Mayors' Council Meeting, January 26, 2023

Okay, good morning, everyone would like to call the mayor's

council

meeting

on January 26,

2023

to order. The first time is the adoption of the agenda to move forward. He supported all those who were in favor. The motion presented is carried out. Before we begin, I want to respectfully acknowledge that we are. gathering on the territory of indigenous nations um uh whose territory we are fortunate to live, work and operate WE recognize that in the planning and management of the Region's transportation system we all have a role to play in supporting reconciliation with the indigenous peoples such as On a

council

, we recognize the importance of doing our best to build respectful relationships that contribute to managing land and waters in the community with integrity and consideration into the future.

With that I will move on to the approval of the amendments. Many delegates, today we have two. Please note that we have any presentation present in front of us and, as a general rule, there are no questions or discussions with the council. We'll start with our first spokesperson, Nathan Davidovich, foreigner, just press the button there, we'll be able to I hear, thank you, yes, thank you. Mayors and advisor. um transportation 2050 has not been supported by motions in any city council or in Metro Vancouver. The new men and women on this mayoral council can and should amend the visions and priorities outlined in Transportation 2050 and the 10-year Priorities.

The senior TransLink staff who pushed for Transportation 2050 left TransLink and we need better visions and priorities in the last 40 years. In years there has been no change in the cow modal share in Metro Vancouver, it is still around 80 per cent, while Transit walking and cycling account for less than 20 per cent. I disagree with some of the statistics presented by TransLink that compare different cities in a neighborhood. It's bad, since many bus routes and train lines travel to many municipalities. This type of comparison is not made by BC Transit or other modes of transportation. The system's suggestions of having six committees on page 58 are fine, but having them on Zoom and close to the public and university academics goes against accessible government and the way the gvrd ran Transit from 1979 to 1983 and the way Metro Vancouver and most municipalities manage their committees as open.

Vancouver and UBC account for about 50 per cent of ridership and are represented on only three of the six committees we need to copy from other cities where transit committees are represented by elected councilors and the majority of citizens. of the men in our great city are too busy to attend traffic

meeting

s, look what happened to the previous mayor of Vancouver, he missed 75 percent of the regional meetings, so thank you very much for listening to me, thank you very much for your comments, Mayor Locke and Mayor Simmer in a one hundred percent is for the record, okay, our next speaker, uh, it's Mr.

William Dawson Dawson, would you like to move on to the second call, third and final call, okay, Dawson's not in this, okay, that will take us to the president and vice president's report. I want to thank all colleagues for being here for our second regular meeting and their first in-person regular meeting on that point. I just want to be clear that I have heard from several of you that now that the realities of our Pac schedules and limited time are settling in. There have been some requests for us to reconsider the potential of holding meetings on Zoom and in person, so we said we would revisit that in March.

I just want to share with all of you that I am open to your comments. so don't hesitate to let me know how you're doing. I know we'll all be listening to Sarah and her team's update on today's ridership trends, the picture that report paints that I know many of you are seeing. their own communities are from a vibrant growing region that is recovering from the pandemic changes I am seeing and Sarah's reporting confirms overcrowding in much of our system and, just as important, but perhaps more hard to measure, I'm listening and listening. to Residents who tell us they need Transportation that we cannot yet provide and are taking them to their own devices, all of this underlines the decision that the previous Mayor's Council made in May and that we reaffirmed as the new Council in December that we need to position TransLink to begin improving the Service as soon as we can.

I know that our finances are still very precarious and our current investment plan supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds from the Province and the federal government has allowed us to avoid further service outages, but freeze service at levels current is not the same as freezing the quality of service or mobility options, since we all know that our region is growing by leaps and bounds and this will continue. Most of this growth is occurring in transit-oriented communities where new residents expect or rely on transit options, especially given our region's high cost of living, which freezes service at 2019 levels, which is what we have done well while growth is occurring, it means we are effectively reducing the quality and usefulness of our service, it means people are already being left behind, more are added every year and often the most vulnerable and those who fight hardest to achieve a good life for their families are the ones left behind.

I know the Mayor's Council does not believe this is good enough for our region. I am proud of the steps we have taken hand in hand with the province to protect service and ensure Transit survives and we want to extend our thanks to the provincial government for recognizing how critical this step was. Survival was a necessary step but it cannot be. our final step given the ridership trends and continued growth we are seeing in our communities there is pressure and pressure on us to meet provincial housing and climate change targets, it is up to us and the province to unite our heads again and move forward.

With more solutions to determine the next step towards sustainable financing, how can we begin to improve public transportation by providing more services to growing communities, new services for underserved areas, reduce emissions, all starting as soon as possible, which the Work can't start soon enough and we all need it? work as hard as we can to show our residents real results on the ground. I have had the opportunity to speak with Minister Fleming about these priorities and I know that he is receptive and shares our objectives, so I am interested in hearing from the staff team today and I know that we have a full program of work in front of us beginning to deliver on 10-year priorities so we can provide our residents with the services they need now and in the future.

With that I'll just open it. I'm ready for any questions for myself or Vice President Hurley. Seeing them, can I make a motion to receive the report? It was presented and seconded. Everyone in favor was opposed and it was approved. The next item on our agenda is the report from Sarah Ross, the vice president of planning and her team on passenger trends and to you Sarah, please, good morning, it's a pleasure to see you all here today, thank you for being here and joining me today . I'm Teresa O'Reilly, our systems analysis manager, as well as Michelle Babiak, our senior transit planning manager, and us.

We are very pleased to present this report on ridership trends and how we are managing our service in response. Public transport ridership has been trending upwards week after week and I'm very happy to report that based on yesterday's data, last week was the highest. recovery rate we've had for average weekday trips since the start of the pandemic, our total weekly transit trips now exceed 4.3 million, that's a hundred thousand more trips than when we created that slide and this puts us 82 percent more than before. 2022, sorry, early 2020 levels and bus service, as you can see in this chart, are still the strongest.

Our customer recovery is still greater than our passenger recovery, so with 94 of our customer base returning each day, there are approximately 400,000 unique people. who use public transport in our region every day now because the number of unique customers has a higher recovery rate than the number of passengers, this means that some Public Transport customers still rely on our services every week, but they are making fewer trips each week than they used to. and that makes sense with a huge increase in people working from home a few days a week, you know, so I take public transportation to work and before the pandemic I came to this office five days a week and now I come two or three. days a week, then I worked from home the other days, you know, 2022 was actually a year of massive growth.

A year ago our ridership was where it had been in about 2006 and by the fall we were at 2014 levels and now we have about 700,000 transit trips on an average weekday and about 450,000 on an average Saturday Sunday . You know one of my favorite statistics and you know that in terms of population, Metro Vancouver ranks 24th among Canadian and American cities in terms of public transit ridership. Fifth, we have more boardings in the entire Chicago area region, with three times our population, and ridership is significantly higher than Seattle and Portland combined, and this is because we have an incredibly transit-oriented region.

The land use decisions that have been made and over decades We allow this and we have a great system and as the President mentioned, thanks to the decisions made by this Council, the TransLink board and the significant financial support of the governments of BC and Canada, we maintained essentially full service during the pandemic. Yes, some reallocations to increase service on those routes where ridership was strongest and by avoiding service outages we kept our system usable and therefore when activities in the region started to pick up as restrictions were lifted, people were able to trust our services now in the market segment that has been the weakest to recover is office travel and we see it in our Compass data, we see it in other data like Google Mobility travel data in the workplace and the research by Avison and Young in this graph shows office travel in the workplace on the left. and retail and recreation at this time from the perspective of sustainable transportation outcomes.

People who choose to work from home a couple of days a week, who have the benefit of that option, know that it is not a bad thing, as it reduces the overall peak. Demand frees up space for other customers and we are now seeing these trips to the office starting to increase; in fact, the last two weeks have been the strongest yet for the West Coast, for West Coast Express, you know, approaching 25,000 trips each week. Turning to commuter rail service, I'll now turn to some subregional breakdowns in our ridership trends. This trend, this graph shows recovery rates in a selection of neighborhoods that had at least 10,000 average daily trips before the coven and as You can see that our recovery rate is highest in Surrey, with Surrey Central surpassing pre-pandemic levels and these are high growth neighborhoods and as you can see the recovery rates among this group of neighborhoods are the lowest in the core Metro and central CBD areas where the largest number of regional office jobs are located in the next slide, but it's very important to note that although the central business district, while lower in terms of recovery rate, is still by far the largest total number of passengers, so there is still a lot transit. trips and for those of you who commute to the central business district and on Metro Corps, you know the system is busy, so dig a little deeper into bus ridership and zoom out a little bit, you know, recovery. varies across the region and two things I'd like to point out here: The first is that the recovery is strongest in the southeast Surrey White Rock and Langleys area as well as Maple Ridge Pitt Meadows and also over the weekend.

Sorry across all regions, weekends have a stronger recovery than weekdays again as a result of those fewer weekday commutes and on this map, the big numbers are the average numbersof weekdays and the small numbers below are the recovery rates for Saturday Sunday according to the address. established in this body and by this body in 2020 and 2021, we have been reallocating services to reflect changing traffic demand and have made reductions on some routes at some times of the day where services are still frequent every 15 minutes or in many In many better cases than that, we have also suspended three routes that had extremely low passenger numbers and were very good options.

There were alternatives to taking public transportation for those trips and in some cases we increased the frequency of those alternatives and are using them. resources from those reallocations to make improvements where service was not sufficient to meet demand and you know this has meant a 12x increase in service in the Surrey Langley area and many of these routes were not considered frequent before coveting and However, passenger demand is strong and we have been able to improve both capacity and comfort on these routes. I want to point out that many Transit usage patterns remain very similar. We still have peak periods in the morning and afternoon.

In the afternoon, the afternoon peak, as you know, lasts longer as there is a wider variety of travel types during that time of day and the morning drops off quite steeply around 9am. m. and then starts to rebuild around lunch time. In closing, I want to touch on one aspect of the system that we monitor closely and that is overcrowded, so this occurs when the number of passengers in a vehicle exceeds our guidelines for what we target as the maximum number of people in that vehicle, so that this is when all the seats are full and all the standing spaces occupied this is when it is difficult to get to the doors when people may need to get off to allow other people to exit and then get back on, you know it is likely that they pass at some stops that you already knowpandemic overcrowding was widespread on buses and trains, you know, people were really stuck, people were waiting several trips before they could find a place and that this was happening on routes throughout the region and not just at peak times, and so when we talk about our passenger recovery percentage compared to previous coverage, you know, when I say we're at 82 percent overall, 100 in some parts, we also have to remember that the denominator of that was some very overcrowded conditions, uh, not a good experience for customers in Many situations are not what we want our customers to experience, so I would say today we have a better match between our service levels and our number of passengers than before, but it is not perfect to achieve perfection in that, getting the right combination is always a challenge. and overcrowding is beginning to increase and we are seeing the number of trips with overcrowded conditions begin to approach pre-covered levels.

That's a bit of a rough measurement, I'll say that because you know the definition is binary of overcrowding, you know if it's one. extra person or if it's 20 extra people triggering that overcrowding metric, that's a very different experience, but you know, customers, those for those customers are experiencing this for those customers who are experiencing passes, we're monitoring this, we're working to make reassignments. make adjustments to schedules to send additional trips to reduce this and ensure customers have a reliable and reliable experience. You know, if our passenger level recovery remains relatively stable in

2023

, we hope to be able to greatly minimize these crowding conditions, but if our passenger growth exceeds expectations and the region continues to grow in the coming years, which we know will not be the case.

We're not going to be able to address this through reallocations, so overcrowding is going to increase, and eventually, without an expansion of service, this is going to limit growth because the experience of taking Transit is going to be materially degraded as it gets more crowded, and obviously this is something we want to avoid. In short, you know that our ridership recovery is the strongest in North America. We have 94 of our clients back serving. around 400,000 people every day 4.3 million trips and 7.2 million shipments every week and this is good news and we are monitoring everything very closely, responding within our possibilities to the areas of need and continuing to work to achieve expansion .

Thank you Teresa Michelle and I. I will be happy to answer your questions. Thank you very much for the presentation. Are there any questions or comments? Mayor Johnstone. Thank you. I don't know how granular the data is that is available to us, but the only part I don't see addressed. There is often talk about the destinations people go to and how they vary with the change in the workplace. I recognize that office workers are moving, so we don't go to the office five days a week like we used to. but we are looking at a hospital full of healthcare workers, people who work in our light industrial areas, people doing jobs that they simply can't switch to working at home and I wonder if we are looking at our travel patterns. to see how travel to those employment areas is affected differently than the downtown Vancouver employment area, so I don't know if we have that kind of granularity, we talk a lot about living near a Transit, we don't talk a lot about you know work areas around Transit destinations we will do that thank you that's a fabulous question and the importance of where people work helps make our system more accessible so when we plan to have housing around Transit, we also have to have workplaces.

Around Transit and we've been looking at this, we know that the patterns are largely similar to what we saw before, so there haven't been drastic changes in the origins and destinations of where people are going and I think that That's a testament to the network. which we have, which served multiple travel purposes pre-Covid and still does today, and we also have a frequent transit network that has infrequent reliable service and fast service all day, every day of the week, to help address those types of jobs that don't work. and not answer on the nine to five ride, which was the traditional service that we might have provided in I don't know the '70s, '80s, early '90s, thank you, Vice President Hurley, yeah, thanks for the introduction, just a question about the settings. you say we haven't made any cuts in service, but when those adjustments were made, the people who were using those roots see it as a cut and I understand that, you know, finances dictate a lot of that, but if finances appropriate in place, would we be planning to implement those adjustments or what has been adjusted again in the police so that they know, for example, older people along a route that a bus used to take?

You know, because of those adjustments, their lives are really altered. So I just have one question: Do you know the adjustments that others would consider cuts? Certainly, when we do reallocations, that means there are some red reductions on some routes that we focus on, most of those reductions have been on our High Frequency Routes where before a route ran every eight minutes, now we run every 10 minutes, maybe even every 12 minutes. The principle we have focused on is to keep our services above 15. Services that we run for more than 15 minutes continue to run for more than 50 minutes, but there have been reductions because less capacity simply needs to be provided, so The principle has been not to undermine the usability of the system, although you know, recognize it.

That's certainly when your service used to run every six minutes and now it runs every 10 minutes, that's something that people notice, you know, and right now that's our only option when we also have areas where the service is only running . every 20 minutes and there are a lot of people on those buses that are crowded and leaving people behind and now we've been able to increase them to say every 15 minutes, you know for sure when we're going and you know those are difficult decisions to make. do sometimes and, you know, I think there's a balance that we always want to make the best use of resources and we know that we depend on transit fares and taxpayers, so we always have to make the best use of our resources, You know, as we are, you know, in the times of our history and as we look to get back on a path of expansion, we will have more options so that when it is necessary to increase service to a 20-minute route. to 15 minutes or 15 minutes to 10 minutes, so I can do that, we can do it at a net profit with expansion and not have to reduce from somewhere else to be able to achieve that, yeah, you too. saying then that actually the roots haven't been completely removed, they've just been adjusted over time um no, no, no, I'm not saying that we, most of our reallocations are those adjustments, we have three routes that uh had a number extremely low passenger numbers, um, that were serving destinations that were essentially shut down during the peak of the pandemic and we suspended those routes, we haven't reintroduced them and we've been able to use those resources to serve higher demand areas and also because the alternative that there are, there are very good alternatives, so in those situations, there should never be situations where people once had Transit and now they don't thank you, Director McCutchen, uh, Director Sarah, both. around root adjustments and overpopulation.

I wonder: Do you know that you painted a scenario in which if growth continues in the region as we expect, we are not going to keep up? I know you know that funding is a key constraint for that's the main key constraint, like do we have the buses, do we have the staff, do we have to find the funding or what are the constraints around that increase in the number of passengers, yes, yes, funds are the key constraint, you know, we need it if to increase services at peak hours when we have all our buses dispatched, as we scale the fleet size in both rail and bus based on how many vehicles do we need to have in service at our busiest time when we have the most service on the road, so to increase service during those times we need operating dollars to pay for the service and we need capital dollars to be able to purchase the fleet.

Operating dollars would allow us to increase off-highway service. Peak hours of the day, which could be increased, frequencies in the middle of the day, at night, extending the service for longer. We know that this Council has set many objectives in both the 10-year priorities and the 10-year priorities. in previous jobs where there are many different needs in the region, some of them are to make sure there is no overcrowding, others to make sure your services later at night for shift workers, especially well, thank you and if I may um, just in sub-regional passenger recovery, what is the data point that you use?

It's where someone enters traffic or where they get off or we're looking at the beginning of the trip where people are fine not to start the trip. To me, those are boardings, so that's where someone gets on the bus in this case and we're looking at that in terms of comparison to previous resources in 2019, so it's a percentage of recovery from 2019. So if you took a bus from one city to another in the morning to work and then come back, you would have both exactly and if you did a transfer, we would also capture that if you were to transfer, that would be a second board, that would be a second boarding, thank you and finally my last question quick, um, you talked about transit fares.

I wonder. I've heard complaints from people, uh, writers complaining that there are people, more people getting on the bus without paying, what is our mechanism for evaluating? Whether or not to get people to pay on the bus is a big question and certainly, you know, fair evasion is something we don't want to see in the system, too, you know, the vast majority. of our clients are doing the right thing and paying their full rate. There are times when that doesn't happen. One of the things that is of utmost importance to us is ensuring the safety of our transit operators and that is why we do not do that.

We ask our transit operators to implement fair enforcement directly with customers because their safety is paramount and we have traffic police monitoring, we conduct regular monitoring and audits to assess where our fair evasion rate is and we know it. happens in the system. We also know that the vast majority of our customers are paying the right rate. I would have to follow up and we could certainly provide a more detailed briefing on that. Thank you, Councilor Asmussen,Thank you for your presentation. On a topic here, when I talk it's more about service reliability and when we start making cuts or adjustments and I would like to see more statistics on service reliability, one of the biggest things that drives people away from public transportation is the service. especially on the bus system which does not exist reliably.

My other question is when we consider taking the service into lower volume areas, which makes it very difficult to attract people back to the service when we put it back there. Third, The point of a person who has been behind the wheel in your operation for a long time is between adjustments when there is overcrowding, we take service on lower volume routes to help with the major overcrowding issues that are happening but creating a service. Reliability has roots of lower volume and affects the quality of service, so to me that is the most important question: we can talk about the increase and decrease in ridership, but our most important point that we should focus on is the reliability of the service because people will take public transportation, but Transit is a little more inconvenient than just getting in your car and having that freedom to drive, so people need to know the reliability of the service.

That's my only question. I leave it to you. Okay, that's a great point and you're absolutely right about having reliability. Services are really critical, they are actually critical in all aspects of transportation, what people want most is to be able to reliably predict how long something will take to get to its destination. I am pleased to inform you that in the coming months we will present the reliability of our bus speed. We'll do the BuzzFeed bus service, excuse me, bus speed reliability report and we'll come back to look at that and how our buses are performing.

In general, we are moving more information on that. It would be nice to know because it's really important in that sense because it's what people expect. The other thing is you know when I've been in trans for a long time and when we look at this. The board of

mayors

or the board that really has the power to decide how public transportation works is that every time there is a budget crisis, we reduce or eliminate bus service, bus service is the backbone and that is reduced to the reliability and the ability to do it, because in general.

The statistic used to be that if people miss a bus for a couple of days on the road, we'll lose them for about five years before we get them back, so I just want to stress that you don't need to respond. That one again, but that's just one point. When you look at the comparisons between Portland and Seattle, our service area is quite different than those areas, ours is a much larger Integrated Service, which I think is great, but how can you compare those numbers because we have a much larger area large with much greater difficulties in the distance and service areas like Ella Theresa talk about the details?

Certainly, it is always difficult to compare between regions. I mean, Portland has a very comparable population to us, but you're absolutely right, we have a very large total service area and we also have concentrated growth. I think that's a good point and it's not entirely fair. making these comparisons, but it's useful in the sense that we have a lower population but a higher ridership and I think that speaks to the transit culture that we have in this region; we also have four roads a lot less, so we don't have the Um, the ability for people to get in their car and that makes Trends that much more important and ensuring that it's accessible, available and reliable for everyone, so we don't It's a fair conflict, uh, comparison, but we could also say that our services could be superior to some of the areas we're comparing to and offers greater accessibility because we haven't invested in the highway system like some of our American peers have. done well and I simply forgot two questions about overcrowding a service two. things you know, like again we talked about I've been in and driven where you have a full standing mode, it's not a high quality way for people to ride Transit or Skytrains when, especially when you get to the Broadway station , you say a sardine and it can't, then we have to consider the quality of the service, the other thing to consider is overcrowding, whether it's a SkyTrain or particularly buses, which shortens the lifespan of your equipment and that's another thing when we consider doing with that overcrowding in those roots over a long period of time it has an effect and it affects your um your replacement of capital in those areas thank you very much Mayor Sager thank you Mr.

President thank you very much for the presentation I'm curious is one of the routes of the who spoke, mentioned that there were three routes that have been discontinued due to extremely low ridership. Would one of them have been from West Vancouver to UBC? That's right, but UBC is back open now and we have I. I know you've heard I know you've probably gotten the requests. We have a lot of students at West Van on the North Shore that relied on that route and it was really just the last comment. Yes, there are alternatives you can take. a bus to downtown and then take another bus to get there, you can get to UBC on Transit, but it is the time connection and I have heard from many students who have tried, but what they miss out on are the connections that don't always work. a class that they abandon and return to the vehicle that we're trying to get out of, so I really hope that we can find a way to reassign, you know, I might suggest other routes.

Even in our own community they are not as valuable as the UBC connection route so that's a quick question and please forgive me because I'm new to this and I don't know but you know now you have to drive to TransLink and see everything. people who drive from so many of their communities on the east side of the second Narrows to the north shore, has there ever been a study on having a rapid bus that follows the highway stopping at a few exits, you know, let's say it started in 200 ? Street and emerged into Horseshoe Bay. I just can't help but think that there would be a lot of people who would really love to get out of that and try to get out of the North Shore in the afternoon these days like, forget it, um, actually. in my office, not the municipal office, but in my office I let anyone who lives on the east side of the second Narrows Bridge come in at alternate times.

My own assistant, she leaves at 10 in the morning, comes into the office at 10:30 and works into the night so she can miss that horrible pending job, has she ever studied herself? And I'm sorry if it's a stupid question. Thank you, no, there's no stupid question, so thank you very much for the first point, uh, the West Vancouver express service from Dunder Rave to UBC. It was certainly a very convenient service, there were approximately 90 passengers per day on that service which is also very one-way, so the buses would return empty. We have multiple options for connecting downtown to an express bus that leaves from downtown Vancouver. that works very frequently and we have increased the frequency to improve the timing of that connection in terms of the north coast.

Yes, extensive work has been done to look at options to improve service to the North Shore and rapid transit. to the North Coast is a key priority of our 10-year priorities mandate and that work is underway. I'll talk a little bit about that in the next report, but analyzing at all times what Horizons we can do as soon as possible to increase access to the north coast, what we can do in the medium term and then what would be the definitive construction in the long term From that, knowing how complex and challenging the corridor is, so absolutely that was a very big focus?

The 10-year priorities are to provide a rapid transport connection to the north coast. Can I do a quick follow up on that regarding the number of passengers to UBC? I understand that it would be one-way. Is it possible that when the bus returns from UBC and could help, like stopping at other places, so it is expressed in a way depending on the time of day, but maybe it could pick up some loads and drop people off so it was more that only one. route, we have a lot, certainly, there are trips to and from UBC, I mean, it is a very strong anchor of students and jobs, there is also population and people who live there, so there is also quite a bit of transit service, we can have a follow-up conversation with you about our options there.

I would appreciate it, thank you very much, Mr. President, thank you Mayor Buchanan, thank you very much, President West, and thank you very much for the presentation, just terms of that route. was suspended, does that equate to the six percent reduction in annual service hours on the North Shore to address overcrowding or are there other reductions to the service we receive on the North Shore? There are other reductions in service that I would need to follow up with the specific details are fine, and I will just say that the other reductions and services on the north coast would have been on those high frequency routes where we have simply adjusted a little in response to the lower demand, okay, I would say or My question would be: do you know now that we are?

I mean, we're still in a pandemic, but we're obviously recovering pretty well and we're seeing overcrowding on some of the routes, but we're also seeing what we're seeing. On the North Shore, we actually, on particular weekends, exceed the number of passengers than before the pandemic and we also see on the North Shore more traffic vehicles per hour or vehicles crossing the Ironworkers Memorial than during on weekdays. I'm just wondering looking at those factors if it's the north coast, other parts of the region, staff will be considering a possible reassignment, given that pattern chain patterns have changed due to people's work or recreation, certainly, as Teresa pointed out, we have a system where our system is robust and designed in a way that allows public transportation to be used for a lot of different purposes and that's why in our region you see really strong ridership the weekends, not as busy as weekdays, but very busy and more and come back stronger so you know what our team is doing, you know, we, as you know, we make changes to our bus service four times a year, we are always analyzing that data, where are the problems that we analyze, actually, all kinds of data, the compass data, the automated passenger counts customer complaints to monitor that, so yes, we are analyzing what would be the reallocations to try to do what we can within the resources that we have to meet as many of those goals as we can, okay? because I think you know it and others have said it.

I think the value of always continuing to evaluate, reassess, be as flexible as we can and agile as we can because patterns have changed after, well, I don't want to say after the pandemic because we're not really post-pandemic, but we're different than that we are at the peak of the pandemic period, but we are again, you know, if we are looking, I mean, I don't need to stress the importance of traffic demand to the north coast, but if we are seeing increased volumes of vehicles through of the bridge and we are seeing a recovery of more than one hundred percent of the number of passengers on Saturdays, the last thing we need is more people getting into cars to cross. that bridge and getting to where they need to go so the more agile and responsive we can be, I think that's going to be important as we look at 10-year priorities and how we prioritize what's coming, how we're prioritizing. those to achieve the balance that we are looking for in terms of the number of passengers and their experience, we and we know that one of the objectives that did not really arise through our work on transport 2050 and our 10 years of experience.

The priorities of the work are the access to nature that we have. There are many parks that you can access by public transportation, but there are also many outdoor activities. You know, that's why people love to live in this region where we don't have good public transportation options and sometimes none at all. Transit options and that is a goal that you know as part of our 10 year priorities to try to address thank you, thank you Mayor Locke, thank you President, I wonder if there has been a review or an audit of a regional service both from an equity regional both from a service center and from a financial perspective, so an audit of the service provided throughout the region and equity has been carried out.

One of the types of analysis our team has been doing is more equity analysis. particularly in social equity and looking at where there are communities where we have people with greater representation of people from inequity groups and where the gaps in service are and how we are addressing that and if there aresome discrepancies in the region. And we've certainly identified, you know, historically we've also looked at kind of a regional distribution. One of the greatest strengths of our system is that it is a regional system and we know that that's how people travel and travel regionally to look at all the different needs and you know there are different growth patterns, so certainly, as we have done through this report, we do sub-regional breakdowns, if you know we can't just look at this service system in the overall region as a monolith, there are different things. is happening and that is what we are trying to achieve through this report and other work that we do to look at what is happening in different neighborhoods, even in different subregions, and what is the agglomeration, what is the overlap between the number of passengers and service that we are providing and passenger demand thank you mayor thank you um mayor Barry thank you President West and the presenters uh just a question um regarding the rural communities in Lions Bay um we have had a significant increase in I guess tourists and and people who wants to come on an excursion and so do our locals.

I know many residents drive from Lions Bay to West Van in areas two three times a day. How is it determined? Can we get additional services? It seems that some of our older residents and younger residents have difficulty with that time. I assume the buses arrive at that time and often seem to be eliminated, but perhaps you could comment on that, thanks. In terms of what the process is to get a new service, you know, that's what we do. It will go while we prepare for an upcoming investment plan. We will go through a process where we look at what is required in the 10-year priorities, but the 10-year priorities don't go into the details of specific pathways.

We will then work with this group to identify and evaluate regional priorities and what could be achieved within the scope of an upcoming investment plan. We certainly have a regular service to Lions Bay. it provides connections to um to West Vancouver, so that's all we're always evaluating, you know, it's always difficult, you know, when you do it, we offer an additional service and, um, will it be used and will it really start to be used? the tipping point of transforming people's behavior, so those are some of the things we looked at, okay, and one of the reasons I thought to ask was that some residents commented that some of the buses later in the nights, especially.

It doesn't look like they are being executed as I think they were perhaps planned in recent years, but anything they can do for rural communities would be appreciated. Thank you very much for those comments, we will investigate it, thank you. mayor bahal uh thank you president I know in the 10 Year Vision at Metro or sorry transportation 2050 we're looking at putting more bus service in underserved areas so I'll leave that aside, but I was wondering, you know? We saw how the 531, for example, is one of the fastest growing routes in South Fraser and covers office parks. Anecdotally, you know, I can talk about Port Kells and Walnut Grove and areas in Delta and even our industrial areas in Langley City and the Langley Beltway region.

Around the world, have you seen more people return to public transportation service in those industrial and office areas where I know in the past these areas were thought to be difficult to serve by public transportation or that if served by public transportation public, people wouldn't use it? so againI know we've seen it in South Fraser, have we seen that pattern repeated in the office and industrial park areas in the rest of the region? Certainly, in recent years during the pandemics, the route that the services that provide to the industrial parks saw almost no decrease because those people continued to go to work, while many of us worked from home, the people who worked in the food distribution continued to work and many of those people depend on transit services and there are a variety of levels. of transit services, you know we have service to Campbell Heights, it's a big area as well.

Campbell Heights is a large area and we know that it has been growing and certainly our 10-year priorities require significantly improved service in that area. that there are places like Gloucester that currently have no service at all which is quite rare, most places of employment in our region have some level of service but sometimes it doesn't start early enough for someone to get to their shift at the one we work on. We connect with employers and transportation, we organize groups within those areas to do what we can to adjust schedules to meet that demand, but we know it's an issue in a needy area in the region, thank you Mayor Sim, great, thank you. president Hi Sarah, by the way, thank you for the presentation, it was excellent.

I just have a quick question for you: how can we, as a local government, support Trends Link to meet or exceed their electrification targets? Oh, a really great question and I know it. I'll give a brief preliminary answer and then we'll do it. I think we have a topic on the agenda later or maybe it will be at a later meeting. I don't remember at that time talking about that electrification and the change to zero. The carbon system is a critical priority for TransLink, we absolutely have to work with local governments because it's not just about us being able to buy the fleet, the infrastructure is a very, very big part of that infrastructure in the Depot infrastructure infrastructure , so we must do it. let's work on everything we can do or that you can do as

mayors

to help us move the processes forward as quickly as possible to allow those facilities to move forward.

Certainly, your support, you know, we rely on funding through the Greater Vancouver regional fund, that is. It is also a fundamental part of our low carbon fleet strategy, thank you Mary, thank you very much for the presentation and my question. I suppose it can be limited to day to day operations, but how does TransLink make the decision? I am facing staff shortages in the North Vancouver district. We have approximately eight percent vacancies for positions. I know Translink is under pressure for bus drivers. How is it translated? Making the decision when they are short staffed as to which Roots will not run that day and why.

I asked the question: routes 211 and 212 receive passes fairly consistently and the reason given is that we regret that there was a staffing shortage at that time, is that the decision made throughout the region is that decision within our service from Kitchener. How is the decision made at the Burnaby facility? How is that decision made? So when we have staff shortages, we could be people calling in sick? The first thing we have is what is called the replacement plate, which is. where we have standby operators ready to go out and take that trip if the person who signed up to take that trip is not available, so that's the first thing we do to try to avoid having to make those reductions. managed at the depot level and the depot in collaboration with CNBC planners and translation planners would identify a list of you know if we have to cancel Services here are different routes that could be canceled certainly we look at you know where the roots are less we work to avoid canceling routes that are less that have less frequency if your service comes every half hour we can't cancel that at all we have to take them out if your service comes every 10 minutes or every then, and we know that's not great either because it's a long wait, uh but it's better than a lower frequency route so those are some of the things about how decisions are made again there's a level of detail that I'm a little bit removed from and I would love to bring in some members of our team to speak with you in more detail.

It would be nice to know which direction we are going, how many times we are having. Objections or service not available due to labor shortages, obviously we face significant pressure to increase service, but if we cannot maintain a sufficient supply of labor to be able to deliver what we currently have, it will be problematic for the expansion. of the service thank you Mayor McDonald thank you President and thank you Vice President Ross and your team for your presentation just a very quick question here we are we are seeing that the gap in the recovery is really our weekly commuters and but I'm hearing anecdotally that there are a lot of backups and problems on our roads during that time, so I'm wondering if you're a great example, but you probably know that you're trying to bias traffic, so going back to your three days, or two days, on public transportation, are we incentivizing people at all? our riders who maybe are doing partial work from home because we know we're regulars, generally speaking, and maybe We had the monthly pass before, but we didn't buy it, so what's up?

Is there anything that is encouraging? If it's not the usual, but we still want them on that bus or on that Transit two days a week, even if it's not the. We've certainly seen a decline in previous monthly purchases, which has a revenue implication, you know, with the Compass card and your ability to load what we call stored value, it provides a real convenience, you just pay per trip to lowest fare, you can set your card to automatically reload when it falls below a certain threshold, so it's very convenient that we recently launched our transit-friendly employer program in the fall to build relationships and encourage employers. employers to provide financial support to their employees to take public transport, so that is something we are looking at as it is something that also exists to encourage people.

Excellent, thank you and I know Pet Meadows. We have a very large commuter population, so if there's something at the municipal level that we can do with your communications or your marketing, still encourage that part, you know, getting the hybrid worker back on public transportation. Yes, thank you, thank you mayor. Ross, thank you very much, President West and thank you Sarah and you and her team for a wonderful presentation. I just wanted to focus on one part in terms of our position in North America and you and your team talked about that. I know we read it all with pride, but we were very, very important and also recognized that you and your team are difficult to make strict evaluations because there are differences, but I think everyone at this table has said where it really is.

What it comes together is in those individual users and when that reliability or roots are suspended, so I would like to remind you just for a second when we were planning before we talked around this table about the people who were here about the importance of observing . post-secondary institutes and upon returning we saw that as the bell that we were moving forward and I know it was unintentional, but my concern was evaluated at the larger post-secondary institute when they returned from an area that had people, us and me. I'm not saying it's intentional, but it was discontinued and therefore West Bank directly into UBC is that correct.

I didn't quite understand your point about the larger area, so the larger institution, yes, UBC, yes, so we have one of the feeders of that. from the western right, that route was canceled correctly, that route was suspended was suspended okay, that route made only a couple of trips a day to UBC, the vast majority of our service to UBC was throughout the pandemic, certainly we reduced it, that's us. I've raised it again, we have how many different routes serve UBC and I'm sorry, I didn't want to go into detail because I know those are difficult decisions, they're not easy, but it seemed ironic that we were projecting on post-secondary and one of the, I guess one of the results of that is that the route was discontinued.

What I'm interested in what the other ones were, there were three routes suspended correctly and the suspension stopped completely for the moment, is that the definition could just share with us what the other two uh there was a uh and so, first of all, know us we know customers don't like it you know if you can get a single seat ride for your entire trip that's great we had a route that provided a historic route that provided direct service from Richmond to UBC that was still running but with the Canada line now in place and the straight line and rapid bus on 41st Avenue, both very high frequency services. that provides a very high quality option for people, we also had a route that went from the Vancouver neighborhood to the central business district.

There are many other different options because we have a resilient network that gives people what we can do in every situation. I made sure people had high-quality alternatives. Thisgood. That's fair, thank you. So I just want to know the other two routes and you have helped me. I would urge the board and everyone to take a cautious approach to this and not go fast. When you buy a bus, you'll have it for 15 to 20 years, you'll get the wrong technology, and you might not get it. Make your goals if you have an unreliable product or we have bought before, new technology equipment that was no good and you are stuck with it for 15 to 20 years, causing a lot of service reliability problems and higher maintenance and operation costs .

So while we all want to get there, we want to make sure we have the right equipment to get us there or we'll miss that part, so just a warning, I know there's always a rush to say it. We need to do this now, but it's in its infancy. I was going to bring it up here or later, but it just came out, so I won't be increasing the network, so I'll speed them up a bit. That's one way to look at it. Sarah, I'm sorry, I did, um, no, you know, we're certainly always monitoring the technologies, we also have the imperative of the buses that are now 17 years old, that, you know, the hybrid diesel buses that need to be replaced and we have to make the best decision with the best technology available at that time, okay, thank you all very much for the discussion, the staff was worried, no one would have anything to say, so look what we showed you, right?, now You know, the conversation has been, I think. an important one and what it demonstrates are the limitations of reallocation.

If this is our future, our region is in trouble, we will have a carefully managed slow decline of our transit system and I know that's not what any of us want, so it really brings us to our next discussion, which is about our 10-year priorities and how we move beyond cannibalizing the region and the system to having one that matches the expectations of our residents and the growth we are experiencing, before we arrive. that if I can make a motion to receive this report, the exact nails in favor of publication take Kate a 4.2 report on transport delivery by 2050, 10 year priorities Sarah Ross thank you very much, I won't say so much, um, the purpose of this report is to request your approval of our work plan to advance the projects and services established in the approved 10-year Transportation 2050 priorities.

That plan, of course, was unanimously approved by this Council in June of last year. in a very ambitious plan to respond to the challenges of this region the challenges of affordability of climate resilience of improving access for all now. I recognize that we are a little behind on our agenda and I presented this report in detail at your December meeting to ask for your input, there are slides in the package. Maybe I'll leave it up to the president, but he could, um, we couldn't review them because he's seen them all before. I'll just note a few reviews.

We did that based on his comments at the December meeting, so we made it more explicit, maybe Mike, maybe you want to show him um just the map, we've made it more explicit than King George. The Boulevard corridor from Surrey Central to South Surrey White Rock is one of the priority corridors we are evaluating and is part of our brt action plan, so for all of those corridors it includes a conceptual plan that evaluates options and, in the case of King George Boulevard, you know those options include extending the existing R1 rapid bus that currently runs from Guilford to Newton.

Would we extend it all the way to Surrey White Rock or would we skip that step in the transit hierarchy and go straight to a brt in that entire corridor? uh, you know, we've also clarified that for some corridors, like the 200 corridor that connects Langley City to Maple Ridge, you know, Willis was successful again in implementing rapid bus with high frequency and 20 percent transit priority, or we skip that step and, you know, in our transit service product line and go directly to a full bus rapid transit system that has full transit priority, Sarah, yes, I apologize for chiming in, yes, I know we got there late last time, but I think it's probably one of the most important decisions the agency will make in terms of the priorities and the work plan around it, would you mind moving forward? the presentation not at all um yeah well we can go quick but yeah I think so we're all on the same page we should review it yeah sure thank you so let's do it so um this report describes the work that's in march to move forward and take us between the 10 year priorities and the next investment plan, so this is the transit map, so we are looking at the brt action plan, in those brt corridors that we are.

We are working on the interregional uh Express that we have. If you go to the next slide, we are also working on bus service options. You already know that this plan calls for doubling local bus service and increasing service to new areas. Mike is having technical difficulties moving forward. the slides are good, um, uh, thanks, uh. I mentioned earlier that access to nature again also required, so one of the things we're doing is looking at evaluating and better developing bus service, uh, options for bus service, which could be achieved within a Shorter time horizon given some of the constraints that we have on the next slide please, and of course cycling, working closely in partnership with municipalities, also Metro Vancouver, on a very ambitious cycling network to really make that bicycling and walking, but on a bicycle, be the most attractive option. for shorter trips and for, you know, with e-bikes even longer trips and we know that when we invest in high-quality separate bike facilities, people use them, people enjoy them, it's a great option for people, the Next slide, we'll move on.

Do we have a business case framework that we will look at? You know, a key part of this job is developing a sustainable financing strategy. You know, we know we've relied a lot on Fair Revenue. diversify our funding sources even further and this is a very ambitious plan and funds will be needed to implement it so we are working on that we are working on developing some options on the next slide please I mentioned that you know this requires a record . level of bus service expansion, so this work is underway to identify First, what is the maximum we could do between now and 2027, knowing that we would have to work within the existing maintenance and depot facilities, what would be the needs of the fleet, what would be some of the options. and objectives that we would advance on the next slide um I have mentioned the brt action plan so this is this work is starting to define a brt design working with people uh in your in your with your municipal hats in your your staff uh to develop concepts for each corridor to evaluate them, I'm looking at different options for each rope or as set out in the table on the next slide, please also other Rapid Transit and North Shore Rapid Transit project planning.

I mentioned earlier, we are simultaneously starting work planning. for a brt knowing that that could be implemented more quickly and at the same time moving forward with long-term work on what a definitive rapid transit buildout to the north coast would look like, as well as looking at what we could do as soon as possible. possible to improve the experience of bringing public transportation to the North Shore by increasing service on existing routes incorporating other priority transit measures we are advancing work on the Burnaby Mountain Gondola to develop the full business case for that as well as the Millennium line extension looking particularly at, also the operations and maintenance center requirements to support further expansion of the SkyTrain network, next slide please, we have already mentioned the corporate climate action plan, there are certainly two aspects to our climate work , this is the corporate side of developing a zero emissions program.

Fleet transition plan to achieve a 45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 20 in 2050. next slide please and of course we have a very important role to play in the reducing greenhouse gas emissions from overall transport in the region to identify how We know that transport is a very important source of our regional GHG emissions, partly thanks to the fact that our electricity is not, so we need do a lot of heavy lifting on the transportation side to achieve our goals, uh, I've already talked about that and then. the network, Bikeway Network's main action plan on how we can move quickly on this to really connect uh build the network close some of those gaps that exist on the next slide um we're working on express transit services you know those trips from greater distance, uh, greater distance, some of them are within our region, some of them are outside our region, and we know that, as the region has grown, people are traveling from further away, also from the seat of the Sky Highway into the Fraser Valley, we need to make sure there are good connections for the next slide.

You know, we continue to work on new technologies, working with regional partners on electric vehicle charging. Shared mobility. You know that transportation is changing. You know we are in a really transformative trend in the transportation field and this organization needs to be a part of that and help advance and shape it in this region excellent selection, so the next investment plan, you know, this is an ambitious plan, we, we I know it will take time to implement it just like we were doing with the 2014 Mayor's Vision that we had been implementing with great success and that will be the focus for this so we will not move forward.

In a Fell Swoop investment plan there will be a series of investment plans. The work in progress is to identify to help bring the information and develop the information to help this body have the information it needs to make prioritization decisions and we are currently developing a more detailed work plan and timing options for the next plan of investment that we would bring in a later meeting, yes, and with that just to close the purpose is, according to um, the emotions is to seek their support for this. work plan um and then we would come back to the related, of course, the timing of the work plan for the next investment plan, so thank you, thank you very much, Councilor Asmussen, well, I want to thank this overall, it is a very good plan , believe.

Moving forward, it is an ambitious plan. I want to thank the previous mayor's council for all the work they did to achieve this. It has many good things. Sustainable financing is the key. We need our levels of government to be stable and predictable. funding sources to do this, particularly for operations, that's really the key where we need funding is for operations. Capital is not the biggest problem, but operational soap and that is the key to our success in that part. On bus expansion, I think it's a great thing because that's where 80 or 70 70 80 of our ridership backbone comes from the one comment I made at the last meeting.

I didn't really get to that, but my concerns about brt and the adoption of existing road travel lanes and the rise of more congestion translinks inform a As noted a moment ago, electrification or electric vehicles will lead to more congestion because people are no longer guilty of driving their car and maybe they will switch back from public transportation to their car, so I also look at things that can push back against TransLink in a negative way and upset our goals, so I would like us to have be very careful when we enter that area of ​​the brt expansion.

I know Mayor Brody brought that up last time and I agree with them. He would do it. Be very careful how we go in that direction. The other thing is that they know it from the upper levels of the government. When I look at the plan and we talk about both, I would like to find a way that from the funds we do not have to raise. fares fares are a negative thing especially if we commute for an individual when you have families and you want to travel there is no point in taking public transportation because if it is more expensive for you to take public transportation than take your own car so those are just a few comments, but in general I will support it, it is a very good and aggressive job and I appreciate it, thank you Mayor Sager, thank you very much, I would just like to highlight the new service and access areas. to nature on that particular slide, if we could turn it back up.

I would just ask that you keep in mind that Cypress Mountain, forOf course, it's an incredibly popular recreational facility for everyone in Metro Vancouver and I don't know if my colleagues around the table know this, but we are in the process of negotiating with British Pacific Properties who owns most of the property left on the upper levels highway, highway one that runs through west vancouver. Our goal and objective is to benefit everyone in the region. protect much of the land for permanent recreation and park use, particularly in the Eagle Ridge area, transferring density to what will be called Cypress Village.

That town in its uh and it will certainly start, I imagine, within 10 years and its eventual build up will have a significance or could have a significant population base so there are two areas there that would just do it and I'm sure you know that. , but I would like to raise that and I also hope that nothing in this set of priorities will prevent us from West Van, as we are very determined to at least try a minibus or on-demand public transport to try to get people who live on the hillside and have Difficulties in getting to major bus routes force them out of their cars and onto them. micro Transit, put them into operation.

I hope this doesn't prevent actions we might want to take. You won't stop this from being an exhaustive list and we know that over time we will implement this with the best. The information we have and the communities are developing rapidly and when we make specific decisions through the investment plan, that is the process by which we confirm exactly what will happen. Thank you very much, like SkyTrain to Little Mary. Thank you very much and I look forward to it. Listening to the new members uh comment on this because obviously we had a good run with the previous group.

I will say that I support him a lot. I think if we build this and stick to the plan. After 10 years, we really will have provided great alternatives to, uh, independent vehicles for people across the region. One thing I did want to mention about the North Shore specifically, is the business plan for connecting Rapid Transit to the North Shore. It's scheduled for about a year of plan help that takes us to about 20 30. Whatever we can do to move forward, we're going to make an official community plan that will run from 20 30 to 2050 and I want the plan to be based on Transit as the backbone and to achieve that I need the planning to happen before that point so we can know what our supporting policy arrangements are.

We know what our commitments are to Transit and we can do transit or wayfinding. development for local area plans from that point, so I understand it will be there in year eight, but I want to do everything I can to get it done as soon as possible so we can base planning on the north coast around that, thank you. Thank you very much Director McCutcheon, that's why I feel this way, especially the focus on buses and bus rapid transit, as well as the cycling network and making sure that we link things like cycling to bus transportation and then up to a SkyTrain and those later parts, my question is simply referring to the climate action piece, uh, the toxin of both corporate and regional size and there are two goals, one of 45 reduction in GH in ghcs and the other is around a reduction. to two million tons of things at the regional level.

I'm wondering if those goals are just some kind of goals or if we have the plan in place and it's included in this to achieve that goal, as it is, is it an aspiration or is it planned, those goals are set, were set and confirmed in transportation 2050 and in the Metro Metro Vancouver climate action plan, that's probably not the right word, title of it, and some of those achievements are, you know, The 10-year priorities are very tied to achieving it. There is other work underway to look at what else would be needed politically to achieve this and we will come back to this as well and I'm sorry, Director, just to clarify. so the 10 year priorities are explicitly designed to achieve both goals, the corporate and regional goals, it doesn't mean it will be easy, so they are not aspirational goals, we have a plan to implement, it will be very, very It's a big challenge, especially if there is some delay in implementing the 10-year priorities, that's fine, but if it were implemented, as I mean, there were delays, but without delays we would achieve those two reductions of 45 by 2030 at the corporate level and, uh, up to two million problems that is that's what I'm reading, I mean, I won't hold it back, I can verify it, so our funding takes us basically to 37 of those 45, so you'll get a presentation on this a little bit. later, but that target of 45 includes things like electrification, renewable investments and renewable natural gas buses, which brings us to 37, closing that gap between 45 and 37 as of today without full funding, so, sitting here today, we won't be able to achieve that with with Where We Are thank you Mayor Locke um thank you um and uh thank you for the presentation and I support the uh the report as well, but I would say that um given what we've heard before and uh certainly um the challenges that we face in Surrey and the King George Corridor I would like to see that the King George Boulevard exploratory business case has been put forward as one of the um priorities, as has the North Shore rapid transit system and the Burnaby Mountain gondola.

King George's is extraordinarily busy and I think we have all recognized that, but I would like to see it given a higher priority in the report thank you, thank you Mayor Buchanan, thank you very much, Chairman West, and thank you very much again, sir, for your presentation , just a question and then a comment, in terms of the brt plan, and well, my general comment is that obviously I agree with the plan that we implemented in the last period, but in terms of the BR T plan, one of the things The ones we talked about while we were working on it last term was differentiating between brt and bus rapid and a note on page 12 of the package and on one of the slides it exchanges talks about the brt action plan that will develop a strategy for the delivery of brt and rapid bus projects and I really believe that we must differentiate ourselves so as not to confuse each other. to the public in terms of what we're talking about ERT, as we know, will look and feel and be very different than our rapid bus lines, so we really need to be clear on that in general terms. and I know we have a report coming up that we're going to talk to about the investment plan, but I think you already know the mayor of Echo West in terms of some of his comments about being known in case we No, this is the moment where that we must be bold if we are to manage carefully but see a decline in passenger numbers.

We have population growth. We know that immigration numbers will be higher than projected. We have a home. crisis that we are trying to manage just for the people who live here now, not even including the people who will come, we need full pressure in terms of how we are going to achieve higher levels. of the government at the table with us not only from a financial perspective, but as it needs to be from a financial perspective, but also in terms of our land use planning, land use planning around major capital infrastructure , uh, the Ironworkers Memorial as an example, maybe you know.

It's a 30-year plan for the province, but we need to understand from them their use of the land and what their expectations are of that replacement when it may arrive and how that interferes or doesn't interfere, but how that works with the province. planning that we are doing at this table and the staff is doing around a rapid transit line, but also around the land use decisions that local governments are making and that First Nations governments are making and that all have to be on the table if we are going to consider for the future, this is not about the livability of the region, but it is also about, as other people have mentioned, the connectivity of moving people to places of employment that They don't have that flexibility, it's about transferring young people. to your educational institution, what is our future human resource that we are going to need and it is about our economy and it is not just about our local economy, we represent a significant proportion of the national economy, um, that we have to implore the elders. levels of government are at the table and seek predictable sustainable financing and not beg, bore and steal in order to set up a transportation system that, frankly, has been piecemeal for decades and if we have learned anything through the pandemic it is that in We can actually do things across government lines, we can do things quickly, and we can't go back to the status quo of okay, let's take a look, let's build the plan.

I appreciate that my colleague in the district wanted certainty about his ocp planning, but for my community and the south. of the Fraser communities that have experienced exponential growth, we actually need the service today, we needed it yesterday, but we need it today, so for us around this table it has to be a full court press, no more, already You know, we can be nice, but we have to have them at the table collaborating with us and you know, at the end of the day, it's not always that nice to make it work, there has to be a lot of pressure to get this done, we can't have an infrastructure important as the lines of Canada. revolve around major events like Expo 86 and the 2010 Olympics, it is false, it is going to fail us dramatically, so I would prefer a legacy that we can say we made it happen and when we are no longer at this table we will see a region that is doing well economically and from a livable perspective thank you, thank you, well said, Councilor Krueger, I will thank you, President, I will be very brief, I will support the recommendations, I think it is a very solid work program, uh, what was I'm going to highlight I think Mayor Buchanan actually mentioned what he was going to highlight, just under number nine, express transit services and the importance of continuing to make that clear distinction between BRT Rapid Bus and also express services.

I think you know, even looking at the planning process for the Scott Road rapid bus that will be implemented this year we come from a community that currently does not have rapid bus service, so I think we will get better buy-in when we can try to explain to people these distinctions. just locally through discussions I've been having, you know, a lot of people think this just means increased frequency of existing buses, without understanding some of the comprehensive improvements and $20 million of new investment along the corridor Scott Road, let alone what that means for bus rapid transit, so we understand those distinctions because we've been talking about this chart for several years, but I don't think I don't know if there's public opinion research on this, but I would expect that our ridership in the general public is not quite there, so I think it's very important to generate that acceptance and also, as mayor, we little notice our own land use planning purposes, but no, it's a great work plan and I will support it, thank you. thank you Mayor Johnstone thank you um and uh just thank you to Mayor Little for asking what a new board member thinks about this plan um I'm really excited, it's not often that you join a new organization and just see something coming right at the beginning of its incorporation into the organization, which is a visionary plan that is already prepared and ready to go where, for the direction points where we are going, I think it is a really bold and necessary strategy for the region, um and uh.

As we all know from our own communities, our own councils, sometimes bold plants are easy to do, and I'm not saying it was easy work whoever did this council before me to get to this point because I know it's not. It is, but uh. Implementation is always the hardest part and we are only at the beginning of the implementation journey here so I very much appreciate Mayor Buchanan's comments that we have a full press to present to senior government officials right now to talk about how we are going to fund this and even talk to each other about how we're going to make the funding fun to make this plan a reality in the next 10 years, but I think we also have difficult conversations in our community. that brt is a different vision for this region and I think we're all going to have conversations in our community about how this is going to change a little bit, how our road network works and what we expect from our road network.

I totally support it. I think it's important. Can't wait to see brt running down 8th 8th Street in New Westminster. Can't wait to see BRD connecting New Westminster's long Marine Drive to youthe areas of our west. suburbs, but I recognize that it is a conversation that we will have to have in our communities and it will not always be an easy conversation, we have to recognize that this is the vision of our future, this is the only way we are going to achieve our planning goals, our regional planning goals, our regional transportation goals and our regional climate goals, so I wholeheartedly support the plan as it is and I'm ready for us to get to work on the hard part of convincing senior officials and convincing our communities that this is we have to fund this and we have to support it thank you very much mayor pahal uh thank you Taryn thank you Mary little in addition to asking that question as a new member of this Council that I have been following uh transportation 2050 and the process to get here and I can to say that I fully support this plan of work going forward;

A lot of thought has gone into it and I think there is something that will really connect this region like we have never seen if we can get this going, cracking the nut on sustainable public transport funding will be the key to this. I think we can all see elections maybe in the future at the federal and provincial level, so I think it will behoove us to put extreme pressure on the province. and the FEDS I know the feds are looking at their permanent transit fund, but they know that beyond the election period, so let's work hard to push it as much as possible.

I know the feds and the province talk about making life affordable, well the number One way to make life more affordable is to have affordable public transportation service, so we need to drive that point home. I know the province is also interested in doing something around affordability, so I hope we can get that message across at the same time we need to. We have a difficult conversation as local leaders and in the region because I imagine the province and the feds would like us to find a viable solution for funding, so I look forward to that difficult conversation, but if we can get sustainable funding. so everything we want to do in this Vision will be done so that will be my first priority thank you thank you Mayor Brody oh okay get me ready Mayor Woodward yeah thank you I want to thank you for the presentation of course it's just my second meeting, so I'm still like others here catching up and starting to understand what our role is here.

You know, I wish my role or Langley Township's role was deeper than approving billions for other municipalities and trying to understand. You know, you know how. We can think of Reese as the priority or raise the profile, like Equity Mayor Locke's comments you meet on 200th Street, for example, as perhaps he becomes a higher priority than he is now based on of some of the things that are changing in the municipality. perhaps Translate is not aware in terms of the intense increase in densities we are contemplating and pursuing and perhaps even if it is not built or planned but it is not built immediately or at the top of the list given the population densities in other priorities that We could do that planning so that as we move forward with densification, we have confidence in the schedule because you know right now I have developers in my office with 11-acre sites on 200th Street that want to build single-story warehouses because they don't There is traffic.

I have people who don't locate their businesses in Gloucester because they tell me they can't get employees because there is no traffic and what I also wanted to highlight here is that I didn't hear any part of the presentation mention the main road network and for us in the borough from Langley that's probably more important in the short term than hoping that public transportation doesn't come anytime soon, so I'd like to think offline or maybe into the future to understand that. where to mention the increase in kilometers and maintenance and investment in the main road network, I think it would benefit 80 per cent of my borough, who don't really think about translink radar that much, so I think Aldergrove and Gloucester too and There are so many areas of the municipality that really do not have service.

Salmon River, you know, eight ten thousand residents no, no service, so I think what would be an asset to Langley in the short term would be to see and help us maintain and Invest, for example, in the Fraser Highway, for example, really put something in of money on the municipality's main road network, where traffic does not exist and does not seem to work. Thank you. I'm sorry. Did you want to respond? I just respond very quickly. We are happy to sit down and talk about the work we are doing on the main road network. I also want to say, um, um, for Corridor 200.

It's going to be very, very important for all of these. corridors where we are working closely with your staff and will have project teams, we will absolutely need to understand what is already underway in that corridor, what plan any municipality has in place, what the capacity of the municipalities is to help, whether You know. make decisions that would make higher order Transit implementation more cost-effective to implement and those are the kinds of things where that information is critical, we will seek it out and present it to this body as we work collectively on how we take how to prioritize which corridors advance, of course, they will all be advanced, we can't do them all at once, no, and I think we recognize that there are other corridors with higher population bases. "Maybe the tattoo industry has to wait, but you mentioned Gloucester earlier in the presentation in your mind again.

We have 80 acres of industrial land that we are trying to put into production, but the developers who own that land tell me they will win." They don't develop it because they can't get employees because no one can afford to travel that distance for the salaries they earn in some of these businesses and that's why there's always the chicken and egg problem in the municipality that people don't want. be located there and they will not work there because there is no Transit and there is no Transit because no one is located there and no one works there, so how can we solve this in one of the main employment lands within the municipality?

Politely, it's right on your border. I recognize that it is right on their border, it is not. North Vancouver is not Burnaby, but it's still in translate thank you, thank you Mayor Sim, thank you very much, yes, I know the plans are not perfect and you know if each municipal region will love part of this and We're going to hate part of this, um and you know, Eric, I'm sorry, Mayor Woodward, we totally hear you and all the other individuals who have raised concerns, but I want to be clear from the perspective of the city of Vancouver, all 100 of us support this plan and I truly believe that what's good for the whole is good for Vancouver and if we all support this plan, we have an incredibly strong voice that actually serves us incredibly well when we look at higher levels. of the government will support this plan so you know Vancouver will support it even if we're not going to fulfill all our wishes first you know we will support it so thank you thank you mayor Rumi thank you for your presentation um and not being here in the previous round to configure this.

I think the plan itself is a good plan if we can get the funding, so I want to echo what everyone else has been saying here and that it should be ours. priority or are we just wasting time having said that, from Maple Ridge perspective we are a fast growing town and we are already over capacity when it comes to traffic congestion, something like a brt is something I think that would be a game changer for our population, something that I think would benefit us to the point that we and other cities that are connected, like Langley and Coquitlam, plus the fact of maybe getting a skytrain to Poco, which we're going to connect it to Maple Ridge, but instead the brt is one of those projects that I think is a game changer, but it's something that I think we need to prioritize as part of this plan sooner rather than later to start having them.

The conversations are going to be engineering, it's going to be a challenge to get to how do we get it from Haney Place to Langley City, how do we get it from Haney Place to Coquitlam Center, when it's going down the low temperature highway, so. We have also involved the ministry in that, so they will be long conversations. We wouldn't like to see this at the end of that 10-year plan. These are conversations that need to start happening now and we can take advantage of that with the federal government and their goals and the provincial government and their goals on climate also now is the time to capitalize on those things and not wait until maybe the next election let's lose that influence, so for me it's something that I will support with the intention of pushing to have a brt as part of the plan sooner rather than later thank you, thank you all so much for your comments, Mayor Lottie, simply, the motion has been moved, no it's not okay I'm going to move the recommendation says they've been put forward so there's going to be a lot of conversations a lot of conversations that need to start but we can't start them until we're done so let's go ahead and start those conversations and get that done. funding available thank you, just want to make an additional comment um and all, I think the conversation has been great and you know, we're all saying the same thing, we're all speaking with one voice and I think that's incredibly important.

I think when we communicate this to the public to the provincial and federal government, one of the important ways to frame this is that it's not something optional or a nice-to-have, but that you think about it the same way we think about everything else that we need. . support growth in public services in the region, you know, our sewer system, our water supply, we think of these things as requirements, very true with the transit system, I mean, this is not optional, it is not good Having it for our region is a requirement if the province and the country are going to meet their climate objectives.

If you are not serious about that, then don't make this plan, but if you are, you have to make this plan. Our goals around housing, we, the province, are talking a lot about housing. They are telling us all that we are going to have housing goals that we must meet. I appreciate that, but there are things that are required if we're going to meet the housing targets and Transit is probably chief among them, so all of these things are all interconnected and if the provincial and federal governments are serious about their housing commitments and environment and they say that this region will have a million more people by 2050, they have to sit at the table and help achieve it. plan or else all those other things won't happen, we need to be upfront and honest with people about it, so I think that's what's at stake and I look forward to working with all of you to start those discussions with the provincial governments in earnest. and federal.

The government and as mayor Ruby says that we should get to work because all things also require time to be delivered, so anyway, thank you all very much for the very good discussion, it has been moved and seconded by all those who are in favor, the motion against is carried, okay, that will take. We move on to our CEO's report on the work plan and committee structure for 2023. Thank you, Chair. There is a report on page 54 of your agenda packet. I'm not going to go over any slides. We talked about this. A draft version of this report at your last meeting I incorporated your comments, suggestions, changes, so there's really no, there's just no substantive changes to the proposed work plan, clean up a little bit and based on the conversation, we just had your goal. main part of the work plan. is to begin meeting 10-year priorities, part of that means approving an investment plan that we will also need to complete our financial recovery from the pandemic again.

This is all not new so I won't talk about this in detail the committee structure and membership listed here again is very similar to what we talked about and incorporates the changes in the direction you provided so I'll be happy to respond any questions, Mr. President, but otherwise, that's my report, Mayor Brody, please move and second. any comments when seeing any calls for it was yes, so I have a question Mayor Lawton, yes, thank you. I have a question about the committees and I don't disagree with any of their purposes. I wonder how much interaction there is.

It's between committees because I'm seeing that I think there was a committee that was divided in two since the previous one, there was a yes, so it was like the one there was one to analyze specifically how the funds are generated and then now we have a second one that is looking at how to get it out to the public and get support yes yes uh uh uh Merlotti that the public affairs and governance committee, which probably focuses primarily on public affairs, is a It's a bit of a new structure in recognition of the actual conversation thatWe literally just had, which is one of the biggest challenges in implementing the 10-year priorities, will be securing support from the public and from senior governments, so the goal behind having a focused committee structure. just in that allowed us to spend time on that, so it wasn't something that we really spent that much time on in the last, in the last Marriage Council and that work was subsumed into what was called financial governance.

I completely understand the purpose of having a separate entity to develop those types of communication plans, but I think there should be a link between the finance committee and see if it is a liaison or someone so that there is a connection between what we are communicating and how it is communicated. is performing well and in fact I would go further and say that the three committees should be quite linked, the finance committee is really there to help identify how much yes. we need the planning committee to actually be there to identify how much we intend to accomplish to build and improve and then the public affairs community is there to help figure out how to secure public and student government support so that everyone has to be working together, where that link occurs first and most importantly is that the three committees report periodically to the Mayor's Council, the president and the vice president also sit in various combinations, that is an important link, thank you, oh yes, sorry and, in fact, I'm sorry that the president reminded me. that this is actually not specifically mentioned here and there may have been a mission um in the previous mayor's council the president and the vice president the mayor's council periodically convened meetings of the presidents and vice presidents with all the committees to do exactly what you're about Speaking and I think because the need for coordination will be even more important, we anticipate having those meetings more regularly.

I mean, obviously, as we just talked about, we need action now, so we need to have a coordinated effort, okay? thank you very much I don't see angry speakers all those in favor opposed the motion approved the motion to adjourn you can add all those in favor publish and approve thank you very much so if we could take a break from 10 to 10 minutes, feel free to skip ahead. door, we'll just need to close the top door so we can go into closed session, uh, and we'll meet here, we'll start the meeting at 11 o'clock, so you may need to stay away from those doors while you close them unless You wanna know what's up, yeah, that's right, yeah, we could have gotten the little Bing, yeah.