On June 18 & 19, 2024, the BC Cycling Coalition hosted its second Active Transportation Summit, at the Anvil Centre in New Westminster, and on day 2, New West Mayor Patrick Johnstone gave a keynote address which provided both the context and a prescription for moving transportation forward in the province.

I transcribed his talk, and the mayor gave me permission to share it with some of his slides. It’s a long read—but it’s also a pretty rational pitch and framed in such inoffensive and appealing terms, for measures which are both outrageously audacious and completely inline with established provincial policy across a number of files. In other words, his presentation was indeed long…overdue. And so, IMO, it deserves a wider audience.

Enjoy—and if you agree with Mayor P@J’s thoughts, please let him know, and then send a note to the Honourable Rob Fleming, M.L.A., Minister of Transportation & Infrastructure to express your support for greater public investment in active transportation, province-wide.

Thank you for the welcome and the land acknowledgement.

I want to recognize we are on unceded and unsurrendered land of the Halkomelem-speaking peoples here in New Westminster.

Our land acknowledgement is a little bit weird right now. We're shifting from an earlier, and perhaps a little bit of a ham-fisted approach to reconciliation that started a couple decades ago, and are moving a bit more towards truth-seeking. I think we spent a long time as a city thinking we were doing reconciliation when we hadn't taken the time to find out the truth of the history of this land.

So we’re doing that work right now—reaching out to the host nations, people who have ancestral ties to this land, and talking to them about how we need to acknowledge this land in a better way.

New Westminster is a strange place to do this. We're older than the province; we have a deeper history to reconcile with than most cities. The colonial experiment in British Columbia began here in New Westminster, and the colonialist journey was about transportation—the reason why this city is here is because of the Fraser River. It was a transportation route that existed for millennia, had to be taken over by other interests in order to move things through a port, and in order to move goods out to other places that were the root of the colony.

It's a transportation story, but it's all stories. I want us all to take time to think about that.

So thank you for the introduction, and thank you again for sharing with us—every time we listen, we learn a little bit more.

I struggled to find a title for this talk, because every local government is going to come here and talk about active transportation.

You end up with a catalogue of the things that they've done, or haven't done. It always ends up being some theme around the good, the bad, and the ugly.

You've heard that… how many times? Don't worry, that catalog's going to come with my talk. But to pay homage to it a little bit, I picked another spaghetti western, if anyone likes spaghetti westerns. This is the movie before The Good, The Bad, The Ugly—For a Few Dollars More.

I feel like we've got a fistful of dollars, and now we need a few dollars more. So I'm going to try to stick with that theme. And you'll all hear that when I get to my call to action.

I've been mayor now for about a year and a half, and one thing about the job of being mayor is that you're almost always the least knowledgeable person in every room you walk into. That's not false modesty—your job is partly to stand in front of a room of subject matter experts and talk to those people about the very thing that they're experts on. I have to say something knowledgeable about that topic in front of the very people who actually know that I'm wrong. And you have to clap and be polite to me when I do that! I call this practice mayor-splaining. And I'm getting pretty good at it.

But today, I'm going to try to make the case that this is not that. Because this two-day conference is about a topic that really got me into this mess in the first place.

I got into this job because I'm an active transportation advocate and always have been. I grew up as a kid in a bike shop. I spent most of my life in and around bikes, and when I came down to the big smoke here to find my fortune 35 odd years ago, I became an everyday bike commuter in a city that was not designed for bike commuters.

That got me involved in advocacy around biking and active transportation. And as you know, active transportation is a gateway drug to environmentalism, and it's also a gateway drug to urbanism. And you know what happens when you start down that dark, dark path.

I've read Donald Shoup's book on parking. I use words like 'sneckdown' and 'stroad' in polite conversation. I listen to the War on Cars podcast. And when I take the time to stop and think, I realize I don't know everything. I hear stories about things that don't apply directly to me in the transportation space—about disability justice, about how intersectionality impacts everyone's experience in the transportation space.

I'm still learning on this topic. So I'm really thankful that the B.C. government and the B.C. Cycling Coalition put this conference together so I can continue to come and talk to a room full of subject matter experts and learn more about this topic, and sit on a stage full of people who are smarter than me on this.

But the one thing I do know a lot about is New Westminster. So, before I go into my call to action part, I'm going to do a little bit of that good, the good, the bad, and the ugly thing.

In many ways, New Westminster should be an active transportation leader in the region, if not in the country, really.

And maybe someday we will. Because New Westminster is described in urbanism terms as a city with really great bone structure—"it's got good bones". It was the vanguard of colonization, as I mentioned, but that also means that we built a city and a city form long before the automobile.

A hundred years ago, New Westminster was a streetcar city—we were built around that. This gives us this dense urban fabric: the tight street grid. It's great bones, but it has been overridden over the second half of the 20th century by what can only be called car sewers that have been shoved into too small a space. But the bones underneath these car sewers are still there.

New Westminster is also a transit city. We have five SkyTrain stations in 15 square kilometers. We're the second densest city in Canada according to the last census, with 90, 000 people living in 15 square kilometers. We're a dense city, and that dense, transit-oriented development means that the majority of people in this city live within 800 meters of a rapid transit station.

In the last TransLink Trip Diary, which was back in 2017, we had the highest transit mode ridership of any city in the Lower Mainland, just slightly edging out the City of Vancouver. My favorite thing from that last Trip Diary is that, over the six years between Trip Diaries, between 2011 and 2017, our walk, transit, and bike mode shares all increased, and over that same time, automobile road share did not increase at all. In fact, it went down slightly.

It looks like a small victory, but, during this time, our population grew by 10%, and according to the trip diary, the number of trips taken by people in the city increased by 12%. So we did not increase the number of people getting into cars; the traffic in this city did not increase over that time.

This is transit oriented development in action. We've built our development around transit stations, and tried to make those accessible in order to drive the development towards that. I can't wait for the next trip diary because I know this data is going to get better.

That said, we are not Copenhagen. We aren't even Montreal. The cycling and pedestrian advocates that are in the room right now will tell you that we're falling far short of being an active transportation paradise here. With great bones, and with an active transportation advocate as mayor, it's fair to ask the question—why not? Why aren't we getting there? I'll talk about two challenges off the top that will surprise no one in this room.

The first is the hundreds of thousands of cars and thousands of trucks that drive through this city every day.

New Westminster being in the central Lower Mainland region, and residents driving less, only helps open up road space for induced demand for all of those other modes in this massively fast-growing region that we're at the center of.

Alternative modes are not being supported enough across this region, and New Westminster's inability to move forward is slightly hampered by the fact that our region can't move forward. New Westminster can't really move forward until our role in the centre of this region is addressed, and unfortunately alternatives are not being funded in the depth of the scale that highway improvement projects are being funded around the region.

The second challenge is those bones themselves. When we start digging in this city, we're digging into a very old piece of infrastructure.

This city is 160 years old—not old in the history of the Tswawwassen people, but old for the kind of infrastructure that we build here. There are no green fields in New Westminster. Every time we build something in New West—every time we add a sidewalk, we add green space, we add a bike lane—we need to take something down, take something away.

That can be car space and parking—not a problem. That's just a political problem, I can deal with that. The real problem is that restoring transportation space in New West is like restoring one of these old Victorian houses you'll see up in our neighborhood of Queen's Park. You never know what you're gonna find until you start to take the plaster off the walls. Every water line, every sewer line, every fiber optic line, every piece of pipe or wire that runs through Metro Vancouver runs through the City of New Westminster.

We have a single block uptown, 7th Ave, right there, with a planned bike lane we have not been able to get built in five years because there's a Metro Vancouver water line under you that needs to be replaced. There's no point putting it down when it's all going to get torn up. We've been waiting years for that water line to get replaced so we can just fix this one block. That happens in every block in New Westminster.

We run into these challenges of infrastructure impacts every time we try to build something new, and I know this sounds like an excuse. It's not, it's just an explanation. It's just the reality of what we face, and not at all unique to our city. But it's really felt here.

One thing that keeps coming up in this job that I find fascinating is that when everybody wants change—when the political will exists, and when the city staff and the community wants change to happen in cities—it's still really slow to make change happen.

Cities are machines to resist change. I'll make a defense of it, because there's a reason for that. Cities provide water, sewer, fire, and police—things that keep people alive. We shouldn't mess with those things willy-nilly, right? That's important stuff. There's a reason why we have an institutional idea that we need to protect what we have, because we're keeping people alive.

But when that is resulting in this inability to move on other things, that becomes a challenge. So there is an institutional challenge in all cities, and that's something we have to figure out how to overcome. Advocacy like this is going to help overcome that. But I got to the ugly too early here, so let's talk about some of the good.

While New Westminster has not always had the political motivation to get this work done, we're getting there now. I have to give a shout out to former mayor Jonathan Coté for really changing the momentum on this in the city over the eight years he served as mayor.

In 2017, our massive transportation plan was adopted, and it was the first time that this city adopted active modes as the priority, the first time we actually said that, as a statement for a city. It was ten years behind Vancouver, but we got that done.

Then, in 2019, we approved a climate action plan that included seven bold steps around climate action. One goal was for 60 percent of all trips to be by sustainable modes by 2030, and another was that 10 percent of all road space currently dedicated to cars will be reallocated to either active transportation use or public gathering by 2030.

Those are pretty good goals for a city like New Westminster, when we have so many roads. And in 2020, when the pandemic happened, we started the Streets for People program. We started accelerating that reallocation—taking under-utilized road space and turning it into temporary meeting space and, in some places, permanent meeting space.

This was mostly us figuring out what roads look like when we transition them to public gathering space, because we don't necessarily need all these roads if we're going to be moving to active transportation. Because active roads, as we all know, take up a lot less space. Then in 2022, we completed an active transportation network plan, establishing a complete city wide network of mobility lanes for the first time, which will connect all our key destinations, our schools, our community centres, and our business districts.

This network plan connects these destinations with AAA mobility lanes and routes. The goal is to put one of those mobility lanes within 400 meters of every home in New Westminster, and to have that network complete within five years.

What does this look like practically?

Some of you went on the ride yesterday to the Agnes Greenway. This is our Cadillac. Uh, no wait, I'm a biker, so it's our Pinarello Prince, our Colnago, our Radwagon 5. I don't know what you call it.

This is our best version of a cycling greenway, and it was only possible through a $2 million grant from TransLink and a half million dollar grant from the province's active transportation infrastructure grant. It's a fully separated, two-way route with a nice solid buffer, and really well-engineered intersections at all the crossings.

But it's also more than that. It's a great green space. There are meeting spaces, benches, even a little dog play area. It's actually taken this really ugly road in the middle of a dense downtown area and turned it into a linear green space for people.

It's beautiful, plus it provides a nice low-graded connection between downtown and the new Pattullo Bridge, which is also being built with active transportation connections. It goes past an elementary school.

This is the dream, folks. This is also $3 million a kilometer. Our active transportation plan is looking at more than 35 kilometers of active transportation routes. We can't do this everywhere. This is the dream, but we don't have the money in New Westminster to do this everywhere.

But one thing we have been successful with in the short term is rapid development of really small improvements in the city. We've been using cheap, light resources—easily moveable materials—to make quick changes in conflict areas—like around schools—where traffic calming is needed. We just do this with paint and bollards. It costs us a couple of hundred or thousand dollars to do these treatments. It doesn't look great right now—I know what you're thinking, you're a little disappointed by this.

The idea is that this is better than public consultation, though. This allows us to put changes in place, and to get people to understand what the geometry is like. It allows us to make quick changes if it doesn't really work, and if we get the geometry wrong.

It also allows us to start reallocating that road space really quickly, so that before we spend the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars that it's going to cost to do curb, gutter and concrete—all the permanent changes—we can try the cheap thing to see if it works. And if it works, then we can invest in the big money and do the proper change.

It's an opportunity for a small city like ours, without a lot of resources, to do some quick cheap stuff and find out what works. This is way better than lines on the map in public consultation.

But we do get complaints from people, and some in this room believe it or not, who complain when we try to make active transportation safer. We can point at this and say, "Well, we're trying to work it out, we're going to see if it works, and if it works really well, we'll make it permanent."

It does help with the public consultation process—public consultation by plastic bollard. I encourage it.

Now I want to call attention to this feeling of tension with traditional users.

And I don't mean drivers and car parkers. I mean pedestrians. We can't build an active transportation network that takes mobility away from pedestrians.

Design that works best for pedestrians, and design that works best for people on bikes and especially new e-mobility forms, is not an insignificant engineering challenge. It is hard. And it's also an education challenge.

I'm going to call out this community to own that responsibility— predominantly cyclists and e-mobility folks. Just as we are angry about the interactions we have with drivers on the road—even though 90 percent of the drivers on the road treat us with courtesy, we're angry at that 10 percent who don't—we are the SUVs and the Dodge Hellcats of the multi-use path. I want us to recognize that.

We are responsible for the safety and comfort of people who are using those spaces with us. We need to be talking to our own, and not expect the pedestrian advocates in the room to take that burden on. This goes doubly for the cohort of pedestrians who need mobility aids, and who have visual or ability impairments. In our rush to build bike lanes, we can't create new barriers to inclusivity in our community. This is work we have to do. It is on everyone to do this work, and I know we will.

Okay, I'm on to the call to action part of the talk.

I know there are people from the province here today, and so before I start into this next part, I want to thank the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure for bringing us all together here, and for the work you do to support active transportation.

I want to let you all know what I'm asking for, and I don't really want to bury the lead, so I'm just going to put it out there.

It's an election year, and everyone's asking the province for money. Three billion dollars looks like a really big number, but hear me out.

The Union of British Columbia Municipalities has a meeting every year of all the local government elected folks, where we get together and hobnob and talk to the province and try to figure out problems.

Last year at UBCM, we had an active transportation network workshop, which was well-represented by the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. And at the end of that workshop, a bunch of us were sitting around in conversation, and MOTI staff asked us, "What does it look like for the province to support active transportation in your community?"

My comment was that if they spent just as much on it province-wide as they do on a single highway expansion project, that would be what it looks like to support us.

Now, the ministry does invest in active transportation infrastructure. They do—you can go over to the MoTI website and see the kit that they have to funding active transportation. There's a list there of 560 projects over the last 20 years, totalling $140 million, for the 190 municipalities, regional districts, and First Nations. They received that support and got their active transportation project built because of it, and they're grateful. We're grateful in New Westminster for that half a million dollars that we got to help us build the Angus Greenway.

But the half million dollars we got to support the Angus Greenway is connected to a $1.2 billion road project, and it's almost exactly the same length. Road projects are more expensive to build than active transportation projects. We recognize that—building a bridge is very different from building a bike lane. But the difference in numbers is staggering when we start to look at it.

I don't want to pick on specific highway projects here, but I'm going to. Because this is also about community. This is about the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure supporting community. The community is asking for this, and they do support their communities in ways the communities demand for them to be supported.

But $140 million over 20 years for active transportation investment in infrastructure grants is the cost of the 232nd Street interchange improvements in Langley. Not the cost of the entire Highway 1 expansion project that's happening through the Fraser Valley, but the cost of this single interchange project to accommodate that. That's one interchange costing as much as 20 years of provincial investment in active transportation grants.

Now, I'm also going to defend the good work they're doing. They're on the right track on this. It used to be $7 million a year on average over the last 20 years, and it was $24 million dollars last year. This number is going in the right direction on infrastructure grants.

I was at the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade Transportation Forum about two months ago, and the Minister of Transportation was celebrating the province's commitment to transportation funding with the business community.

The current budget had just been passed,and the three-year budget number for transportation funding for the province was $15 billion.

That's a big number. And here's where active transportation funding fits in that number.

Now, to be fair, the blue area down there also includes some active transportation stuff. Probably on the scale, honestly, of about $200 million over the next three years. That means things like building active transportation lanes on the side of Pattullo Bridge, and other items not counted in our active transportation grants, which aren't the only investments the Ministry of Transportation makes in infrastructure. They're spending on things like those little green signs you see every 500 meters on the South Fraser Perimeter Road telling you that it's a bike route. So when we look at it like this, we see they're really supporting local government investments in active transportation.

So I think that $300 million a year over the next 10 years is not an arbitrary number. TransLink, for example, asked for $150 million a year for its Access for Everyone plan to bring active transportation funding to the Metro Vancouver region, and I think it's pretty fair to double that when you're talking about expanding this across the entire province. The $300 million number seems appropriate for that scale, and this is also the number that Metro Vancouver's Climate Action Committee brought to UBCM to advocate to the province for funding climate action.

They asked for $300 million a year for active transportation funding specifically, recognizing the need province-wide. This is 6 percent of the MoTI capital budget over the next three years. When you say it like that, 6 percent doesn't seem like that much. Only in the context of transportation infrastructure investment can you say $3 billion is only a few dollars more.

That's the cost side.

Now let's talk about the investment, what local governments could actually deliver if they had easy access to active transportation funding at this scale, with only six percent, I remind you, of the MoTI budget.

Now, I'm not a subject matter expert, so I don't want to design the entire program here. You can all figure this out. But if this money was allocated based on population, that's $530 per person.

Over a decade, that would mean $47 million for my city, for New Westminster. That is our active transportation network plan built, actually completed in a decade, with enough money left over to do a whole bunch of pedestrian improvements, and a whole bunch of work besides that. That is this built and done. We're done. One tiny trick, and we are done.

Get those bones back. Put the flesh back on those bones that we have in this community. It will actually make us into that active transportation community that I know we can be.

But it's not just New Westminster. Imagine this in every community in British Columbia.

For the city of Richmond, for example, a random example, that's $125 million. That is hundreds of kilometers of active transportation routes. Richmond becomes Copenhagen if they want to invest that money.

That's eight million dollars for a small city like Powell River, which has these really aggressive plans to change their active transportation space. It is game changing.

If you put $20 million on the table in front of them, I bet you could even get Penticton City Council to talk about this.

And what does the province get out of this investment?

The answer is simply, their CleanBC target realized. The target in the CleanBC plan is for a 25 percent reduction in VKTs, or vehicle kilometers travelled, by 2030. Right now, the ministry has no tool to make this happen—nothing in their toolbox is going to get them to this target.

In fact, right now in the province and in the region, we're trending in the opposite direction on this. We're not trending in the right direction. They can only bend this curve and get close to the goal if they fund local governments to make active transportation happen in every community in the province. There's just no other way for them to get to their stated goals.

So again, not to pick on particular highway projects, but these are the traffic counts from previous years in the Massey Tunnel. I projected to 2030 using CleanBC's goal on traffic levels. They're going to spend more than $3 billion investing in this single traffic pinch point in this single community in British Columbia.

I don't need to tell you that if we do 25 percent VKT reduction, we don't need highway expansion anymore. In other words, the reason behind this freeway expansion project goes away.

There are traffic counts in the tunnel today, and 2030 brings it down to below, below what it was during that beautiful time during the pandemic when there were no traffic backups at the tunnel. This is the opportunity. This is how we can spend money in the province.

I don't have time to go into the bigger impacts—the Summit is all about them.

Again, the subject matter experts in the room can tell you. The cost savings on reducing freeway expansion is part of it. The health cost savings, the climate impacts, the quality of life improvements, increased affordability—it all trickles down to an investment that this province can make in active transportation.

I can go on and like more of all of those, but I think that's enough mayor-splaining for today. I think you know what you need to do.

Thank you for holding this meeting here in New Westminster and holding our feet to the fire that we know to be what we have to do.

I thank you for taking the time to listen to me rant about this. I thank the people at the Ministry of Transportation who are doing what they can to bring active transportation to the region and to the province. I'm not attacking them here, I'm attacking the people who aren't giving them enough money. Maybe that's the best way to think about it.

Please contact me—get in touch with me and tell me how I'm wrong, because I can't wait to hear about it.

Have a great conference. Thank you for having me here. And keep rolling, folks.