The media have given good coverage of the Transportation Monitoring Report delivered to council on Tuesday, May 12.
The Vancouver Sun – May 13
Alternative forms of travel comprise 50 per cent of all trips in the city
Vancouver has reached a milestone in its quest to be the greenest city in Canada, recording half of trips being done by walking, cycling and transit. On Tuesday, transportation officials released data that shows that while the car may still be king, it is declining in importance. In 2014, there were an estimated 918,000 daily trips by automobile, down from 983,000 in 2013.
At the same time, the total number of daily trips by people on transit, by foot and on bicycle rose from 893,000 to 905,000. Much of that came from a 20 per cent increase in cycling from 2013 to 2014.
That puts the alternative forms of transportation in a statistical dead heat with the automobile, according to Jerry Dobrovolny, Vancouver’s director of transportation.
Coupled with the decline in daily auto trips, the number of kilometres travelled by vehicles has declined by 21 per cent since 2007. That, according to Dobrovolny, means the city has surpassed targets set under the city’s Greenest City Action Plan and Transportation 2040 goals of reducing vehicle trips by 20 per cent.
The changeover comes as Vancouver continues to push an agenda of trying to get most people out of their cars and into other forms of transportation by 2020. But despite the gains in cycling — doubling to 100,000 trips a day in 2014 from 50,000 in 2008 — the city continues to be challenged in one area: transit.
Transit growth in Vancouver is flat, largely because of a lack of investment in heavily travelled corridors such as Broadway, Dobrovolny told council.
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Here’s the report:
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PT will pull out some of the significant results in future posts. But let’s acknowledge the main point: The target we aimed for by 2020 has been reached today:
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This is truly a major achievement, and reflects a positive change in the nature of transportation in dear old Soggyville.
50% transit, walking and biking mode share is astounding. I believe the Metro rests somewhere around 21%, which is one of the highest mode shares in western North America.
A great achievement.
Vehicle trip mode share is reported as down, transit and walking flat, bicycling up. No surprise to those seeing the incredible growth in cycling out on the streets, but nice to have a number.
In terms of Vehicle Kilometers Travelled, per capita VKT is down 21% from 2007 (surpassing the 2040 target of 20%) and total VKT is down 16.5%. Cue the calls for more roads and tunnels for this reduced vehicle load 😉
It would be helpful to have more background. What is a Trip Diary? Why is there such a paucity of panel survey results from Oakridge, Shaughnessy and the Arbutus areas?
A Trip Diary is the Translink Regional Travel Behaviour Survey, conducted across Metro Vancouver, to enable future planning.
http://www.translink.ca/en/Plans-and-Projects/Travel-Behaviour-Survey.aspx
Because it isn’t conducted every year, the City has done interim surveys to obtain more current/frequent data.
Too bad the federal conservatives got rid of the mandatory expanded census. This would have been more reliable data and harder to dispute.
That’s a strange caveat on the graph – “for all trips originating in the city of Vancouver”. Does that excludes all commuter traffic from outside the city, or just the inbound leg? The presentation seems to indicate that only Vancouver residents were surveyed, so maybe it does exclude all commuter traffic. Would be interesting to see how the picture is altered taking all traffic into account, and how it compares to the other cities in the metro area.
So, I wonder what percentage a certain mode has to reach before it’s no longer called “alternative”.
At this rate the private automobile will be labelled the ‘alternative form of travel’ in the very near future. Can’t come soon enough, we’re on the right track.
Great news but no surprise. Now it’s absolutely clear that the scaremongering about carmageddon is completely unfounded.