Our community suffers from a lack of viable reliable and efficient transportation alternatives that can be directly competitive against driving.

Two factors impact our travel: The first is constrained access to the North Shore limits viable travel routes into two options to enter or leave our region; Traveling through one of our two bridges (Lion’s Gate and Second Narrows) or traveling by sea-bus. The second is how the North Shore succumbs to traffic gridlock. During daily peak hours, traffic is so negatively profound such that it ripples into our local streets and constantly grinds all types of travel to a halt. 

To manage our traffic and congestion, council need a proactive policy mindset to plan our current and future infrastructure needs. Planning for and around our current obstacles is the best step forward to deal with traffic needs as our current policy should not be dealing with traffic needs only when it becomes prevalent.

Current policy should have accountable measures to deliver on our community travel and transportation issues by creating a ‘Traffic Needs’ study, a yearly report giving current deliverable actions and anticipate future travel needs. Council should look to diversify travel options as transportation alternatives need to be either equally or significantly beneficial and competitive against driving. Council should be more vocal for studies that look at a diverse range of options when transit studies go out such as the viability of Light Rail on the North Shore.

Policy changes championing these ideas include:

• Updating current Mobility Strategy to be more proactive on building for and around our infrastructure issues.
• Creation of ‘Traffic Needs’ Study, a yearly report has realistic actionable and deliverable measures to keep council accountable.
• Utilizing senior levels of government and working with other municipal governments to get the transit investment the North Shore needs.
• Lay the groundwork to ensure studies find the best rapid transit system that would alleviate and capture our communities’ transit needs.
• Lay the infrastructure groundwork to ensure the rapid transit system chosen can be implemented as soon as possible.