The Movement Question

Free at last

Chapter 1: MOVE

Reflect a moment on your movement—and the movement you cause in the background. Perhaps you drove your youngest to the crèche this morning (the eldest cycled to school), then on to work, where you probably spent anything between thirty minutes to an hour queuing on an E-highway or standing in a packed IC train to Brussels. Back at home the rubbish collection lorry passed by, followed by the postman. To make an 11 o’clock meeting at a client, you departed at 10 o’clock, since you never know, given the traffic. In the mean time the goods you design/produce/market/ sell/ regulate [fill in as needed] and off course consume are thundering across the European landscape. Perhaps it’s your turn to fetch the child, back on that E-highway with its structural jams, but you managed to lob a few minutes off the trip due to the back roads you know. Then with toddler off to the supermarket quick – bread needed for tomorrow. Home just in time to welcome the babysitter (who cycled here), since it’s romantic dinner time—back to the city with your beloved... No wonder they call mobility the lubricant of society. A pity, therefore, that nearly all that mobility is under threat.

Mobility is a pretty fundamental issue. It raises a number of key questions both about the lifestyle and sort of economy we want in this country. Perhaps most fundamentally, one can pose questions about the extent to which mobility is a citizen’s right. As Lode Vereeck reflected in a TIJD opinion piece(1) , should it mean we have the right to public transport within 500 meters of one’s home (as it is legally defined in Flanders today), or should it be the right to travel freely, without toll or excessive congestion, on our country’s roads? What type of mobility do we want, asks Professor Vereeck, one that supports individual freedom and emancipation, or one that stifles it? Other mobility experts, like Willy Miermans, take a different tack by arguing that the great emancipator, the car, has ended up stifling freedom in so many other ways—the right to walk, cycle and play without fear, the right to breathe clean air, the right to peace and quiet. Individual mobility has reached its limits. If we want to avoid total gridlock, argues Miermans, then we will need to drastically re-orientate towards public transport. Mobility is a fundamental issue because it presents us with questions about individual freedom, about the acceptability of ‘collectivist’ solutions, about the power of government to control the way we move, to stifle free movement or, as others see it, to protect us from impending immobility.

Mobility is about our lifestyle and urban spaces. Who remembers downtown Ghent or Leuven back in the 70s and 80s? When ambling along the quite civility of the Graslei today, one cannot imagine the grimy, cramped feel of the place when the car dominated this area. Back then it made sense to take flight to the suburbs. Today the opposite is increasingly true. During rush hour the suburb’s quite lanes are used by harassed commuters in their Audis, as they seek to avoid jams on the N- and E-routes. In the process they create jams at the exit points of the suburb in the morning and raise stress levels of anxious parents in the afternoon. Trapped in the suburbs! Change is clearly afoot, but not everywhere. Cyclists in Brussels still have a look of wounded prey about them.