New Westminster Environmental Partners | Sustainability, local.

The City has initiated a Master Transportation Plan process, to be completed during 2012. This planning document will outline the transportation priorities for the City for the next decade and beyond, even including some LNG-term visioning to 2040, to coincide with Metro Vancouver’s regional growth strategy and TransLink’s longer-term regional transportation plan.

Back in March, 2011, the NWEP Transportation Group held a planning session to discuss what we saw as important Sustainability elements that should be included in the Master Transportation Plan. During that meeting we developed a list of 10 Guiding Principles, or discussion points to bring to the table.

We will include all 10 points here, in their fairly raw form, to act as discussion-starters. It is important to note that this list was generated before the UBE (United Boulevard Extension) decision was made, and before TransLink essentially pulled the plug on the NFPR. It is also worth noting that some of the ideas expressed here are already part of the City’s existing Transportation Plan from 1998, are included in the City’s OCP, the Pedestrian Charter, or other plans or policies the City has in place. Some are just good ideas that the City’s transportation staff have already been working on. This is in no way a comprehensive list of policies or guiding principles, just the starting point for the consultation process.

Guiding Principles 10 points

1. Transportation priorities should be in a hierarchy: Pedestrians > cyclists > rapid transit > bus service > goods movement > motor vehicles.

This prioritization supports Translink’s Transport 2040 priorities (as we are good regional transportation partners!)
This also supports previous Council directions towards supporting sustainable transportation (pedestrian charter, bicycle plan, etc.)
This supports the liveability goals of the community, including health goals, noise reduction, pollution reduction, greenspace preservation, accommodation of aging population, etc.
This will lead to a durable transport infrastructure, protected from the uncertainties of peak oil and energy crises.
This will assist the City, the region, the Province, and the Country to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals.
Ultimately, this will reduce the costs of transportation infrastructure building, and maintenance.

2. Mode Shift.
The proportion of sustainable-mode trips (walking, cycling, transit) in New Westminster is relatively high for the Lower Mainland, but could be improved. As part of the Master Transportation Plan, the City should set realistic but ambitious goals for sustainable mode shift, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years in to the future, and use these targets as impetus to develop their transportation network.
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In partnership with the Tenth to the Fraser blog (http://www.tenthtothefraser.ca), this civic election NWEP has again sent out a list of question for mayor and council candidates on issues of sustainability.

Candidates were given two weeks and asked to answer each question within 350 words with any answer longer being truncated at the 350th word. Answers are being published in the exact condition received, spelling, grammar errors and all, with all formatting removed so they are in the same font (no highlighting, colour, underlines, etc).

We hope this will be helpful for New Westminster voters in their evaluation of candidates on the important issue of sustainability and the environment.

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