by Guy Dauncey
Common Ground Magazine, September 2007
What do we want? THE GREENWAY! How will we get it? OUR WAY! When do we want it? NOW!
Those were the words that resounded in the mind of defeated Cabinet Minister Kip Sparrow as he tossed and turned in his bed on a hot 35 ºC summer’s night in June 2009, wondering where it all went wrong...
Why did the people of Metro Vancouver turn so strongly against his vision of Canada’s Pacific Gateway? The videos were so convincing, the bridges and freeways looked so sleek, the whole multi-billion dollar project was so …. sexy.
Why did they write graffiti on the Gateway posters, adding “Destroying our environment for the next generation – and beyond”? Why did they turn against the largest transportation investment in provincial history? Didn’t they hate the traffic congestion that was making life on the Lower Mainland so slow as much as everyone did? If only he’d not had to bother with those time-consuming environmental assessments.
In the fall of 2006, when the defenders of Eagleridge Bluffs were defeated and Betty Krawczyk was packed off to jail for trying to stop that fragment of beauty from becoming part of the “Road to the 2010 Olympics”, everything had seemed so promising. The Premier was enthralled with the ever-expanding trade with China, and the Ministry of Transport had responded with the best possible solution: a vision of roads and bridges that would make the smallest engineer feel proud.
Maybe it was just as well he had lost his seat. That big all-day meeting in March 2008 when the Mayors of Metro Vancouver had met with planners, sustainability experts and community leaders had been very confusing. They had thrown out the entire conceptual framework of new roads and bridges and efficient road capacity, and were talking instead about sustainability, integrated mobility – and climate change. They just wouldn’t accept that allowing traffic to travel more smoothly would reduce the impact on climate change.
While Kip was failing to get to sleep, the celebratory evening was still in full swing in Hastings Park, where the widened Highway One would have ended, dumping its traffic into Vancouver and Burnaby. The full extent of the government’s turnaround will live long in the region’s memory, and be taught in urban planning schools around the world.
Global climate change had been the impulse that made so many people come together to sing that chant, but the key to the movement’s success had been the willingness of its many players to put the many pieces together in an integrated manner. They had held community meetings in all the affected areas, from Ladner and Surrey to Maple Ridge, where they had laid out the two visions – Gateway versus Greenway – and listened to the feedback.
The central idea of the new Greenway Program was “sustainably integrated mobility for all”. It included a major investment in public transit, three new bus rapid transit lines (including across the Port Mann bridge), a whole new service of luxury commuter shuttles, 2,000 miles of new cycle lanes, bicycle boulevards and long-distance cycle paths, 10,000 city U-Bikes modeled on Paris’ Velib scheme, a community rail link from Surrey to Chilliwack, 50 new SkyTrain cars, the expansion of Vancouver’s car-share scheme to the entire region, a new LiftShare program, a personal travelcard that made it possible for every citizen to pay for all these options electronically, reduced transit fares, and electronic timetables at transit stops that told you exactly when the next bus would arrive.
The Greenway program had been costed out at half the price of the Gateway Program, and it was to be financed by a $2 congestion charge on every water crossing, and increased parking charges, with payment by Automated Number Plate Recognition, and the normal range of choices. As an incentive, the charge would be waived for fuel-efficient and electric vehicles – and there would be EV charging posts in every car park.
With the plan in place, a brochure was delivered to every household in the region, and the Greenway team lined up an impressive array of community, environmental and business leaders to argue their case. The Livable Region Coalition joined forces with the Gateway 40 Network of groups opposed to the plan, and soon there were 400 groups and 50,000 individuals calling for the Greenway, not the Gateway, and an email petition that went global gathered 250,000 signatures. Soon after, with the provincial election only a year away, the Premier announced the rebirth of Gateway as the Pacific Greenway Program – Canada’s Gateway to The New Sustainable Pacific.
Kip took it well, and dutifully smiled at the announcement ceremony, but inwardly, he was sad. All those shining new bridges and freeways – it looked as if they would never happen.
Guy Dauncey is President of the BC Sustainable Energy Association (www.bcsea.org)