by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Everybody's a city planner these days. Thousands sign petitions urging more bike paths. Kajillions of Montrealers demand that we ban autos from the city in favour of ambling pedestrians. We agree that cars must be reduced and public transit be boosted.

I know that this city suffers frequent bouts of West Nihilism Virus, but nonetheless I worry about even our educated elites favouring the fast food of anti-vehicular consensus.

Because in fact, we need cars in the city. We need shiny silver Minis, obnoxious SUVs, cargo vans, trucks, Saturns (actually, to hell with Saturns, we can ban those) peeling everywhere. Blasting through right-on-reds. Preferably fast.

Yeah. Me too. Emotionally, I'm solidatarious with the hacky-sack players at the Tam Tams. I despise solo commuter drivers going back to Repentigny every evening. I know there's a right-thinking orthodoxy that we've got to force people onto public transit because cars are bad.

And now our mayor, like every other recent Montreal mayor, vows war on downtown parking lots. Uh, sure bud. The city can't even enforce its bylaw demanding the lots be clean and surrounded by greenery. Last I checked - and I did check - every single city parking lot was in violation of our parking lot bylaw.

Parking lots owners are uniformly bad people, based on my extensive personal experience as a ticket booth employee. Parking lots are nasty devices, especially the one at Overdale on the site of my old 3 1/2 that I lived in for seven years before it was pancaked and covered in gravel for suburbanite commuters. I don't like it one bit. But downtown needs commerce and to compete against the suburban malls, urban shops need parking spaces for customers. This means we need more parking, involving huge ugly parking buildings downtown capable of parking 5,000 cars and hopefully film the occasional movie car chase along the ramps.

We also want others to ride public transit. Let the population get there the slow way. Except for when you order a pizza. The mozzarella's cold because the delivery guy can't turn right on reds. Plus he has to wait for the silhouette of the little white man to disappear even though there's not a pedestrian within three miles. And how about when your lover vows to rush over immediately for a delicious reconciliatory make-out session? What fun is it to stare at the door for two hours because lovey-duvey's cab is stuck on the Met? And when the roof leaks, it's surely okay for a repair guy to come after the bus strike ends.

In spite of what your commendable sensitive side says, the hard-core truth is that you depend on cars and big, manly trucks zooming around town, sputtering toxic fumes and tearing through the city at breakneck speed to give you deeper fulfillment.

Like water finding its level, crippled traffic moves on to friendlier ground, like the despised suburbs where consumers spend money at big box stores offering unlimited space for your rustbox to rest its polluting ass. Once it loses its customers, downtown becomes a ghost town.

And with ageing, people get wheels. And we're ageing. Thus car-hostile areas could shrivel up because in a few years there will only be a tiny generation of starry-eyed youth to fawn over quaint urban 'hoods because while they were dancing on speakers they forgot to have kids.

Yes, the city needs more roads, more parking, more cars, we need to drill holes in the mountains for new autobahns - digging is easy with new technology - and every major north-south boulevard should be connected underwater to the mainland. And yes, the rich should be allowed to have their own highways if they pay big bucks to ride them.

I too would be thrilled if everybody rode bicycles or strode in sandals or zoomed around on our fabulous metro. But like New York, Paris or London (where my sister Tanis once almost got run over by a speeding car driven by Princess Diana) we need our traffic moving at breakneck speed because the faster they get there, the more gets done.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca