Adventures in Active Transportation
The folowing post is a letter written by BCCC Member-at-Large, Tannis Braithwaite. It was sent to relevant local, provincial and federal officials about the state of cycling safety on the Sunshine Coast.
Community cycling advocacy is a long game. Often times it may feel like for every step forward there are more obstacles to overcome. However, there is a cumulative effect and over time voices for change do get louder. If you are an early adopter of advocating for active transportation infrastructure please know that you are not alone and that your efforts do matter!
Getting Started
In December 2021, an active transportation advocacy group located in BC received a $25,000 donation from a private individual to fund a Multi-Use Path (MUP) feasibility study. The money was used to hire a professional transportation planner to collect and analyze GIS data and describe the feasibility of placing a MUP in the Right of Way (ROW) of a numbered provincial highway.
It struck me as odd that an individual resident had to pay for a study on the feasibility of implementing active transportation infrastructure, whereas the highway’s owner (the BC government) has paid for two recent studies on expanding the highway’s capacity for the benefit of motor vehicles. It’s unfair. And that’s only the beginning.
What I would like to do is bring you along on this adventure in MUP building so you can see for yourself some of the barriers that exist to active transportation in BC. My intention is to send you a letter approximately every six months in which I will attempt to describe, as clearly and concisely as I can, the challenges as they arise. As a gesture of my goodwill, I will limit myself to a maximum of two problems per letter. In this letter, I ask you to consider the problem of jurisdiction and the problem of standards.
The problem of Jurisdiction
In the unincorporated areas of BC, regional districts do not have jurisdiction over any of the roads within their boundaries. This has several consequences. For example, these regional districts generally do not employ any staff with expertise in transportation: no transportation planners, no transportation engineers, no one familiar with the TAC Geometric Design Guide for Canadian Roads or the BC Supplement thereto. Instead regional districts rely entirely on MoTI to provide for their transportation needs and guess what? When it comes to building active transportation infrastructure, MoTI is not interested.
The lack of jurisdiction renders the regional district powerless to provide for the needs and desires of its residents. It can, and frequently does, advocate to MoTI for improvements, but these pleas generally go unheard. Back in 2011 my regional district spent a bunch of money creating a transportation plan, which has now been gathering dust for 11 years. Not a single thing the regional district planned for back in 2011 has been done.
It is particularly ironic that one of the conditions applicants to the Province’s Active Transportation Infrastructure Grant program must meet is that the proposed project be included in an Active Transportation Network Plan (or equivalent) in order to received funding. If you live in an area where the regional government doesn’t have jurisdiction over any of its roads, it isn’t likely to have an Active Transportation Network Plan. Creating one is just a waste of money when nothing you plan for or request ever gets done.
Proposed Solution
In my opinion, the BC Government should explore the idea of giving rural regional districts greater jurisdiction over their road networks. At present, these road networks are governed by an opaque and unsympathetic bureaucracy whose members often have no connection to the areas for which they are responsible and no accountability to the people who live in those areas. Giving some jurisdiction over the road network to the local regional government would help solve this problem.
The problem of Standards
Of course we need standards for infrastructure. The problem is that the current standards relating to road design focus almost exclusively on the safe and efficient movement of motor vehicles. The introduction of the BC Active Transportation Design Guide did not change this. The AT Design Guide simply adds standards applicable to AT infrastructure without examining ways in which the feasibility of implementing AT infrastructure is negatively impacted by the pre-existing motor vehicle standards regime. I will illustrate my point with two examples.
First example: The BC Supplement to the TAC Guide requires that highways have a “clear zone”, which is an unobstructed area adjacent to the travelled roadway which is intended to allow a motor vehicle that has left the roadway to stop safely. The required clear zone depends on highway geometry, but can be as much as 14 meters wide. Given the width of most highway ROWs in rural BC, it is very unlikely that a MUP can be accommodated within the ROW but outside the clear zone. It does not matter that most numbered highway ROWs do not currently have the required clear zone – these areas being full of rocky outcroppings, telephone poles, trees, etc. -- any active transportation infrastructure now placed in the ROW must be outside the clear zone.
Second example: A major barrier to active travel in rural regional districts is the difficulty and danger of crossing numbered highways. However, The Pedestrian Crossing Control Manual for British Columbia provides for the installation of signalized pedestrian crossings only where crossing volumes meet a minimum threshold. The newer TAC Pedestrian Crossing Control Guide explicitly recognizes that pedestrian crossing volumes may be too low to meet the standard precisely because crossing is dangerous, and tries to correct this by requiring that latent crossing demand and network connectivity also be considered. However, the TAC Guide does not approve any pedestrian signalization for roads with speed limits above 70kph.
In lieu of signalization, several studies from other jurisdictions show that pedestrian refuges placed in the centre median of a highway reduce the danger of pedestrian crossings by more than 50%. However, according to MoTI this cannot be done because pedestrian refuges represent a danger to high speed motor vehicle traffic.
A simple solution to the problem of both signalization and pedestrian refuges, which could be done without changing the standards, is to reduce the speed limit on the numbered highway to 70kph, which would mean it was no longer classified as a high speed road. However, even though MoTI data shows that approximately 50% of motor vehicles using my numbered highway travel at 70kph or less (and 87% travel at 80kph or less), reducing the speed limit in order to allow safer pedestrian crossings is considered to be entirely unreasonable.
Proposed Solution
In my opinion, the BC Government should undertake a review to determine which engineering standards currently used by MoTI are acting as a barrier to the implementation of active transportation infrastructure, and determine in a principled way which of these standards can reasonably be relaxed in order to enhance the safe and effective movement of active transportation users. Without this being done, it will likely remain impossible to achieve significant modal shift.
Well, that was fun! Talk to you in December!