Interact: How can cities move transportation equity from rhetoric to reality?

Full Panel
Transcript

Note to readers: This video session was transcribed using auto-transcribing software.  Questions or concerns with the transcription can be directed to events@canurb.org with “transcription” in the subject line.

MARY W. ROWE Hi everybody. It’s Mary Rowe from the Canadian Urban Institute. I’m happy to be having this conversation because what could be more important than transportation equity? And, very appreciative and Interact’s leadership on this. And for them for producing this really great report, we’ll give a few more minutes for people to come on in. And, then we’re looking forward to having a really rich discussion. And we have a number of people … What we’re going to do is have a presentation from Interact first, and then we have a number of panelists who are joining us to give us their views on this, on what is a really, really weighty topic. So, as you know, the CUI operates in cities across the country with many, many Indigenous peoples, ancestral territory ceded and unceded. And we at CUI in 2024, are committing ourselves to redoubling our efforts around what reconciliation needs to look like in the city, and open space. And so I appreciate having a three month stint here to be present in Ottawa on the traditional territory of the Algonquins, and to be working with many, many partners, Indigenous and settler, to address the colonial legacies of, of urbanism and to how we address those. And a lot of what we’re dealing with right now, across every jurisdiction is, a manifestation of those, patterns, that were established and, reinforced over decades and decades and decades. So I appreciate you joining us on that journey on that whole walk together as we work towards truth and reconciliation. If you can put in your chat where you’re coming in from, that’s always helpful for us to know. We have, listeners who come in coast to coast, obviously, and we also have people that come in from outside Canada. And we appreciate our City Talkers. There are tens of thousands of you that have joined over the last several years. And we’re getting ready, actually, to launch a new website which will feature every video we’ve ever done. So, every webinar we’ve ever led, which means hundreds of people, well, thousands of people like you who have listened, but also hundreds of people that have offered themselves up to be participants and interlocutors and conversation starters. And as you always know, every conversation we have on CityTalk, we always say “it’s the beginning, not the end”. So just keep that in mind, that the chat here – if you’ve if you’ve been a lurker on CityTalks for years and you know, today it’s a new day, new year and you’d like to actually participate in the chat, we would encourage you to do so because there’s a whole world of expertise and, thoughtfulness on the chat. And we publish that along with the transcript and the actual video. And people make good connections in the chat and learn from each other and all that kind of thing. So, it’s a really rich discourse. And if there’s anything that we’ve tried to do, at the CUI through the initiation of this program, which was just at the beginning of the pandemic through, is to just reinforce that we are a peer to peer network of problem solvers. There’s not a single person participating here that doesn’t every day focus on how can they make urban life work better for themselves, for their families, for others, for their neighbors? And what are the policy and enabling conditions that we need to allow us to be able to flourish and do what we can do best, which is make great cities. So, welcome, everybody. I would encourage you, as I say, to participate in the chat. And if we could now, open up the, the chat so you can see who the participants will be. And also, I would be delighted to introduce my colleagues from Interact who are going to come on. And Meghan is the first and she’s going to summarize the report, and I bet you’re going to show us some nice pictures, and we’re going to have a really interesting conversation and, see how we move forward in this discourse. So over to you to kind of give us the technical overview, if you can, Meghan. And then, we’re going to hear from our colleagues in the cities that work closely with you on this report. And then, as I say, throw those questions into the chat. We’re interested to hear what your queries are. And if you take exception to something you hear, please don’t hesitate. Good heavens. This is a safe space. Let’s talk – obviously we do that with great respect of each other, but please feel free to raise your misgivings or questions or what you think needs more attention. So Meghan, thanks for doing this. Glad to be here and with you, and I’m sorry that I was a few minutes late, but here I am.

MEGHAN WINTERS No problem. Thanks so much to you and your team, Mary, for hosting this today. I’m really pleased to be here to share the work of our team. I need to acknowledge there’s a whole research team behind this Interact team, as well as our partners, so Victoria Barr with Level Up Collaborative and Tessa Williams and Jamie Fisher, our two graduate students who did a ton of work on this. I also thank the many transportation and equity practitioners whose experience we’re drawing from in putting this report together. I’m the face of a really large collaborative effort, and I’m really grateful to be able to do that. I’m speaking to you from the lands of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tseil-Waututh people, in what is now the City of Vancouver. I just take a moment to highlight the role that transportation has played in colonization and sort of the persistent mobility injustices that happen with a lack of safe transportation supports for Indigenous people across the country, people living on reserve and off reserve. And it’s really an area that needs, focused attention. And there’s some speaking to that within our report as well. So research has showed that an estimated 1 million Canadians live in transportation poverty. This is where like ability to access opportunities is limited by inadequate, unaffordable and unsafe transportation. And as Mary alluded to, these injustices are really built in over time. I think many on the call would know that today, and they’re standing in the way of people’s access to things like jobs, but also education, health care, social opportunities, things that ultimately impact sort of health and well-being broadly writ. Now there’s movement, we’re certainly seeing, governments making major investments in active transportation and travel that’s happening across the country right now. We’re also seeing cities put equity on their policy agenda. So making this front and center and adopting citywide policies and frameworks. And it’s a real opportunity right now to make sure that these transportation systems are working for everyone. But what’s missing is how to action these kinds of big, high level commitments on the ground in everyday work. So the big question really is the title of today’s talk, “How Can Cities Move Transportation Equity Forward, From Rhetoric to Reality”? It’s a question that we heard come up again and again from our city partners. And so as we started on this work some year and a half ago to tackle it, we had the goal to assemble practical guidance and inspiration on how equity can be meaningfully embedded into sustainable transportation interventions or changes in the city. Our research process was a combination of crowdsourcing, policy reviews and extensive interviews and dialogs with practitioners to delve into what worked in their cities, what failed, and why. The work we summarized in a new report, that’s just come out. You can use the QR code on the slide right here, or I hope someone’s putting a link in the chat as I speak. The report has sort of five things that it offers, five key pieces that are shaped by the needs that were expressed by our city partners in this journey. The first is, key elements that define transportation equity, and resources for learning more about this. It includes ten considerations for high level municipal policy equity. Municipal equity policies. It also has lessons learned from in-depth studies of the transportation equity journeys of three cities in Canada, of New Westminster, of Edmonton and Ottawa. So who you see on the panel today, and it’s got snapshots from other large and small cities and some international cities as well. It shares 15 promising practices to help move forward embedded in equity in sustainable transportation planning, implementation and evaluation. And it touches on the remaining challenges and where we heard the field is heading next. So for today’s session I’m just going to highlight a few key sessions, things that I think might resonate with the audience and invite you in. The first thing is that over and over we hear confusion around what equity means for transportation. And more generally, we hear that the term equity can be thrown around and co-opted so much that it can lose meaning. So in response to that, we included an explainer around what transportation equity is and is not. And within the report we describe these sort of five components, with explanations in them and additional resources for learning around them. So our practice partners said this kind of explainer was really essential, that it was important, framing for speaking to elected officials for when they were going to speak to the public, or for speaking to different kinds of departments that might be moving at a different pace around this. So it really puts it forward around equity in transportation context. Secondly, after 2020, we saw municipalities accelerate around the creation of these like citywide equity policies and frameworks. More and more cities were starting to formalize their commitment on how they were going to address the harmful inequities from community planning. And this is a really evolving and active space. Cities wanted to hear from each other. And so we did a broad scan of citywide equity policies, and then we narrowed in on eight cities for a more in-depth analysis, just to name these cities – it was Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax. And we looked at their citywide policies, to compare and contrast sort of what were the key elements in them, how was equity defined, the process used, the tools and the indicators used? And from this we identified ten considerations. And we really see this contribution as a way to help municipalities along their journey. We know that each municipality is a really specific context. There’s different levels of readiness and challenges, and that some of these points might resonate differently in different places. But there’s detail within the report for each of these sort of ten observations and considerations and guidance on how a city or municipality might embrace this to move forward and do the work deeper. Finally, throughout our work, we heard that the big question was no longer whether to take action toward sustainable transportation equity, but how to do that? Specifically, cities in Canada were moving forward to adopt these kinds of like, broad policy goals. But transportation practitioners are eager for guidance on how to successfully action those kinds of commitments on the ground. So some of you on the call might not be in transportation. And I’d underscore that the learnings from this report, I think, are really relevant to other planning domains as well. Transportation doesn’t happen in a silo, of course it’s integrated with land use, other practices, and many parts of the daily work in transportation planning that are about funding, planning, engagement, implementation and evaluation also happen in adjacent municipal departments as well.

MEGHAN WINTERS So the report introduces 15 promising practices. These surfaced through the case studies that we did, and also a large dialog we had with the transportation community at a workshop in Winnipeg last year. They’re cross-cutting practices that illustrate how equity can be embedded across different aspects of transportation practice. And you can see the color coding on the slide here. So this is a listing of them. And there’s detail and explanations within the report. But I’d highlight that there’s steps that can be taken if you’re working at the policy level, there’s promising practices if you’re in analysis and reporting, if you’re focused on engagement, if it’s about prioritization and implementation or about learning and evaluation. So across any of these areas of practice, there’s steps that can be taken. And we put forward some promising practices and inspirations. So to learn more about these, I’d invite you to take a deeper dive into the report. In the report, there’s policy context and storylines for each of these three case study cities. They were cities that we’re moving forward and making advances in this area. For today, I’m not going to get into the details of any of these cities, because we’re really lucky to have leaders from these cities who can speak to their own stories and journeys and what stands out for them. But there’s a few pages in the case study for each of them within the report. We also have spotlights from some other contexts, one of these is around Toronto, which has a multitude of efforts around equity. But we also highlight small communities with a spotlight on the County of Kings in the Atlantic provinces. And then there’s a few spotlights that we take from U.S. cities as well. I’m acknowledging this is a very different policy context, but there’s opportunities to learn from some of the steps that they’ve taken moving forward. Just to close, I want to share that no one we spoke to in all of our efforts felt like they had all the answers. What was clear is that you can’t do the equity work alone. In every municipality we spoke to progress was possible because of collective efforts across departments, sectors and disciplines. Our hope is that this work and this report can inspire other city builders to consider how the practices apply in their own contexts, experiment with new ways of thinking and working, and sort of join a broader community of practitioners through these CityTalks and through efforts locally that are committed to transportation equity. And so I want to invite you to take a minute to read the report. The executive summary or the deeper dive, if that’s what you’re looking for. I hope you can share it with colleagues, elected officials, people in your network and share it online. Thanks for joining in the conversation today. And there’ll be more conversations like this in the coming months. And also to invite people to consider hosting or joining a workshop so that you can start experimenting with some of these practices, taking a deep dive with scenarios or projects that are relevant to your context. And I invite you to reach out to our team. If you’re interested in collaborating on that. And so with that, I’m here to hear from the panelists and I’ll pass it back to Mary. Thank you so much.

MARY W. ROWE Thanks. It’s so interesting … In your research here and in your faculty work, you chose transportation equity versus transit equity or mobility. What was the thinking on that?

MEGHAN WINTERS You know, there’s a lot of terms. We often talk about mobility equity as well. Transportation equity. I think a lot of the municipal departments that we work with in the field, our transportation departments, and define themselves as a transportation community. So within the equity conversation, there’s all sorts of different terms and terminologies. Part of the reason why we needed transportation equity as an explainer. And also there’s a glossary in that book as well. So just an example of different language that’s happening there. But really the ask for our work came from people who were transportation planners, practitioners, engineers across the country.

MARY W. ROWE Right. So what they’re saying is there’s a mixed modality here, a whole bunch of options. And basically we’re talking about moving people and you don’t want it to be one or the other. Grand. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, let me ask our panelists from the cities to put their cameras on. And, Meghan, don’t go anywhere, because they’re going to have lots of things for you to, I’m sure respond to. And I always, my view here is that we always open our mics. Unless you’ve got a wild child behind you or a barking dog, or, I was on a call this morning and they had a woodchipper who was working, and you couldn’t hear anything else. So, but please feel free to keep your mic open, because it’s just a much more natural way for us to talk. And, and I’m really interested in not only the findings of this piece of work, but also just the choices and the methodologies that you chose, Meghan, because why these cities and what their particular perspectives are? But let’s go to Nathan first, if we could. And Nathan, I just want to acknowledge and I should have said it right off the bat. Your city has experienced something extraordinary over the last 48 hours, and we are appreciative that, I mean, you had a rough couple of weeks over there. But, we’re appreciative that no one was injured in what was going on there in City Hall. So just to say that and to acknowledge to all our Edmonton listeners that we, feel for the kind of, impact that kind of disruption can have. So over to you, Nathan, to talk a little bit about Edmonton’s perspective on this work and on and on mobility, equity generally, or transportation equity generally. Go ahead, Nathan.

NATHAN SMITH Great. Thanks. I’m Nathan Smith. I’m an engineer working in Treaty Six for the city of Edmonton. I work more on the policy strategy side. So a lot of my personal experience in this area is trying to find ways to make sure we’re considering equity in some of those bigger citywide policy, strategy, prioritization work. I think most, if not all municipalities are at a point where there’s a lot more potential infrastructure projects than there is money. So if we want to make recommendations of where to focus limited resources, how do we do so in a way that better considers the needs of some of the folks that haven’t been served well, by our mobility system in the past. Generally, I’d say kind of a more formal move towards including equity, and work within the City of Edmonton started around 2017, and it’s kind of been evolving and building since then. A few years ago, Edmonton started incorporating a gender-based Analysis Plus section that highlights equity considerations in all council reports. So it’s always something that that has to be discussed. But it hasn’t always been easy or straightforward. The work varies a lot depending on the different types of projects or the different levels of projects. But it’s an ongoing conversation, and we’re trying to find ways to incorporate equity and make sure that we’re incorporating it meaningfully into all of our levels of work.

MARY W. ROWE Thanks, Nathan. I just am always agog at the intelligence that comes out of the chat, including someone has identified the plant behind you … a Staghorn Fern. Just so you know, this is an attentive audience because somebody on CityTalk’s going to know what that plant is. Thanks for that. Patrick, can you go next?

PATRICK JOHNSTONE Thank you. Yeah, I’m Patrick Johnstone. I’m the mayor of the City of New Westminster, here on the unceded and unsurrended land of the Halkomelem speaking peoples. I thank you Mary,

MARY W. ROWE I should have said “Your Worship” …

PATRICK JOHNSTONE Yeah, we don’t use “Worship” … as part of our equity efforts here, we don’t talk about “Worship” anymore. We’ve moved past that …

MARY W. ROWE OK … just Good old Pat. Hey, Patrick. Hey, you. [that works] Okay Mr. Mayor, go ahead. Keep going.

PATRICK JOHNSTONE Well, I want to thank Meghan for talking about that, about the relationship between, between reconciliation and this, I’m sitting here in New Westminster, which is, the oldest city west of the Great Lakes in Canada. And in many ways, it was a beachhead on the colonial experiment here. And we’re still reckoning with that. And I’m looking down right now at the part of the Fraser River where Simon Fraser came down the river and said, “we’re coming through”. And every piece of colonial activity that’s happened grew out of that, out of the need to use this river as a transportation route or the desire to use it as transportation. So it is tied together. I guess my, in reading this report, what one part that kept on playing back to me is, it is about transportation but transportation equity is like every other equity effort in the city. It’s about, it’s about making sure that we’re talking to people, and that we … It takes an intentional drive. It takes, a meaningfully … an effort to make sure you’re centering people that you haven’t been listening to when you’re making decisions. And, much like reconciliation, if it feels good when you start doing it, you’re probably doing it wrong, because the conversations you start having when you start talking to the people who have been marginalized by your decisions, by the people who aren’t being served by the work you’re doing, those are sometimes difficult conversations. We have a lot of good ideas about how we’re going to build transportation space, and it’s only when we find out that we’re building them in a way that doesn’t serve everyone in our community that … It makes the conversations harder. And I think transportation is also, as we talked about, using the term mobility or using the term transportation or other terms, I think transportation is the real technocratic word. I think that’s part of it. Part of it is the people who do this work are engineers and technocrats who see technical solutions and, bringing real public consultation into that and real discussion with a broader community into that hypocratic work is uncomfortable and difficult and challenging. We’re really, I think, fortunate in our city that we have staff who are really interested in doing that work and, and they are being driven by some leaders on my council, not myself, actually. I mean, I’m one of the council members, but, there have been some really incredible leaders at our council who pushed our staff towards rethinking what equity is in all departments, including transportation. People like the Nadine Nakagawa and Mary Trentadue and Jaimie McEvoy, people I have to give shout outs to because they’re the real leaders in my community in that work. And I don’t know what else to say other than that. I think it’s about public engagement. It’s about making sure that we are engaging people in a meaningful way. And I can talk more about how we’re trying to do that if we get to it.

MARY W. ROWE Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s so interesting. You know, I often say it’s all one conversation, as you’re suggesting. So this is a focus on transportation. But I can almost guarantee that every barrier that Meghan and her team have identified is something that’s a barrier to equity in some other domain of service. Right. So it’s a fundamental approach to, as you’re suggesting, engagement. And Patrick, I want to go even further. I want to I want to send … this is a challenge, CityTalkers figure this out … We need another word for engagement. Because engagement for me still feels like somebody in power going out and asking somebody what they think versus something that is a collaborative co-design, shared solution. I don’t know what the better term is, but you know what I’m getting at? Mayor Johnstone, it’s just something that conveys that this is a big collective enterprise, the urban environment.

PATRICK JOHNSTONE I think people often conflate the word engagement and communication. And I think a lot of cities make the mistake of asking their communication departments to do engagement. And that is a mindful, that’s a mindful separation we did. We have created a separate engagement group who are clear, they’re not in the communications business. They’re not talking to people. They are bringing people in and asking them, and, and putting in front of every engagement exercise the … what is it … the IP2 spectrum of engagement … Like what are we actually … are we asking you to give us some ideas? Are you asking us to tell us about your experience. Or are we asking you to co-develop or co-build this thing. And being clear with people at the beginning of an engagement process, so let them know where they’re at.

MARY W. ROWE It kind of works both ways, because the flip of it is also that those of us that are being engaged with have to take responsibility, that the problem is ours to solve. So – because what often happens then is people say, well, you know, it’s their problem. The city came, they ask me, and my opinion now goes back and we wait for them to fix it. But, you know, there’s not a struggle that we’ve got that’s going to be fixed by only one sector. And I appreciate Nathan’s bio. You put right in here, Nathan, that you’re not an engineer. You’re a plan-gineer. But this idea that, you know, cities … this rejection of tech … With all due respect to the engineers. Hands up. There’ll be a gazillion of people who are on this call that are engineers and planners. Great. But the magical thing about cities is that, mayors always hate this when I say this, but no one is the boss of the city, right? So it’s  … because it’s an amalgam of a whole bunch of people with, and you want them all to have agency to come up with the best idea. And we’ve seen that in the Global South for years. You know, that the best ideas came from the ground. So anyway, over to you, Sawsan in sunny, not so sunny Ottawa. I got the tip this morning in the meeting that I was going to do that you have to adopt a penguin walk in Ottawa to deal with ice. That’s right. You have to waddle. You kind of know that in Vancouver, Meghan. I’m sure you had that with the snow and the ice last week. Anyway, Sawsan, let’s hear from you – your perspective on transportation, mobility, transit, whatever … However you want to define it, and this notion of equity versus poverty. Such an important topic here in the nation’s capital.

SAWSAN AL-REFAEI Thank you. Mary. My name is Sawsan Al-Refaei. I am currently the manager of the Community Safety Wellbeing Fund in, in the city. But, you know, before I joined, I was the program manager for anti-racism and women and gender equity, on the, land of the Algonquin, unceded land. I think that the journey of the City of Ottawa was quite interesting, but I think that we started from the right spot. We have a lot of to learn and, a long journey. But we started with a political commitment to equity. And I think that is what stood out in the report. So in 2019, I was a new immigrant to Canada, but that’s when the, the city of Ottawa, asked city staff to come up with the first woman and gender equity strategy for the city, and that was the first step on the equity pathway. But it started, at the top. And I’m really glad that we have a mayor, among the panelists, because you can talk equity as much as you want, but if there’s no political commitment to the process, I feel it’s very, very hard to put all the equity, responsibility and accountability on the shoulder of public servants. So we started with that, a women and gender strategy that commits that a gender lens and an intersectional lens has to be integrated in everything, including transit. And there was a culture in Ottawa, and I was new to it, that equity comes in the context of housing and children’s services and community services, but that’s not the case. You know what, transit should come number one? Because it has to do with health services and with access to schools, with access to childcare, to everything. And so the journey started with a political commitment not only to women and gender equity, but also to the anti-racism strategy. And as part of that strategy, there was a commitment by all three departments to report on equity implications on whatever report goes to council. It’s not mandatory yet, but it was optional. And what I shared with, with my colleague, Meghan and her team is that, kind of putting it as optional is really tricky because if you don’t fill it, then why do you think there are no equity implications to whatever you’re doing? And if you fill it, you have to do the work from the get go. So it was really tricky in there, but that really helped our department Transit Services, to think about equity on everything they do. And I can go after in details on how we did it. But it’s actually, I think that the, the power in what we did is bringing transit people to the equity table, and that was new to them, but they understood equity because they sat around the equity table. But in the same time, the equity people and the specialists and experts went to that table as well and were embedded in the discussions that went around the transportation masterplan. So, that’s the beginning of the journey, and I can speak to the rest of the journey afterwards.

MARY W. ROWE Yeah, it’s so interesting, isn’t it, what you’re suggesting. I mean, you’re a public servant and you’re saying, look, have really realistic expectations of what a public … what the public sector can deliver. And I totally agree with you on that. And I hope that other people are empathic to that because it is it’s totally true. And we’re all limited. Same with … you can’t go to the private sector and expect them to be able to do things singlehandedly either. Can I just encourage people on the chat to switch your settings because you’re all saying really smart things, and I can see it out of the corner of my eye, but sometimes you only send to the host and the panelists. So if you’re one of those enthusiastic keeners that’s been posting in here, just go back, look at your comments and make sure you did them to everyone. And if you didn’t, redo them so that they everybody can benefit from that and people are asking if they will be published and they will. They always say, this is a bit … This is not Las Vegas. You know, everything you put on that chat is public. So just judge yourselves accordingly. So let’s talk a little bit about what you think the biggest obstacles are in this piece of work when you were trying to move this agenda forward? What? … And I think I’m waiting to see if someone uses the C word, which is council, and  just whether or not, what would you say are the biggest challenges that you’re facing? And on the chat, let us know, gang, because you’re all in the trenches too. So who wants to start? Nathan, what’s the biggest challenge to advancing this?

PATRICK JOHNSTONE I think, you know, we talked about engagement a bit, and I think that’s a really big part of it. But I think doing meaningful engagement and finding a way to do that without overburdening the communities that you’re trying to talk to is, is quite challenging. So since this became more of a focus in the city of Edmonton, I think what we’ve start to hear from some of the community groups is like, okay, it’s great that you want to talk to us about equity considerations and what our communities need. But now we’re hearing from the city every two weeks, oh, come talk to us about this. Can you talk to us about this? Where a lot of these community groups are struggling just to kind of keep the lights on and manage their day to day operations. So finding a way to get that input as much as possible, but making sure we’re not placing more of a burden on the communities that we’re trying to help. And I think that’s been kind of an ongoing learning. I think at first it was very much like just asking a bunch of questions and trying to find other ways to make those connections, work with other groups within the city that may have closer connections with these communities. So we have a bit of a head start understanding what are some of those challenges. We’re not just coming and like demanding that they give us a bunch of their time.

MARY W. ROWE So while you’re there, just to everybody, recognizing the chat’s blowing up on this topic, which is great. Nathan, in terms of … do you have a dilemma that you raise an expectation of a community, so you consult with them, you engage with them, they come up with some fabulous ideas, and then what happens if they don’t get realized? Do people then feel, you know, more than disappointed? Patrick is nodding. Go ahead Patrick. I mean, is that one of the dilemmas, you know?

PATRICK JOHNSTONE Oh, yeah. I mean, I absolutely reflect … I mean, would, amplify what Nathan said about engagement fatigue. You know, engagement fatigue is a real thing. And part of that is, part of our way of addressing that is finding new ways to engage. If you just want to put together a town hall and put poster boards up and ask about a project, you’re going to get the same 15 people who come to all town halls on projects and they’re going to feel engagement fatigue. So we have to find creative ways to reach out to the community. We do pop ups in malls. We, you know, we take the project to where people are, in order to surprise them into being engaged in the project. So you’re not fatiguing the same people. There’s another important part you brought up about, making sure we close the loop on engagement, making sure that when people do engage with us, they hear their own voice in the engagement, even if they don’t get what they want. We can say back to, yeah, we heard that these things that we’re not doing … Or we’ve heard that you wanted to see X or Y out of a project and we delivered X and we couldn’t deliver Y because … So closing the loop on engagement helps with the fatigue. But the other problem though is transportation projects as opposed to plans, are always time sensitive. They always have, they always have, funding issues. They always have timing around when you could do the work compared to other work you have to do in the city. And engagement … Meaningful engagement takes time and it takes … and, that always, especially for transportation engineers, is a challenge for them because they have timelines. They want to get things built by … for funding reasons, for budget reasons, for all kinds of technical reasons. And, sometimes this is seen as a barrier to getting work done time in a timely manner, which is why I think we have to put emphasis on the transportation plan part as opposed to the project part. If we really do meaningful good engagement at the planning part, then really the project part, we’re going to hear back from people, but at least we can say, you know, we’ve engaged with the community and we’ve talked about this with the community and this is reacting to what we’ve heard. One of the things I learned from the former mayor of Victoria is, is if you, if you build two blocks of bike lane, you’re going to get a lot of pushback from the community. If you build ten kilometers of bike lane, you’re going to get exactly the same amount of pushback as you did for two blocks. So do the big plan, come up with the big plan, engage on the big plan. Don’t engage on every three blocks. Engage on the big plan. And that really helps you … It also helps you actually implement … like take the feedback you’ve got from the engagement and put it into the plan, because it’s so hard at the project stage to actually do that the meaningful way.

MARY W. ROWE So lots of great questions again in the chat. And again everybody make sure you fix your settings so we’re all seeing them. I’m interested in a number of questions here around how much did the work look at rural and First Nations and Sawsan and I drove back into Ottawa yesterday, I was up the Ottawa Valley for meetings. And I came back, and I was struck how that City of Ottawa sign is like 50, 45 minutes from downtown, like it is a very big … I remember the mayor, the previous mayor, used to put up a poster and say, you know, we’re six Manhattans, you know, it wasn’t even that, it’s bigger. You know, you have rural within your urban boundary. So can we talk a little bit about how the equity and accessibility issue was dealt with in these sprawling environments? And I’d be interested to hear from you, Meghan, because you live in an extraordinarily mixed, diverse land-use pattern in, lower mainland. So anyway, over to you, Sawsan, about how do we address rural and First Nations.

SAWSAN AL-REFAEI I have to speak to this from an equity perspective because, again, I’m not a transportation expert, but I want to go back to the previous question. If I may Mary around engagement, because this word comes up every time we speak about intersectional groups in our community. I think the city of Ottawa is moving away from engagement as THE way, into collective impact and collective impact means that, you know, just like you said, instead of being in a position of power and then bringing people in, into a discussion at the time we decide, in the way we decide, but creating that power spot where everybody comes into that collective impact place and having equal power and then going out and in, as we can. And this, this really helps with sharing that accountability. I mean, for us, it definitely helps knowing that everybody is on board and everybody’s contributing versus just engaging them, and we carry all the accountability. Now for rural areas, I think that you asked first about the obstacles and if we want to deal with Indigenous communities, rural communities this is important. And I know that a lot of people say there’s a lot of data there. We don’t want to spend one more dollar on that. But the data is not intersectional. It doesn’t speak to the lived experiences of those groups. And if we speak rural areas, if we speak, even the intersectionality within the rural groups, there is a notion that rural areas are majorly non-racialized people. This has changed a lot after Covid and we still use very old data to make transportation policies and decisions. And you know, the City of Ottawa, I’m being self-critical, we also rely on neighborhood indices, which is great because it speaks to priority neighborhoods. But in the past three years, things are dynamic. They change a lot. The immigration that is happening into Ottawa because of all the things that are happening in the world, but also because of internal things that are happening in Canada,  the picture is different. And so to rely on…  not individual like, not population based gender and race sensitive data will never give us the idea of what is the lived experience of First Nations, of Indigenous communities, what is the experience of rural persons? What is the difference between an experience of a women, a single women in rural area versus, a business owner or land owner in, in a rural area. So what we are working now with, with the transportation team is to try to embed good practices of collecting data, but also trying to base our policies in a way that makes sense, so that those realities are examined, revisited regularly, and not rely on a particular indices that will govern all our, our policies. But again, it goes back to how we look at engagement, because a collective impact approach will allow people who live in rural areas to have a voice on a regular basis and to report the dynamics that are changing versus municipalities just taking one snapshot about, you know, on what’s happening and then basing phasing a ten-year plan on that. So it is not just the data, but it is how policies are made.

MEGHAN WINTERS So, Mary, I can pick up on that …

MARY W. ROWE Can I ask Meghan a question about that in terms of the methodology?

MEGHAN WINTERS Just a couple things. One, I work with many other cities, not just the cities here. And I want to say that a number of cities are really hesitant to collect disaggregate data and to, report on that data. And that is like a message I walk into every city … And so cities who have adopted with their leadership GBA plus analysis, they’ve got it and they have permission to and an obligation to look at this and look at intersectional experiences in their cities and their sort of call to action on that already. But other cities are very hesitant, and that’s a shift that has to happen. And I’m still surprised when I see it, you know, coming out of Covid … But I feel like really we’re still saying we can’t collect data on gender, race, income and housing tenure. How can we know who responded? And so it’s sort of, doing a disservice to the data and efforts that happen around engagement. And it doesn’t allow … a lot of transportation practitioners are very skilled with data and interpreting it. And, you know, they need to be able to have data that can drive that. The other sort of narrative I want to put out here is that, you know, and our report has some limits on challenges to moving forward. And one of them is that car dependency is slowing us down. That’s the statement in it. We all have these sustainability goals, but what I … The message I really want to send is that there are people who can’t or won’t, depend on cars. And so there’s many segments of our population, whether it’s the young or the old, whether it’s people with disabilities who may not be able to drive, to get around our communities. And our car dependency really puts them at a disservice and is an equity consideration from the outset. And it’s one that I would say on the whole, we broadly overlook. The other final thing I just want to say is, I meet a lot of passionate and committed transportation practitioners who understand this context and are moving it forward. And as a professor, I have to say, many schools are doing great training to that next generation to bring them forward, and they are getting jobs in our cities. And this is a growing area, you know, for employment for sure. But it takes time sometimes for that to permeate into cities and to work its way up to seniority in decision making. And so I really hope that, you know, I really love when I see new councilors and, mayors and elected officials take charge for that, because I do believe that the transportation profession is training and getting, like, moving forward on this and that it’s just, hopefully a matter of time before those kinds of things are infiltrated more commonly in settings both small and large.

MARY W. ROWE All right. I have a fiddly little question for any of you to jump in on. And it has to do with this larger issue of what does equity look like? And I’m wondering if … do we see ourselves, you know, the transportation field has been disrupted, in the last 15 or 20, by technology … ride hailing, various things – to varying degrees in different places. But I’m wondering to what extent will we be able to see hyper-local solutions? Can we get our heads around the fact that it doesn’t have to be the same kind of service everywhere, and that what works in one particular community and neighborhood, could look quite different from what it looks like in another, and that we can serve equity that way by supporting these micro approaches. Anybody else thinking about that, or not? Go ahead, Nathan. You’re kind of nodding. So that means I’m going to ask you.

NATHAN SMITH Sure, I think that’s a really interesting idea, and I think that creates some tension in terms of municipal governance, because generally, what you’re trying to do as much as possible is kind of standardize for efficiency. It’s easier to deliver services and programs and operate something when you have something that’s more standardized, like across different areas. But I think what we are starting to see is like there are different needs, and looking at those more local problems and local solutions might get you something that’s, that’s a little bit more functional. So I think we are starting to see more programs that focus specifically on working with the local community to kind of understand what their needs are and trying to tailor those solutions, while balancing that with some sort of program that can be operated by the city as a whole. So it’s not something I’m personally involved with. But we have like a street labs program where our safe mobility team works with specific communities to try to find kind of what their unique needs, and what solutions might be. But while still kind of having a city approach that makes sure it’s something that we can support, without having to have too many different products or things out there that we’re needing to manage.

MARY W. ROWE I mean, this is the dilemma. Sawsan, how does that sit with you as an equity expert? I mean, can we meet our equity imperatives and still allow some variation in how services are delivered in different places? Is it possible?

SAWSAN AL-REFAEI I think it’s possible. And I think that, you know, we really need to reframe the role of the community. Looking at transportation as a service, it just narrows … And that’s back to the old question what’s the difference between transit and transportation? I feel that whenever we say transit, people just envision the service being run by a couple of professionals. But transportation is more than just that. It’s the way people move through the city in general. So it’s not just about transit. But I see that happening by reframing the role of the community, the actual people deciding about what is doable, what is not. And when innovation comes up, I’m just a bit, you know, concerned that sometimes we don’t study our communities enough before we introduce innovation because, again, there are intersectional experiences. If you are somebody in a wheelchair, if you’re a mother with two toddlers and you know you’re walking in the snow, your experience may not be expecting innovation right away. You just need to move from your house to the daycare, to the health center and back, on time, without being injured. Right? So, innovation is possible, but the kind of nature of innovation, the pace on which it’s going to be introduced, we have to bring the community on board. We have to bring them effectively on board. And again, that goes back to – we’re not going to ask you if you want this or not. We’re going to let you participate in designing this for you. And this is what we mean by intersectionality. It’s not just a word that we add to our strategies. It has to be practiced, meaning that you say what works for you and your community group.

MARY W. ROWE But I’m just imagining, and mayor, I want to come to you next. You know, I’m just imagining if you have a particular part of the city that might in fact, not be downtown, might not have access to the core transportation systems. It might have a certain kind of cultural identity as well. And if that community can self-organize and come up with some other kinds of experiments to be able to provide the kind of micro mobility that they know they need. Do we need to be open to that? And is there a way for municipal government and other governments to allow that kind of experimentation to be tried? Go ahead. Mayor Johnston.

PATRICK JOHNSTONE New Westminster is in a unique situation here because we are 15km² in the middle of, you know, we’re 80,000 people in 15km² in the middle of a metropolitan area of 2.5 million people. So every decision we make in our small area, even though my downtown, almost half of the households in my downtown don’t own a car, we have five Skytrain stations in our downtown. We have one of the highest sustainable transportation modes of any city in Canada. Yet we are surrounded by big cities with cars pushing through our city, and we are so limited in our ability as a local government to change how our road system works because of provincial regulations and because of our regional transportation authority regulations. So we’re limited in that. But I want to come back to a little bit about … sort of, reinforce Sawsan’s comments about – so much of transportation innovation is just cut through with a leap projection. It’s cut through with somebody with a bright idea solving a problem that they think we have. I mean, the Hyperloop is the best example of this, right? Somebody thinking they have a solution to a problem that they have without ever considering whether that’s a problem that anyone else has. And we are all, all of us, subject to elite projection in that sense. And, that’s a Jarrett Walker comment …

MARY W. ROWE But Patrick …

PATRICK JOHNSTONE Yeah.

MARY W. ROWE I mean, I hear you, I mean, it’s ridiculous. And we all kind of roll our eyes. But Patrick, what about the other extreme, which would be not elite, that you might have a grassroots hyper-local … So I see on the chat all sorts of people commenting on car dependency and the patterns that we’ve reinforced. And I get all that. But I also remember there are, just put out a trope, there are hockey moms out there in suburbia who are trying to get three kids to practice, or out skating or whatever, and they don’t have alternatives to get those things worked out. And they informally often form carpools and various things. Right? So we have to find ways to … Spark up new ways to kind of try stuff, you know, and get us away from the single family vehicle, I guess. You know.

PATRICK JOHNSTONE I think what speaks the hyper local level to everybody is talking about transportation through a safety lens, through a public safety lens. Ultimately, transportation decisions are about public safety and, making our spaces safer for people to move through, with any mode they choose to go through. And again, this goes right to the equity part, because we know that the people who are most endangered by our transportation systems are marginalized people, low income people, people of color. We know the statistics are clear, that they are the people who are harmed by our transportation systems. And I don’t mean inconvenienced, I mean physically injured and killed by our transportation systems. And, so I think putting an … I, in our city, I’m trying to always put our transportation discussion through a safety lens … This is about public safety. Public safety speaks to everybody in our community. But we have a very, we have a non-rational, I’ll say it, idea of what is dangerous in our community. We fear things that aren’t dangerous to us, and we don’t fear enough the cars that we walk around every day. And, and that is. Yeah. And as someone said online … It’s a public health lens. We have to talk about transportation through public health lenses. I think someone mentioned, Angie Smith’s book, “Right of Way” in the chat. That was a … it’s a really good short book, easy to read. It talks about how the equity of … it talks about the equity of transportation safety. And I think that’s a good way to talk to local communities, because when people come talking to me … If anyone comes to talk to Mayor and Council about transportation, it’s almost always around something they see as unsafe in their community.

MARY W. ROWE If I could encourage people to throw stuff into the chat, I see … hi, Mitchell, he’s just put in a great video about equitable snow clearing. I mean, any resources you got, throw them in the chat, books … Thank you for that one, Sandra. Let’s get as many in as we can. Meghan, just to you, as we round up here, what do you think the next round of research should be focused on?

MEGHAN WINTERS Well, I mean, I will say there was a lot of flags in the chat about, how this report dealt with reconciliation and transportation injustices. And I think that that is a space of work to have happen. It’s deeply relational work. It’s work that takes time. But I don’t know, like, where is the funding call for this? Because it’s absolutely a gap in terms of, assessing and providing for and doing needs-based analysis. There are areas and I want to just speak to the sort of community led initiative or initiatives, because some of them I just want to highlight don’t need to be super technical or super expensive. So others in our work have looked at sort of community based, transportation sector solutions. One example would be the Zunga bus in Powell River is like really fantastic and something that could be adopted elsewhere. It’s low tech, it’s small community, and it’s responsive to all. It is like a wonderful equity intervention, making sure those are funded. Another example I just want to say, like I think electrification was raised here … And Mary, I’m a soccer mom, I’m not a hockey mom. But you know, we have these bikes now that are electrified and you put your kids on the back and that’s what lines up in front of the soccer practices now, right? This is the new minivan, in our in our communities. And imagine how many cars that takes off the road. And it is just such a wonderful kind of option. So the province taking the lead off Saanitch, a municipality in BC, the province is now paying for an income based e-bike incentive program. And the world of difference that this can make for all sorts of different kind of people to get around. Some people, of course need to drive, will always need to drive, but we need to get lots of the cars off the road so the people who need to drive can still get to their places. So those are sort of lower tech, lower cost programs that I think fit in all sorts of different community contexts and can be driven by the community.

MARY W. ROWE Yeah. I mean, I think we have to … I know there was a bit of disparagement here about pilots and experiments, but you know we do have to try some stuff. We do have to encourage people to try some stuff. And lots of people in the chat here are putting up – what about this, could we try that? I know that in American cities they’ve allowed … they’ve tried to lift those zoning restrictions so that we can just try some stuff. And I hear though, Patrick, your admonition about safety, there’s always a risk. People are afraid of the risks of trying things. And so we’ve got to always mediate that, that we’re not putting people at risk. But at the same time, we’re open to new approaches. One last word to each of you. And I just want to just flag that we’re having this conversation at a time, I’m just going to use the other T word where the, where the transit discussion in Canada is quite serious because ridership is so, so seriously down – to the point where I think we need to be thoughtful about whether transit is at risk. And we also have municipal governments without a lot of spare cash. So, last comments to each of you about what we should be looking at next. You first, Sawsan …

SAWSAN AL-REFAEI Okay. I just wanted to say that in anything we do, and I know that we can experiment all we want. And there are lots of solutions. But two simple questions – in anything we do or innovate, who’s going to benefit the most, and who is going to pay the price for that? And if the people who are well-off are going to benefit, while the people who are suffering or are at risk, or are most vulnerable are going to pay a higher cost, I think we’re not in the right direction. So I hope those questions are asked before we do anything in terms of transportation.

MARY W. ROWE Patrick.

PATRICK JOHNSTONE I’ll just say, the Lower Mainland is unique. Our transit ridership is not down. Our transit ridership is now higher than it was pre-COVID. And our biggest challenge is our ability to get money to expand our transit system. Our transit system is full, we can’t fit more people. It is. And we are really challenged in finding the capital funding, to expand the system that we need to expand as our city grows. But that’s just the model that we need …  Well, we’ve had a good record in delivering reliable transit in this region. And it’s paying back. I mean, I guess I encourage all of you. I mean, I feel very fortunate in New Westminster that we have, again, council and staff all working on this, all pushing in the same direction on this. And we are driven by our staff to bring equity into our work and council and support staff in doing that. So, it is … and it starts with education. It starts with educating your elected officials, and it starts with education within your city hall about what, what equity is and why it’s important to make sure that you’re serving your entire community.

MARY W. ROWE Right, Nathan.

PATRICK JOHNSTONE I think it’s really important to always start the conversations and making sure we’re understanding who we’re thinking about and what our assumptions are about who we’re thinking about in our transportation systems, because we tend to think a lot about, like, the 9 to 5 commuter, these peak hour flows commuting into downtown in the morning and away in the afternoon. But understanding all of those other movements, the ones that we aren’t thinking about as much, when maybe the transit isn’t as frequent, and things like that, I think are really important because those are often the folks that haven’t been thought about in our planning in the past and maybe getting forgotten in our systems.

MARY W. ROWE Yeah. I mean, s I always say, you know, now the conversation has to continue. So in the chat we’re going to encourage you to go look at these reports, that the team Interact folks have put together, and we look forward to whatever the next iteration of that would be, Meghan. And can I also just encourage everybody in the chat – you know, there are lots and lots of topics there that we just dusted on. We just touched on. So if you’ve got suggestions about follow up programing, I saw there’s some events that people are posting here, of how we continue this conversation. And it’s all one conversation. Just know that CityTalk is your platform, and we can put those programs together if you come to us and suggest, let’s do some. So, thank you for doing this work, Meghan. And pulling your team together. And, Patrick, your worship, your not- so-worship, Mr. Mayor,  Nathan and, Sawsan. Thanks so much. Thanks for being part of this conversation. We’re always in it together. And, we appreciate everybody joining us online for CityTalk. See you next time.