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what makes us interesting is the walk by
transit connection and the multi
mobility that allows you to live
comfortably without a car I have been
promoting cycling super for ten years
and I am so thrilled by the change in
our city and so they started building
protected bike lanes first in the city
center and then into the more outlying
areas has really changed the type of
people you see a bikes here women
children or the elderly to watch the
city change while our children are
growing and watch them adapt to the new
city and the new places they can get to
has been pretty spectacular and that's
helping us achieve our transportation
2040 target which in 2020 is supposed to
be walking and cycling and transit being
at 50% and so we were pleased to be able
to tell council that we've already
achieved a 50 percent sustainable
transportation mostly
the story of Vancouver City making has
really three primary events the first in
the late 1960s early mid 1970s was the
famous rejection of the freeways where
the only North American city that has no
freeways within our city limits there
was a plan to have a major network of
freeways of urban freeways around
Vancouver including a waterfront
expressway that was planned to go sort
of rate plowed through most of those
buildings here and actually come rate
under here so this Plaza that we're on
in this building was part of that 1960s
expressway vision and of course local
residents in Vancouver opposed vision
and more cars and more freeways and
instead set about building a region a
city that was more focused on walking
cycling and transit and so instead of
building a water for an expressway that
was intended to cross the Burrard Inlet
this body of water over here and and
over to the North Shore a bunch of that
money was reallocated and put into the
sea bus service so the sea bus is one of
the first high-capacity transit links
built in this region so now it operates
every 15 minutes throughout the day so
that's you know more than 50 sailings a
day really just takes about 10 minutes
to get across there so it's a really
popular service and can carry about 400
passengers in our downtown it looks a
lot like Hornby where we have protected
bike lanes 24% of our network now is
considered for all ages and abilities
and we're excited we're seeing more
children more new people cycling it's
the fastest growing mode over 30% were
over 130,000 trips a day 10% commute to
work the second event was Expo 86 that
rejection of the freeways led up to
building a different model of people
living downtown multimodal City making
that really culminated with Expo 86
which had a theme of transportation of
the future and it led to a as a catalyst
a lot of the transformation of the
waterfront that we're now fairly famous
for Vancouver seawall is routinely
ranked as the best public space in at
least Canada and it's world renowned of
course all ages and ability also means
are our wonderful seawall and so that's
another part especially for thinking of
people cycling not just from a commute
perspective but how they want to get
around enjoying parts of Vancouver and
going to destinations best thing about
it is how beautiful
is as you move through it and one of the
criticisms including for me has been
that we need more places more sticky
spaces on our on our seawall that our
place is to go and enjoy not just move
through a often say the best
transportation plan is a great land use
plan
so it really flows from the land use so
we're standing on Granville Street in
downtown Vancouver and in the 1970s
there was a decision made to turn this
street into a transit mall so it's a
busy arterial coming on to the downtown
Peninsula and the car traffic is is
directed to the two parallel streets and
for this whole stretch of one of
downtown Vancouver premiere streets it's
successful only two transit buses and
taxis and then the third event was more
recently 2010 when we hosted the Winter
Olympics and we upped our game again in
terms of not only mode shift towards
walking biking in transit we were the
most urban Winter Olympics ever held and
we closed down streets in the viaduct
and we showed that the world didn't end
when we did that we use the streets to
have parties instead and have great
Civic celebration so it's the three big
events and the time in between you
smartly that really has led to the city
that we have now we're constantly
talking about 2008 as a turning point
and it was the new mayor and council
that came into office and they shifted
their strategy from recreational and
sports cycling to enabling transport
cycling we moved to Vancouver about nine
years ago and kind of thought it was the
great place a great place to end up with
our children's we were living in
suburbia in eastern Canada and this
place was just so green and fresh there
at the age right now seven and ten where
they're starting to test their
boundaries and we're starting to
experiment with giving them some free
rein and we like to think we prepared
them for that process in the in the best
way possible by allowing them to
negotiate their own streets they
recognized that getting around by car is
a nice thing to do once in a while and
sometimes it's necessary but they would
much rather go around on foot and by
bike or on public transit they love the
SkyTrain
here we are in the platform at Main
Street Station on the sky train system
it's actually the world's longest
automated light rail system and with 53
stations as soon as we open the
Evergreen Line extension and with
frequencies that come every 90 seconds
eighty seconds during the peak periods
it's amazing I mean if you miss one
train another one is along in a little
over a minute and is that frequency that
really makes this guy training networks
so powerful and popular so Vancouver
finally has a bike sharing program
called mobi which basically means we
brought more bikes to the City of
Vancouver we launched on July 20th there
are 600 bikes on the street right now
and we're building up to 1500 at 150
stations we had 4,000 people sign up as
founding members within the first few
weeks it's a game-changer for Vancouver
between all of the new protected bike
lanes of the city built downtown and the
launch of our bike share system we are
going to see so many more people riding
bikes so for me as a user
I've got my transit pass I now have my
mobiie Bike Share membership to use if I
want but I of course have my own bike
and by the way if we need a car we've
got literally the most successful car
share system anywhere in North America
so I've got choices and the the best
thing is to have not just available
choices but delightful choices every day
and that's been built up over decades
generations of City making that is
really now in the last while coming
together with a real multimodal success
story that's really working well
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thank you has shown that a bike-friendly
mayor and council can get reelected over
and over again if even if the media
pushes back even if there's some certain
segments of the business community that
push back there is that latent demand
people do once walkable bikeable cities
well you are gonna generate a lot of my
class and you're gonna get a lot of
noise and just need to push through that
2016 the city is 50% of trips are now
but is walking biking a transit so what
you see is you see a safer downtown
you'll see hard as being much more
respectable excitement
we haven't lightened up enough as a city
in terms of getting into this kind of
messy gritty City making until
relatively recently it was the Viva
Vancouver program taking spaces like
this like a closed Robson Street that
get has been seasonally closed every
year since we closed it down for the
2010 Winter Olympics and now finally the
decision to permanently close it but all
sorts of examples around the city
starting to happen that you would call
tactical urbanism or pop-up urbanism the
good news is we're trying to absorb that
learning curve on tactical urbanism or
placemaking very fast there's a lot of
great cities that Vancouver can be
learning from at the same time as other
cities are coming to Vancouver to learn
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you