As some cities find a way to avoid a surge in car ownership, they offer lessons for others — and hope that B.C.'s transportation sector can still fight rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Over a quarter million vehicles were added to British Columbia’s roads over the last six years. But over half of those hit the pavement in 2021 — a spike that has touched nearly every community in the province and threatens to undermine emission reduction targets.
The province’s largest city, Vancouver, has long aspired to be the greenest in the world. But in 2021, residents registered more than 29,000 new vehicles, more than double the previous five years combined. Langford jumped from a 1.49 per cent increase in cars over five years ending in 2020, to a nearly 24 per cent increase by 2021.
Cars' rising toll There are a lot of good reasons why cities want to reduce the number of cars and trucks on their roads. And according to a landmark national study led by the University of British Columbia's Michael Brauer, even low levels of air pollution from trucks and cars kill almost 8,000 Canadians every year. In B.C., emissions from cars and trucks have been climbing steadily over the past several decades, so that by 2019 — the last year public data is available — more than a quarter of British Columbia’s carbon pollution came from road transportation.
In cities, transforming how the average person gets around is an incredibly complex task that involves reimagining neighbourhoods as dense urban developments, well-connected to public transportation and close to all the necessities of life. In the District of West Vancouver, the number of cars on the road fell over five per cent between 2016 and 2021.
“The more affluent you are, the more likely you are to have a second car and that’s what we see in West Vancouver,” said Werner Antweiler, a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia, who is currently studying barriers to EV adoption in B.C. Population and relative wealth could also play significant roles in making the district an outlier.
E-bikes, added Powers, have allowed the relatively older population to get out of their cars and still navigate the North Shore’s hilly terrain. Perhaps a better blueprint to help reverse the rising tide of car ownership lies on an island south of the Fraser River. The City of Richmond has also been an early backer of electric vehicles. In 2017, it was the first jurisdiction in North America to require that all resident parking stalls in new buildings have the electric infrastructure to install charging stations.
“It is difficult,” said Bycraft, who oversees the city’s charging network, “[the installers] come across locations and we're thinking, ‘Oh, it's so expensive to bring it in here.’” The young father became obsessed. He would do massive amounts of research to figure out the logistics. Answer questions. Educate. He kept pushing.
“Once I could talk to people with facts and say, you know, ‘Here's how much it's going to cost. Here's how it's going to work. Here's how the apps work,’ it started to help make it seem kind of more mundane.” The cables they are planning to run underground should allow them to serve 25 to 30 vehicles more. But the longer the distance, the more expensive the installation.
Until a charger arrives in his complex, Martin-Jones says the downside to owning an EV is he no longer rides his bike anywhere. Meanwhile, there are signs public transportation in the province’s largest urban area is recovering from a pandemic drop. According to TransLink, the first five months of 2022 averaged 63 per cent more journeys than the same time in 2021.
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