As an organizer for the yes campaign for the upcoming Metro Vancouver Congestion Improvement Tax plebiscite, I was happily surprised by last year’s near-unanimous consensus on the Mayors’ Council Vision for Regional Transportation.
In a few months, the region’s politically disparate mayors hammered out a something-for-everyone 10-year plan for transit and transportation improvements that virtually everyone could agree on.
But that moment of remarkable coming together had nothing on the diversity of representatives who have rallied around the yes coalition.
I remember, as editor of Business in Vancouver many years ago, arranging a lunch between Business Council of BC economist Jock Finlayson and then-BC Federation of Labour president Ken Georgetti to set up a head-to-head column in the paper. I later found out that this was the first time they had ever met in person.
Yet here in the BC Chamber of Commerce office, fighting for (mainly) transit funding, I’m sitting with senior representatives of the chamber, the Vancouver Board of Trade, Unifor, the BC Federation of Labour, Gateway Council, David Suzuki Foundation, Tourism Vancouver, BIAs in Vancouver and Surrey, UBC Alma Mater Society, Urban Development Institute and others, all sitting at the same table, all passionate about improving mobility in the Lower Mainland in the most cost-effective, politically possible way.
Many of these people have deep, dug-in public differences on child poverty, minimum wages, climate change, big oil, unionization, environmental protection, government debt and pipelines, but the importance of decent transit and less congestion supersedes all these divisions.
Many key players weren’t even in the room. Signatories to date on a statement in support of “a positive outcome” on the plebiscite include 43-plus environmental organizations; ethnic organizations; the Downtown Vancouver Association; three car-sharing organizations; BCAA; cycling associations; seniors’ centres; the BC Healthy Living Alliance; hospital administrators and unions; and the most potent supporters of all: medical health officers.
All the senior public health officials in the Lower Mainland have said that implementing the mayors’ plan would be the most important investment in public health they would see in their generation.
What does transit have to do with better public health? Pending an upcoming announcement from public health doctors themselves, here are just a few health savings when people drive less and take transit more. Not as many people get killed, mutilated, injured and hospitalized. Not as many people suffer from asthma and other lung diseases. More people reduce their risk of getting cancer, heart disease and becoming obese (the average transit user walks a kilometre a day). More people have easier and more affordable access to work opportunities.
The medical health officers might even say that it’s not a smart idea to cut off your nose because you don’t like your face.
Everyone in the coalition agrees on the bottom line. For $0.34 a day per average household, a yes vote, combined with leveraged provincial and federal funding, would reap savings on commuter time lost in traffic congestion; savings on goods movement; savings on building more expensive, less effective expanded highways, bridges and parking garages; personal household savings (paying for transit instead of an extra car at $9,000 per year); savings on welfare costs (fewer people cut off from work opportunities by lack of mobility); lower costs for businesses (employees get to work faster for less money); savings on housing (fewer parking spaces and garages); savings on the cost of driving kids to school and lessons by car; savings on police, court, legal and insurance costs related to traffic; and on and on.
No other issue has the same level of cross-sectoral, cross-region, cross-generational, cross-income, bipartisan support as investing in transit.
Unfortunately, that still may not be enough to win the plebiscite.
Peter Ladner ([email protected]) is a co-founder of Business in Vancouver.
