From Grey to Green

South Fraser OnTrax is a big supporter of the Downtown Langley Master Plan. Last night Joe Zaccaria and I attended a presentation on phase three of the plan called “Public Realm Plan: From Grey to Green” which is basically the new look for Downtown Langley. Highlights of the plan include making pedestrians a priority in the downtown core. They will do this by improving sidewalks and introducing greenway streets that will contain multi-use trails. Also, the City is ditching 90's aqua as the colour of choice and will change all street lighting and furniture to black. Downtown lighting will be LED and Dark Sky compliant. Recycling will also be included on-street. One of the biggest changes will be the increase in plantings on the street. You can check out the whole phase three plan on the City’s website.

From Left to Right: Nathan Pachal, Councilor Collette, Mayor Fassbender, Joe Zaccaria

Also at last night’s presentation was Councilor Collette from Oregon Metro. Before becoming a Metro Councilor, she was a Councilor for the City of Milwaukie in the Portland area which is about the same size of Langley and had a similar downtown. She was very impressed with the Downtown Langley Plan and said that is was an ambitious plan. One thing she did note was the apparent lack of cycling integration in the plan; something I agree with. Anyway, I hope to see you all tonight at our Sustainability on the Edge Event.

Sustainability on the Edge

Good afternoon. Our agenda for tomorrow's Sustainability on the Edge event is now complete. You can download a copy from our document archive, or view it below.

Sustainability on the Edge Agenda
Fraser River Presentation Theatre
Township of Langley Municipal Hall
Tuesday, January 12th, from 7-9pm

Start at 7:00pm

Introduction - Joe Zaccaria, South Fraser OnTrax (2 minutes)

Introduction - Mayor Green, Township of Langley (2 minutes)

Introduction of Mr. Moreno Rossi - Councillor Jordan Bateman (2minutes)

TransLink Presentation on Transit Oriented Development (15 minutes)

Introduction of Mr. Gordon Price - Councillor Jordan Bateman (2minutes)

Gordon Price Presentation on Sustainable Transportation Options (15 minutes)

Introduction of Councilor Collette - Councillor Jordan Bateman (2minutes)

Councilor Collette Presentation on Sustainability on the Edge (30 minutes)

Time should be 8:10pm – At this time Councillor Jordan Bateman becomes moderator

Formation of Panel for Question and Answer time, Introduction of Additional Panel Members, Explanation of QA to Audience - Councillor Jordan Bateman (5 minutes)

Question and Answer Time (40 minutes)

Closing Comments - Nathan Pachal, South Fraser OnTrax (5 minutes)

End at 9:00pm

Texting Transit Police

Last February we hosted Chief Officer Ward Clapham of the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Police Service (TransLink Police). It was a great presentation and you can look at it in an earlier post, but I wanted to highlight something very exciting. During our discussion with Chief Officer Clapham I mentioned that when people are breaking the law, drinking beer, or causing general trouble on transit, I don’t feel comfortable getting up and pressing the “Alarm Strip”, calling 911, or using an emergency phone. We talked about how texting would be a great, discrete way to alert the authorities. Well imagine my surprise when I read the following from Jeff Nagel at Black Press:

Transit riders intimidated by a SkyTrain car full of hooligans now have a new, more discreet way of summoning help.

Passengers can now text from their cellphones to BCTIP 274637 to alert Transit Police.

Road good to a point, but better transit needed

Todd Litman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has written an interesting report on the economy and transportation. It's a 97 page report that I encourage you to read. He made the following conclusion:

-Parking subsidies are generally an inefficient way to support downtown economic development. More efficient parking management is generally more cost effective and beneficial overall.

-High quality interregional highways support economic development, but once this basic highway system exists, expanding its capacity to reduce congestion has negative as well as positive impacts. By stimulating automobile dependency (fewer travel options) and sprawl it tends to reduce transportation system efficiency and increase external costs such as parking costs, accident risk, and pollution damages.

-Mobility management strategies tend to increase transport system efficiency and
economic productivity, reduce specific costs such as traffic congestion, accidents and consumer costs, and provide basic mobility for non-drivers. Such strategies tend to be particularly beneficial if implemented as an integrated program. Many of these strategies reflect basic market and planning principles, and so tend to increase productivity and economic development.

-High quality public transportation provides many economic benefits and so can be cost effective, provided there is sufficient consumer demand and supportive transport and land use policies.

So what does this mean for our region? One could argue that with our current/in-construction highway network that we have more than a basic highway network, and any further projects will have a diminishing return on investment. It would also appear that we should be looking into things like congestion pricing, HOT lanes, and other traffic demand management strategies. In the South of Fraser, we need improved public transportation full stop. On the topic of parking management, the City of Langley may want to look at metered parking instead of 3 hour free parking to promote economic activity in downtown Langley. In the City of Vernon (about 30,000-40,000 at the time) when I was growing up, we had meter parking downtown plus a paid four-story parkade.