Trees and Urban Zoning Are Related

How many people can go a day without a car or transit?

The streets we've built and the way we've zoned Kingston is in service to drivers and cars. There is an old joke/story I heard as an undergraduate that if aliens were to observe North American cities from afar they'd decide we were a society of vehicles with slaves that maintain their paths and gather their fuel.

The spaces we want to green shouldn't be thought of as a few places we reserve for trees, they should be corridors we can walk through on a blazing hot summer day to get a few groceries or meet a friend for coffee. Those green spaces, those trees, should invite us to sit and relax, hopefully somewhere that cars aren't whizzing by creating an envelope of omnipresent noise.

The story I want to write is a future story, a story where I can go for a coffee, can go for a walk for groceries, and it doesn't matter where I live in Kingston, this is part of our urban fabric. I want to live in a lower-carbon-footprint world because I'm not obliged to drive 1500kg of metal around to do minor chores, and where those chores aren't chores because of connection to community. To live in this future I either need to move to one of the few areas where this is possible, or to work to write the new story for Kingston, where trees are part of a larger rethinking of how we inhabit space.