I come from a long line of non-drivers. Getting my license was not something I eagerly awaited as a teenager, and whenever I considered getting it after turning 16, I always found that I had a better use for the money it would cost. Besides, driving looked intimidating. I knew, logically, that if hundreds of thousands of people did it every day all over the world, it couldn't be that hard. But I still felt no desire to change my G-None status until I started teaching high school. Students would come to my class thrilled that they'd just gotten their license. I figured there was no way that there was anything they could do that I couldn't do. So I became a driver at the age of 26.
Shortly after getting my G2, I wound up needing to rent a car for a week for several out-of-town appointments. Knowing it was costing several times the price of my Metropass, and giddy with the novelty, I drove everywhere. It was the first time I'd truly looked at the city — traffic, pedestrians, cyclists — from a driver's perspective.
I'm a real driving-school driver. I don't drive often enough to have habits. I need to think about almost every action ("press brake, turn key, move out of park…") before I perform it. My hands are always at ten and two. I don't talk on the phone or eat behind the wheel. But even being cautious and well-trained, I found that driving could be terrifying. Cyclists jammed themselves tight between me in the left lane and the parked cars in the right, leaving only a few centimeters between us. People in black clothing darted across the street at night, or wandered into the road from between parked cars while chatting on their phones or blasting their iPods. In other words, I got to see how dangerous all the things I do as pedestrian and cyclist really are.
I reflected on this experience in an installment of Povertyville, my regular comic for Torontoist.com. It was the most commented-on article that week, with most readers mistaking my plea for pedestrians and cyclists to act more safely as some kind of tyrannical, pro-car manifesto. What those few panels couldn't express was the fear and panic that overcame me often, not because I didn't know how to navigate traffic, but because I wasn't used to negotiating the streets from inside a car. I wanted to drive the same way that I was used to walking — observantly, in tune with the crush around me. Driving is linear in a way that walking isn't, and the power of a car is the antithesis of the vulnerable freedom of a bicycle or a pair of comfortable shoes. I'll walk and ride my bike differently now that I know what it's like to be on the other side of the wheel.