Holiday Homework: Complete the Nicomekl River ISMP Survey

After writing 195 posts this year, I will be taking a break from blogging until January 4th.

If you have time over the next week, I suggest that you complete the Nicomekl River Watershed Survey. The survey will take under 10 minutes to complete, and must be completed by December 31st.

The City of Langley and Township of Langley are completing an Integrated Stormwater Management Plan for the Nicomekl River watershed.

Nicomekl ISMP Study Area. Select map to enlarge.

Run-off from streets, farms, commercial businesses, and houses, ends up in the Nicomekl River (or groundwater) eventually. This run-off can contain all sort of contaminants which negatively impact water quality and the environment. Urbanization has also impacted the Nicomekl River watershed. Some of the negative impacts including: poor water quality, loss of streamside trees and shrubs, and low summer baseflows.

The Integrated Stormwater Management Plan will provide solutions to improving the health of the Nicomekl River watershed, and the survey will help guide the development of this plan.

Provincial government recommends building more public transit

One of the things that I’m finding exceeding frustrating these days is the disconnect between the BC government’s own research, and its funding priorities. Earlier this year, I posted about the Province Health Services Authority’s “Healthy Built Environment Linkage” toolkit. Building infrastructure that supports walking and cycling, plus investing in public transit was high on the list.

This fall, the BC Ministry of Community, Sport & Cultural Development & Responsible for TransLink released “Age-friendly and Disability-friendly Official Community Plans”. The guide was created to assist local governments in updating their official community plans to support building accessible communities. While accessibility can have a variety of meanings, in the guide it means “the ability of seniors and people with disabilities or health and activity limitations to get around their community and lead active, healthy, fulfilling and engaged lives.”

So what are the key ways to support building an age-friendly, accessible community?

1. Outdoor spaces and public buildings are pleasant, clean, secure and physically accessible.
2. Public transportation is accessible and affordable.
3. Housing is affordable, appropriately located, well built, well designed and secure.
4. Opportunities exist for social participation in leisure, social, cultural and spiritual activities with people of all ages and cultures.
5. Older people are treated with respect and are included in civic life.
6. Opportunities for employment and volunteerism cater to older persons’ interests and abilities.
7. Age-friendly communication and information is available.
8. Community support and health services are tailored to older persons’ needs

A community that supports seniors and people with disabilities is a community that is better for everyone.

The guide contains twelve recommendations for updating Official Community Plans. Here are two of the recommendations:

Guideline 5.6 – Land Use Objectives and Policies
Land use patterns impact accessibility. Complete compact communities with a wide range of mobility options (e.g. transit, cycling, walking) are generally more accessible for everyone, including seniors and people with disabilities, because distances between services, amenities and housing are shorter and easier to travel. These types of environments promote physical activity and provide opportunities for social interaction and inclusion, thereby helping to promote and support vibrant and healthy communities.

Guideline 5.9 – Public Transportation Objectives and Policies
Public transportation is an important option for seniors and people with disabilities who may not be able to drive a vehicle. As with active transportation, access to public transportation options helps to ensure that seniors and/or persons with disabilities are able to safely and comfortably carry out daily tasks such as working, going to school, shopping or attending appointments. Accessible and affordable public transportation is also vital to supporting participation in the social, cultural, and recreational life of a community, thereby decreasing the risk of social isolation.

The irony is that the provincial government has frozen funding for BC Transit, and refuses to show leadership to resolve the funding/accountability issues with TransLink. So while I’m very happy that several Ministries have done some great work around how to create healthly, accessible communities, it’s time for our provincial politicians to actually enable the funding required to move these recommendations forward.

Metro Vancouver: The Prosperous Region

When the Livable Regional Strategic Plan was adopted in the mid-1990s, it was based on the ideal that:

Greater Vancouver can become the first urban region in the world to combine in one place the things to which humanity aspires on a global basis: a place where human activities enhance rather than degrade the natural environment, where the quality of the built environment approaches that of the natural setting, where the diversity of origins and religions is a source of social strength rather than strife, where people control the destiny of their community, and where the basics of food, clothing, shelter, security and useful activity are accessible to all.

This ideal has flowed into the current Regional Growth Strategy. When talking about livability in Metro Vancouver, what kind of local economy we should support hasn’t been discussed as much as other topics. The current Growth Strategy does talk about supporting a sustainable economy, but it is almost entirely focused on land-use policies.

Some people have the notion that a healthy economy and creating a livable regional are conflicting ideals. Of course this isn’t the truth, but this idea still exists in the minds of many.

With this in mind, I was pleased to see that Metro Vancouver has released a new green paper called “Framework for a Regional Prosperity Initiative in Metro Vancouver.”

This new green paper presents the idea of prosperity as a way to tie economic development and livability together.

Enabler of prosperity. From Metro Vancouver's new green paper.

Metropolitan areas are the economic drivers of provinces and of Canada. For example, Metro Vancouver had a total GDP of $119.2B in 2013 which represented more than half of BC's economic output.

In Metro Vancouver, there are challenges that are limiting the prosperity of our region. The green paper identifies deteriorating affordability, a shrinking land-base, lack of investment in transportation and transit, and the impacts of climate change as areas where specific action is needed to ensure continued prosperity.

The green paper makes a pitch for the creation of an organization that supports and promotes economic development within the prosperity framework. Examples of other such organizations include the Puget Sound Regional Council and Calgary Economic Development, among others. These organizations enable the private-sector and public-sector to come together to support economic development.

Now that Metro Vancouver has released its green paper, it will be hosting a “Forum on Regional Prosperity” in early 2016. It will be interesting to see if the idea of creation a regional prosperity agency takes hold.

TransLink performance results in: SkyTrain doing OK, bus service on the decline

TransLink recently released its third quarter results. Over the past several years, there has been a decline in transit ridership. One of the reasons that I theorize why transit ridership is dropping is due to TransLink’s “Service Optimization” program.

With no new money to invest in transit over the last few years, an increase in transit service on one route usually results in a service reduction on another route. While the first round of “service optimization” had a generally positive impact for transit customers, each successive round of “optimizations” has resulted in exceeding more disruptive impacts.

For example in the next year or so, TransLink is planning to “optimize” the 502 service in the City of Langley. Instead of me being able to walk 2 minutes from my house to board a 502 in the morning, I will now have to walk 12 minutes. This isn’t a big deal to me, but will be for others in the community.

TransLink's official messaging around its drop in ridership is that it was caused by fare increases. It is encouraging to see that TransLink is now official starting to recognize that cutting transit service results in people taking less transit.

When discussing transit ridership, located on page 18, TransLink notes “we are continuing our program of service optimization; however, there are now fewer opportunities to improve our efficiency while still minimizing impacts to customers.”

Speaking about transit service reduction, in the first nine months of 2014, TransLink provided 4,689,291 hours of service for scheduled transit. In the first nine months of 2015, TransLink provided 4,674,062 service hours.

Compared to the first nine month of 2014, there was a 1.3% decrease in bus ridership. Ridership on SkyTrain and West Coast Express were static. Overall ridership in the first nine month of 2014 was 270,815,000. In 2015, it was 268,835,000.

The opening of the Evergreen Line in 2017 should cause an increase in transit ridership, but if the province and the mayors can’t agree on long-term funding for transit, the quality of transit service in Metro Vancouver will continue to decline.

On the topic of transit service quality, there has been a lot of attention focused on SkyTrain reliability since the meltdowns during the summer of 2014. SkyTrain had an on-time performance of 95.4% in the first nine month of 2013. This dropped to 92.8% in the same period in 2014. So far this year, on-time performance has bounced back at 96.1%.

Because of all the media coverage around every single SkyTrain breakdown since the summer of 2014, people actually think the SkyTrain is less reliable than it actually is.

Bus service on the on-the other hand has seen on-time reliability drop. 82.3% of buses in the first nine months of 2014 arrived within 2 minutes of their scheduled time. That number dropped to 81.7% in 2015. “Service Optimization” and increasing road congestion play a large role in deteriorating bus service.

While people spend a lot of time critiquing SkyTrain, the system is actually performing relatively well. That focus needs to shift to how bus service is being paid for and delivered in Metro Vancouver. As I pointed out last week, the backbone of our transit network in Metro Vancouver is the bus network. Declining bus ridership and service quality is not good for the livability of our region.