, wasteful and unnecessary use of motor vehicles in Prince Edward Island. trucks, when horse manure was more a worrisome source of pollution than exhaust gases; but for anyone born after the first decades of the 20th century, the motor car is as much a part of the landscape as trees and shapes the way we think about everything: necessary to a family as a house; the mobility that connects us to the world beyond our farm or city block to family, holiday, entertainment, dentist, doctor and hospital. The average middle income family now spends more money on transportation, meaning automobile or automobiles, than it does on food. Years ago, in a survey of Island thinking on transportation, a gentleman in Summerside exclaimed: “When I can no longer drive, I’d just as soon be dead.”
One doubts that any invention has changed human life more profoundly than the motor car; not only our social habits and culture, from dating and courtship to funerals; drive- in facilities; on- theroad sagas and songs; not to mention the enormous economic stimulus, for awhile dwarfing every other industry (“What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” once pronounced “Engine Charlie” Wilson).
“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked. This has been true at least since the dawn of the industrial age, a haunting sense that in gaining mastery over nature, we lose something precious, that gadgets and conveniences become monsters. Some Islanders can remember when railroad trains ran across and up and down our three counties, when passenger trains stopped four times a day at Alberton, Morell, Souris, and dozens of other stations, twice in the morning and twice in the evening, carrying folks to their jobs, to important appointments; when a favourite pastime was chatting and joking with fellow passengers, reading a book, or just relaxing with no responsibilities for the hour it took to get home. A rationale for the railroad phase- out was that it was no longer needed in an era of motorcars.
It isn’t easy for anyone but a poet to see beyond the everyday presence of whizzing tires and acres of malls and parking. It isn’t easy to see the way our 80,000 private vehicles are distributed, that unlike a seat on train or bus, a car seat is owned, that the thousands of Islanders who do not own cars, who may not even have licences to drive, ( unless living in the Charlottetown, Cornwall, Stratford area) have only their thumbs or kindness of neighbours to carry them more than a mile from home. We can regret that some suffer, unable to access exercise classes, a job in a plant 20 miles distant; endure enforced solitude; but, hey, no matter what, doesn’t someone always suffer?
Can we ask ourselves, Are we allocating our resources wisely? Can we imagine any other way of living? Is our best hope for the future waiting for things to happen? Can we do better? Who is in the saddle?