What Canadian Transit Gets Wrong About Families And Accessibility
Where Canadian transit policy works for families and where it still falls short
Does having a baby mean you’re officially “car-dependent”?
In this episode of DemograFix, Cara Stern and Reece Martin, of @RMTrasit, tackle the reality of navigating Canadian cities with kids. While many parents are told that a private vehicle is the only safe or convenient way to get around, Cara and Reece explore why our transit systems often fail families, and how we can fix them.
From the “elevator roulette” at subway stations to the hidden costs of car ownership, we’re breaking down the barriers to urban parenting.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.
Cara Stern: Before I had kids, I used to talk about how I get around the city, and I liked to get around mostly by transit and by cycling. I just thought, at the time, I didn’t want to own a car. I don’t want to have to rely on a car. And it’s super expensive and not the most convenient way a lot of the time.
But a lot of people said to me, when you have kids, you are going to rely on a car. That is just how it goes. You’re not going to feel safe taking them on a bike. You won’t want to take them on transit. You’re going to want to take them in your private vehicle. And I still don’t think that has to be the case.
Reece, you and I spent a lot of time in the past year together because we’ve both been on parental leave. We’ve had so many conversations about why Canadian cities just aren’t exactly made for people with children. So given you’re the transit guy, I was like, let’s start and talk about transit. How well designed are our Canadian cities for travelling with kids on transit?
Reece Martin: Well, honestly, they’re pretty good. We actually have transit. So that scores us above the United States, where there is often lacking public transportation.
Cara Stern: Are you accounting for all of Canada? Like all over Canada, mid-size cities and small cities?
Reece Martin: Even in smaller cities in Canada, even in Whitehorse, there’s a bus system that’s better than a lot of semi-regular, standard U.S. cities. So Canadian cities are actually generally pretty good. And the big Canadian cities have really good transit systems by international standards. They’re not necessarily as good as Europe or Asia, but they’re pretty standard developed-country stuff.
Cara Stern: How was it taking your kid on transit for the first time?
Reece Martin: I think that it was a stressful experience. It’s certainly the case that while our transit systems are typically accessible, or becoming accessible, that when you are going on a transit system with your kid, probably in a stroller, for the first time, finding out how you’re going to move through the station or finding a route from the street to the train platform can be a bit of a challenge.
It’s the case that if you use the subway every day, you know the way to go. Suddenly, if you have a stroller with you, you have to go a different way. It’s a learning experience, and there’s sort of a generally heightened stress because you have a kid with you and maybe they’re screaming or they want food or you need to change them. So all of that makes things more challenging.
I think that Canadian cities are okay, but certainly not the best in the world. And there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit where we could make it a more pleasant experience to take a kid on public transit.
Cara Stern: When I first started taking my first kid on transit, I was like, I’m always going to use a baby carrier because then I can just hold her. That would make it a lot easier. And it does, because you can go up and down the stairs, but at the same time, as a postpartum woman, my lower back could not handle that for very long periods of time.
So then I decided, I’m just going to use a stroller. It’s going to be annoying, but I’m going to use a stroller, and it works well. But we’ve definitely run into some issues. Even when a station says it’s acceptable, it may not actually be accessible.
I remember calling you all upset one time because I was on the GO train.
I got on the GO train at Union Station in Toronto, got to my station, and as we’re almost there at Danforth, they made an announcement that said the elevator on this side of the tracks is not working. So if anyone’s needing the elevator, just take it to Scarborough and then go take the elevator down on the other side, back up onto the tracks, and then take it all the way back to Danforth, so you’re on the right side where the elevator is, in fact, working. That was going to add 45 minutes to my commute, maybe an hour. It depends on if the trains line up, and it depends how long it takes me to navigate that station. And I was like, that’s not happening.
So I just got off at Danforth Go and I just looked around and I was like, “Someone help me!” And I decided that if I just looked helpless with my stroller, maybe someone would come to my rescue, which they did. But that shouldn’t be our system.
Reece Martin: I think that it’s also a case where it’s like, if the GO trains ran more frequently, you probably could have just gone to the next station and hopped across and got on a train going the other direction. But because often the trains are once every half hour or so, do you really want to go wait on a barren platform in the middle of nowhere for half an hour, waiting for a train?
Probably not. And so it’s like another thing that wraps into all of this.
Cara Stern: It gave me a window into what it’s like to have a wheelchair in Toronto. I thought our city was accessible, but it really isn’t. It’s really not made for people in wheelchairs. And like with a stroller, you can kind of work your way around it. But sometimes you can’t do that in a wheelchair, right?
Like you can’t just have someone pick up your wheelchair, ask people to hold you down the stairs. The same way that I can be like, excuse me, random person, do you mind holding the other side of my stroller? And I’m going to trust that you’re going to have the strength to carry them down the stairs and not drop my baby with me.
It’s pretty scary. So we need a better way to do it.
Reece Martin: For sure, it’s super awkward having to do the whole weird dance where you sit at the bottom of a staircase, you move it around a bit, like, “Hey, people walking around, you want to help me get this thing up the stairs?” A lot of places have lifts, but often you can’t use the lift without a security guard or something, and they’re often nowhere to be found.
So a lot of places are de facto inaccessible. And the baby carrier thing is definitely a good idea, but kids get heavy and also babies come with so much other crap, so you want a stroller to put all the crap in so that you don’t have to have it on your back, and a baby on your chest, and it’s like you are carrying like 70 pounds of stuff at that point.
Cara Stern: The redundancy of elevators is something that people don’t think about. I’ve been trapped before at places like Yonge and Bloor. I remember going there and one of the elevators was out and I asked the TTC worker there, “Can you help me get up the escalator?” And they’re like, “No, liability. We’re not allowed to do that. Also, I highly recommend you do not carry your stroller up the stairs. That’s not safe.” And I just went, I guess I’m going home because by the time I could figure this out — maybe I could ask someone for help, but I don’t know. It just threw me off. I didn’t feel comfortable and I just went home and then I thought, it is wild that the busiest subway station does not have a redundant elevator, so if one of them is out and you need to use a couple of them — if you’re switching lines you don’t just go on one — if any of them are out, you’re out of luck. You just don’t get out at the station.
Reece Martin: And that is a good thing. For newer systems like Ottawa’s O-Train — everyone’s probably familiar with all the problems it had, hearing the news, etc., across the country. I think it was unfortunately, pretty big news. But a good thing about that system, and hopefully something we will see in more places, in the future, maybe by retrofitting, etc., is they do have those redundant elevators.
So there’s usually two elevators to go anywhere. And so that not only means you don’t have to wait as long, but also in the inevitable situation where the elevator isn’t working. If you’re riding transit, you constantly see announcements or you see signs that the elevator at the station isn’t working, and it’s easy to dismiss that when you’re just commuting by yourself and you take the stairs or escalator.
But then when you actually need to use the elevator, you realize, well, three or four stations don’t have them working right now. It actually makes travelling super difficult. And because that information isn’t presented often, as you found out, when you get on the train, you often end up in this situation where you’re at the place you need to be, but you have no way of actually getting out of the station.
So you’re trapped. And so that’s definitely something that we could do a lot more of to make sure the system actually exists, because it doesn’t really exist if it’s not accessible for people who need it.
Cara Stern: Looking at cities across the country, how accessible are they?
Reece Martin: So right now, it’s a mix. We’re pretty good, again, by international standards. Generally speaking, on the subway systems in Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, there’s level boarding and so you can just roll a stroller or wheelchair right into the trains. That’s a big help, because if you have to add these extra steps, it just makes the process higher friction, and less people want to do it.
Elevators and actual full step-free access, that’s another story. So in Vancouver and Ottawa, which are newer systems, they’re fully elevator accessible. But again, Vancouver being older, has this situation where often there’s an elevator out and if you’re riding a system around, you’ll hear the elevators are not working. But the systems are only fully accessible insofar as the elevators are all working, which they often aren’t.
Montreal and Toronto both don’t actually have elevators at every station right now, but they’re both technically in the process of adding them. Toronto has about five stations left to add them to, so it’s pretty good. But if you need to go to, say, Warden right now, there’s just no way to use that station if you have a wheelchair. They’re reconstructing the station to allow elevator access, but until such time, it does not have it.
I think that might be a bit of a story, because that’s a pretty recently built station. We should always be looking ahead. What might we want for something like accessibility in the future? Because I think Warden was built in the 1970s. To think that they didn’t put elevators is surprising.
And then it’s like, what things are we thinking about in 2025 that we are going to want down the road?
The streetcars are another story. They’re not great. But maybe we can talk about that later.
Montreal, though, is pretty rough. Only about 40% accessible. A lot of the stations don’t have elevators. I don’t know about you, but I travel to Montreal pretty often to see friends, actually, and so it’s an interesting experience going there. You just can’t use the stroller at all. It just becomes a non-thing.
Cara Stern: We were both there this summer for the Canadian Civil Alive event that happens annually, where a lot of YouTubers come together, and it’s a night where you can talk with people who care about these issues. It was a lot of fun. But you and I both had issues with it, where I think I don’t even remember what your solution was.
Mine was that I just took buses because I couldn’t get down the stairs. It just was not happening where I was staying. And I was pretty central! But I just took buses around. The bus system there is not great, so it did work, but it wasn’t a great solution.
Reece Martin: Yeah, the Metro’s really deep underground, and so actually getting down there in some cases, like in Toronto, you can make it work. You can try to carry a stroller down some stairs or ask someone for help.
In Montreal, it’s like it’s often five or six flights of stairs. You’re not going to ask someone for help doing that, most likely.
And so I guess you’re going to carry your kid, or you’re going to have to take buses. The system just ceases to exist for you. And that really sucks.
Unfortunately, the prospect of it becoming more accessible very quickly, they just don’t seem to be treating it as a real priority. Ontario has different accessibility regulations than Quebec, and actually, one thing that Ontario has gotten right is actually forcing the systems to be, on paper, fully accessible by around — I think it’s supposed to be 2020 or 2025, but it’s been delayed a bit — but it’s actually happening, whereas in Quebec there’s no serious prospect anytime soon.
So how things map out in Alberta is a bit worse. Edmonton does not have level boarding on their entire rail system, and so there are situations where you have to lift your stroller to get on, or it might be really hard to get on and off the trains.
The doors are really narrow and stuff. And in Calgary, it’s supposed to be fully accessible. But you see, fully accessible is so often a checkbox that gets checked. And so a lot of stations in Calgary have these giant ramps instead of elevators because they were too cheap to put in elevators, and so if you want to use the accessible part, you might have to walk a really long distance around these ramps to go up and then around ramps again to get down to the platform.
Cara Stern: I mean, at least the ramps can’t break down, so that’s nice. Can’t get trapped on the ramp.
Reece Martin: That is a good point. But it also might really suck to walk up a big ramp with a heavy stroller.
Something on the GO trains that I find remarkable is there’s an entire car on the train that’s, on paper, for people who need the space, essentially accessibility, because there’s only one car on the train that has a ramp.
And what’s amazing, I find, is that you’ll go on it — and now it’s important to recognize that not everyone with an accessibility need is visible, and that’s an important consideration — but it seems unlikely to me, given the frequency with which it happens, that every seat has been taken by someone who looks able bodied, and I’m stuck with a stroller, and I have no place to put it, even on the accessible car.
I’ve had several bad experiences on the subway. There often aren’t even strollers on the strip, signs that say it’s for pregnant woman or an elderly person. So it’s sort of a tacit thing where a family with a young kid isn’t always given the same treatment, even though they’re just as vulnerable as someone in a wheelchair or someone who’s elderly.
They have a kid who literally can’t move at all by themselves. It’s a real problem. And if we want more people to have kids, we definitely have to make it less of a lift, right?
Cara Stern: Why do you think it is that they don’t have that on the signs?
Reece Martin: I’m not sure. I think maybe they believe that there’s a lot more people with strollers than there are. I certainly sometimes see multiple people on transit with strollers, but a lot of the time I find this particularly is the case with buses. I’ve only taken a bus once or twice with my kid.
It’s really stressful. There’s not a lot of space for you. If the bus is busy, you’re squeezing to get in, and it’s sort of just meant to discourage you from taking it. Like if it’s uncomfortable enough, you just won’t take it, and then they’ll say no one tried to get on, so it’s accessible.
I think that’s how streetcars work in Toronto. They added ramps when they got the new streetcars, but to use the ramp, you have to press a button and then the driver has to come out and it’s this whole process where the ramp comes out and there’s all this beeping and everyone’s stopped. And the streetcar, it’s not moving as it’s supposed to move.
And then it’s really not accessible in other cities. They should just have the platform level. So you could just roll right in and you don’t feel like you’re being a burden on everyone around you. Singling you out.
I think that’s probably part of the strategy for some of these agencies — instead of accommodating people, just discourage them from using the systems. And that really sucks.
Cara Stern: It’s unfortunate because owning a car is very expensive. And when you are thinking about whether to have kids, you’re often doing the math of like, how many kids can I afford? How do I make this work in my budget? And so, you have your housing budget we’ve talked about on other episodes, where we’re like, that’s going to skyrocket because you need more space if you’re going to have kids.
But adding a car — that’s often people’s second biggest expense. If people can avoid that, it would go a long way to making it easier for people to have kids, right?
Reece Martin: For sure. A car is expensive, but I don’t think people recognize just how expensive it is. There’s the upfront purchase or lease or whatever, which is huge. But then there’s just the maintenance costs, and literally maintaining the car insurance, fuel, electricity — even if you have an EV, is not insubstantial — and then honestly, with cities and urban living, which we’re trying to make more people come into, parking the car.
In a new condo building, there’s often parking, but you often have to pay $100 or $200 every single month to park a vehicle. So that’s part of your calculation. You can easily be talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month, to have a car. And so that’s the cost of multiple kids.
So if you’re trying to have a lot of kids, a car makes it way harder financially.
Cara Stern: It’s true. And both of us, we’re not anti-car people. We both own cars. We both use cars probably more than the average urbanist YouTuber, because a lot of them seem to be very, like, “No, we don’t want to use a car, ever.” But you and I are like, “Let’s be pragmatic here.” The city is actually designed sometimes to use cars, and it’s actually the easiest way.
The more you can minimize it and use other ways of getting around the cheaper it becomes, and if you can get away most of the time without having to take the car everywhere.
Reece Martin: Look, I mean, I didn’t have a car for the longest time, but at some point I just recognized that, even though I don’t like it, Canadian cities are still designed for it, even downtown. We keep the streets wider than they need to be so that people can have cars. And if you’re swimming against a current and eventually when you have a kid, you just sometimes go, “Well, I guess this is something I have to do.”
For what it’s worth, I track my car use in a spreadsheet, and I try to minimize my kilometres. I think that’s actually becoming increasingly possible. I live in a non-central part of the city, and despite that, I really don’t need to drive very often at all. It’s mostly odd places — places that aren’t regular, where I don’t know how I’m going to get there on transit.
Or the second, you have to leave Toronto itself — this is the case in many places in the country. But the big cities are actually pretty good for transit. If you show up at a bus stop, a bus will com,e and your kid’s not sitting out in the cold.
But a lot of suburban areas and smaller cities have transit, and that makes them better than other places in the U.S. But, for example, if you go from Toronto to York Region, suddenly you’re talking about a bus that comes every 10 minutes, and now in York Region, it’s like a bus every 43 minutes, because York Region doesn’t care about having a functional transit system.
So that really pushes things in the direction of, I need to get a car now because, as an adult or a student or whatever, you’re okay waiting at a stop — you can go on a phone or whatever. You often don’t want to have your kid sitting in a stroller for 40 minutes.
You probably don’t want to give them your phone, too. Not giving your kid the phone is a thing now. And so cars become a thing people feel like they have to use.
Cara Stern: There’s just these small things — that’s what we’re trying to get back to — what are these little accessibility things that they can do to make it easier on everyone to be able to raise families in the cities? You mentioned earlier, the idea of looking at where people were in the ’70s and looking forward, and they didn’t realize they needed elevators at all the stations.
Do you have any ideas of what we should be looking at now that maybe people are missing? That would become very important as the Millennial demographic and Gen Z are parents. A lot of them are parents now, and as they get older, what needs to happen? What are we missing?
Reece Martin: There’s actually a ton of different things, and I can’t list all of them, but I’ll just try to rapid-fire some of them.
So a big one is, we have elevators in a lot of places, but we should try to have more forward motion elevators. So that’s what I think you’re starting to see in some places across the country.
It’s an elevator that has a door on both sides, so that when you use it, you can keep moving forward to exit. It sounds irrelevant, but it’s just another thing that makes using the elevator easier, so you don’t have to try to wrestle your stroller in with your kid in it.
It’s surprising. A lot of elevators aren’t all that big, and so it’s like, if you have a large wheelchair or a large stroller, it’ll actually take some time to get it in there, especially if there are other people. And so this is something that can make that easier.
Something I personally have advocated a lot for is platform screen doors at stations. And a lot of people are like, it’s just to prevent people jumping on the tracks or whatever. But when you have a stroller that can roll around, it’s pretty stressful, actually. You’d be standing on the train platform, and they’re often slanted a bit towards the tracks so that water will run off them and not collect right.
So if you have a stroller, it’s going to have a little tendency to roll towards the tracks, and having doors there, especially if you have a kid outside of a stroller, you just know that there is no way that they can end up on the tracks, because they’re curious or whatever. So that’s a big thing.
They’re really standard in most of the world, anywhere that’s building new transit outside of Canada, basically, and the U.S.
I guess they put them in by default. We still don’t. Some cities are starting to do it — Toronto is going to have them on the Ontario line. The REM in Montreal has them, but they should just be standard.
It’s a safety feature. It would be like having elevators without doors, which was a thing at one point. It just doesn’t make any sense.
The last one that really stands out to me is the washrooms. Toronto is actually not terrible on this. Some Canadian cities have essentially no washrooms on transit. There are washrooms sprinkled throughout the subway. But there should be washrooms at every station.
In Seoul, for example, there are washrooms at every single station, and they’re frankly nicer than probably even a pretty nice public washroom in Canada. They have the heated bidet seats and stuff that you would see in a place like Japan. But they also have a changing table and amenities for seniors — so grab handles everywhere and stuff, lots of space if you have a wheelchair.
The thing is, you realize when you have kids, that a lot of washrooms are too small. Even if you have a big backpack on and you’re carrying your kid, some washrooms are really small.
I know at my doctor’s office, for example — it sounds crazy, but the only washroom there is really tight. Even if you are just a single human, the door swings almost into the sink. And so if you have a kid with you, it’s a nightmare. Having big, accessible washrooms at stations — that would make things a lot better, because when you have a kid with you, sometimes you have to use the washroom.
And having these available wherever you go is huge, right? If people have a car, they feel like if something happens, they’re in their own private space, and even if it does, they can go wherever they want easily. If you’re on a bus or if you’re on a subway train, you can’t.
You don’t have that optionality unless there’s a washroom in the station. And so I think that’s a feature that we definitely need to just make standard like some other countries have.
Cara Stern: And even just for diaper changes, having a situation where you have somewhere you can actually go, because even if they have a bathroom, they might not have somewhere. Sometimes they have that Koala thing that folds down. You can put your kid on it. I’m a little bit like, these are probably gross. I don’t know how much those are cleaned, who knows? I always question that.
But at least it’s there. But it’s so funny because you said that some of these ideas are useful when looking at the changing demographics. But a lot of these things would be useful right now, wouldn’t they?
Reece Martin: We don’t have to wait. Like a lot, I think accessibility features are one of those things that it’s a rising tide that lets everyone benefit from these things, like having a handle on the wall. Maybe you feel faint because you’re dehydrated and have something you can grab, so you don’t slam your face on the floor. That’s a nice thing. Or maybe you injure yourself.
A close friend of mine really badly injured themselves recently. They live in a building that doesn’t have an elevator, and they’ve really struggled to live like that. And so you imagine, anyone can need an accessibility feature overnight if something happens to them.
Having these features just makes our society better. Now that we know that they exist, we have ideas. There are other societies like Japan that are really good at this stuff. We don’t have to wait for our population to become like Japan. We can just start adopting this stuff whenever we build something new.
Cara Stern: It wasn’t that long ago that Toronto added free transit for kids. Is it important to have free transit for kids?
Reece Martin: It’s absolutely huge. I mean, a good example of this that sort of illustrates the point without necessarily being the exact same thing is, I talked to people about getting to the airport. We have transit to the airport. We do in most cities in the country, and often it’s pretty good, but it’s often not price-competitive if you have a group of people.
Something like an Uber, for example, is pretty expensive when you’re by yourself. But as you add more people, the cost per person goes down dramatically. And transit, historically in Canada, it’s been a fare for every person, and so if you have a family, counterintuitively, you’re encouraged to take an Uber, even if you could totally take transit.
And so what we’ve started to see in Canada is this adoption, basically, almost nationwide at this point, all the big cities have free transit for kids. What a kid is is a bit different in different cities, but it’s definitely a really interesting policy.
It’s had a huge impact here. There are a lot of studies saying that it had impacts in other places where it has basically increased ridership, because a parent who might have paid to use the system, well, they don’t pay now. Kids often don’t take up that much space, so the system is not really incurring an extra cost by having a kid on the bus or the train. But they’re losing a rider if that kid doesn’t go because their parents are not going to go.
And so making it free for kids actually gets more people in overall because the parents are still going to pay, so it’s a really good policy. I know I’ve used it tons. It’s just another thing that lowers the friction to using transit, right?
When you’re in a car, you don’t have to think about paying for your kid. You don’t have to think about plugging in your kid or fueling up your kid. Everyone goes in the car. But with transit, when you’re already thinking, is there an elevator? How do I get to the platform I need to get to?
Or like, is this the right bus? I have to think about, do I have to tap a thing, do I tap a thing for my kid? Do I need a special car? Do I need a special ticket? It just sucks, right? And so, having this policy, it just makes life easier for parents, without really costing much to the transit system and potentially causing this gain because those kids, they get used to riding transit.
I actually never really rode public transit as a kid, and I think I would have more when I was a teenager. After being a teenager and getting obsessed with transit, I rode transit more than I would have anyways. But I think for a lot of people, they don’t ride transit because they’re not comfortable with it.
Cara Stern: Did you just dream of riding transit when you were a baby?
Reece Martin: I did not because I never did it, and maybe I would have if I did.
Cara Stern: You showed me a couple of baby pictures of you with trains as you were growing up. So I just picture you being like, “Oh, I can’t wait to go on a train. And then, when we can have a train within the city. We can go around the city on a train. That’d be cool.”
Reece Martin: Trains, yes, not transit. But that’s the thing, right? The kind of transit most Canadians are going to have access to is a bus, right? Most of us still don’t live near a train. That’s changing. We’re building a lot more rail in the country, and so we’re building out more density around stations.
So it might be the case in the future that most kids actually do have access to a train.
And I think that distinction matters a lot because with a bus, it is an inherently stressful experience because with the train, you show up at the station, and most of the trains in Canada are pretty frequent, so you’re not in a rush. You just look at the ticket machine, you go through, adult or kid fare or whatever. You get a ticket, you pay. It’s very straightforward. There’s usually signs that explain things.
But when it’s a bus, which is the transit that most Canadians are going to have close to them, I remember literally growing up and being like, I don’t know how to use them. I saw buses, but I literally did not know that you could use them to get around, because I had never been on a bus. It wasn’t obvious to me. How would you even pay? Like the idea that you would just drop coins into a machine and then it would spit out a ticket. That’s not how cash registers work; someone’s handling it, etc.
And so, that barrier is a real thing for people. And often there’s a line of people getting on a bus. If you have a kid, it’s an extra level of stress, and so people just go, “Oh, I don’t want to do this. I’m going to drive.” And so reducing the stress and making it easier to use these systems it’s huge, not just for use in general, but definitely for use with kids, because already, everything with a kid is more difficult.
Cara Stern: I was looking through a study that was examining how the ridership changed in Kingston when they added the free fares for students. I believe this was for high school students, and it talked about the number of students who are using transit now, it seems like it went up. It’s not even close to what it was before.
It’s huge. It went from being about 28,000 students annually to over 600,000 now. That’s a huge number of people taking it who didn’t before. And then I also saw another study, which we’ll link to here, that was looking at how it impacted people’s physical activity. We know that people should be exercising more than they do, moving more than they do.
It found that people are much more willing to take active transportation methods when it was free, and that contributed to the kids living more active lives, which is something we all know that we need to see more of these days, right?
Reece Martin: For sure. And I mean, honestly, kids driving, we think of it as a rite of passage, but when you hear about crazy car accidents and stuff, it’s often young people that are involved.
Young people are the most reckless drivers. If we want to try to reduce deaths and injuries on the roads, having people drive when they’re a little more mature and they’re thinking a little more clearly isn’t the worst idea in the world.
They actually see that in the data as well. Young people are often still getting driver’s licences, but a lot later in their lives. And I think that often when people get their driver’s licences later in their life, it’s not so much because it’s a necessity, as it’s just sort of a thing that’s useful to have in our society.
We don’t have an easy form of identification in our country that isn’t a driver’s licence. This is a real problem, actually, like a lot of countries have a national ID card. We don’t have one. It’s a controversial issue, but it filled all of these niches in our society, and we could start unplugging some of those niches so that driving is less necessary.
But it’s starting to happen already because transit is just convenient and it’s inexpensive. And now that everyone has a phone, if you might be five minutes late, it doesn’t really matter because you can catch up on reading or send an email or watch a video on YouTube while you’re on the bus.
Cara Stern: It’s great for kids to be able to grow up taking transit just for the work-life balance of parents. I remember begging my parents to drive me around in the suburbs because I did take the bus a lot — I took it to school a lot, but if you missed it at rush hour, it was every 20 minutes, and then on the weekends, it was like once an hour.
And there was no GPS that told you how far the bus was. So it’d be like, “I hope I didn’t miss it or I hope it didn’t come five minutes early.” It was a horrible experience, but I just don’t want to be my kid’s chauffeur. I don’t want to do it. So when I was thinking about having kids, I was like, how can I still have a sense of self and a personal life outside of parenting and work?
And I think that living in a place that has the option to use transit, even if that’s not always the way to go, is a huge benefit for sure.
Reece Martin: And I think for your kids as well, it’s just it’s great to have them in a space where they’re just with other people. When you’re in a car, it’s you and your kid. Sometimes it’s nice, but it’s also nice to have them just exposed to other people in your society and seeing that everyone is just together and no one’s fighting.
No one’s bickering. Everyone’s just happily going to work or going to the pool or going to see a concert or a sports game. I think that’s just a really good experience for kids in society, seeing like, “Oh, this is what the other part of my city looks like.”
Cara Stern: When you think about moving around cities with children, we’ve talked about some small changes that need to be made and some very big changes that need to be made. But if you were in charge, if you were like the Minister of Transportation, and this is part of the Ministry of Magic, so you can wave your magic wand, there are no costs involved here.
What’s the first thing that you would want to tackle that would make the biggest impact on the system?
Reece Martin: This is cheating. This is a cheating answer. But I just wish that when we made decisions about building transportation and infrastructure in general — so it’s not just be trains, it could be roads, it could be sidewalks, bike lanes and everything — I wish we would just try to consider families and kids a little more in that equation.
Everyone in the country knows that we are basically in a Japan situation now; we have extremely low birth rates in Canada. And if we don’t do something to change that, our country is going to be in for a lot of problems. The economic problems we face today will be much worse. Housing might actually be okay, but everything else is going to be way worse.
And so, I think just having this as a big part of our considerations, a lens that we look at our problems through. “Hey, how would we make it for people who have kids with them? Hey, how would we make it for strollers? Hey, how does that work for parents?”
I think adding that question as something that we at least think about more often, it could really have a big impact because I think that there are just so many different things that we could do to make life easier. Trying to tie it down to a single thing, you’re sort of missing the forest for the trees. There areso many potential improvements that we could make.
And also, a lot of those improvements, as we talked about, make life better for everyone, even people who don’t have any accessibility need — just regular old people might benefit from some of this stuff.
So I think that it’s just considering a new group of people a bit more carefully when we’re making decisions.
Cara Stern: My main takeaway from this whole episode is that even someone who is as transit-obsessed as you are finds it difficult to get around with a baby on transit. And so I’m like, if that’s the case, what about the rest of us? What hope do we have? Because you should be perfect at it. How is this possible? We have a long way to go to fix it for sure.
Thanks so much for watching and listening. And thanks, as always to our producer, Meredith Martin. If you have any stories of getting trapped at the bottom of three stairwells with no way to get up. We’d love to hear from you!
You can email us at [email protected].
And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Studies on impact on free fares on active transportation for teens