My Letter To Council Regarding the Transportation Plan

Quick a little pre-amble! If you have never read any of my thoughts on Urbanism, you may not know how I feel! I love walkable places, I love taking transit, but I am not motivated at all to force anyone from their cars, or force anyone to live in an apartment. I just really want a regulatory system in our City and in our Country that allows me to live the way I want, and you to live the way you want, and to have the costs of each lifestyle shared equitably. Ultimately I want to lower mine and your taxes, and I want to stop the encroaching of our suburban style of development further and further into the beautiful nature that makes our Province and Country so spectacular. I want to remove regulation and leave people to make their own choices - and sometimes regulation is quite contradictory. That is what I want to highlight in this letter to City Council shortly after the council voted against adopting the new Kamloops Transportation Plan.

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Good day to you Mayor and Councillors,

As a result of the vote on the Downtown Transportation Plan - I wanted to drop a quick line with you about our ‘Official Community Plan’, Kamplan as it is called, and all of the other associated plans that our city embarks on regularly with the idea of guiding our cities development. There is three parts to this. First is the ‘necessary amount of citizen engagement’ required to move forward with it – the second being what we have done with what we learned from that. The last is what we have actually done in comparison to what the plans suggest we should be doing.

With the rejection of the Downtown Transportation Plan this week, I find some aspects of the arguments against its adoption troubling – the largest part of that being, “not enough public engagement.” When we embark on an OCP process, as we have in 1974, 1979, 1990, 1997, 2004 and just recently in 2017/2018 – we have done huge amounts of public consultation and input sessions in the course of putting together those plans. For example, you can see this diagram from the 1997 OCP about the engagement process and how it was rolled out.

Since 1997, the amount of engagement conducted by the City has grown dramatically with each new plan, and so too has the avenues for engagement with the advent of the internet. If we assume that each plan cost the city roughly $150,000 - $200,000 to put together and conduct engagement/planning sessions, and the same again for the subsidiary plans like the Transportation Plan, Sustainability Plan or Neighbourhood Plans (12 of them, some having multiple editions) – the City, since 1990, has spent no less than $5 million directly on the planning process – and has held no less than 96 formal planning input sessions, and no less than 300 informal ‘lets talk’, neighbourhood engagement sessions about the future of our city. So, what have we learned from 30 years of planning department lead engagement?

Let me lift some statements from the 1990 OCP, adopted in January 1990, 29 years and 11 months ago;

•        The city will continue to encourage the increased use of transit as an alternative to the automobile. (page 51, paragraph 5.5.8)
•     The city will continue to pursue the development of a continuous, integrated bicycle network in order to promote and encourage cycling as an alternative to the automobile. (page 51, p. 5.5.10)
•      In paragraph 3.1.1 on page 13, the OCP shows the following priority list for preferred development

While the 1990 OCP does not establish any specific goals for housing density, nor any metrics around what percentage of trips are taken by various forms of transit – it does already show an encouragement of Infill, Mixed Use, Walkability and Alternative Transit use.

In 1997, the next OCP there are more specific metrics as the city started to collect traffic count data and metrics in 1994;

·         In Section 1, there is much talk of Travel Smart, the new program directed at getting people out of their vehicles to reduce the capital expenditure the city has towards road projects that do not generate any cost recovery. Interestingly since the 1984 Transportation Plan, transit has been mandated to have a 30% cost recovery for delivering, but road projects do not have any requirement for cost recovery.

• “vehicle use during the afternoon peak hour should be reduced by 35%” (page 4)
• “The City will support infill or redevelopment of existing serviced land” (page 9)
• “The City will discourage development or intensification of peripheral areas” (page 9)
• “To develop more compact and cost-effective neighbourhoods” (page 10)
• “The City will encourage a Street Environment that increases pedestrian activity such as placing buildings closer to the street line” (page 10)
• “The City should consider traffic-calming measures in existing neighbourhoods” (page 12)
• “To encourage innovation, flexibility and quality in the provision of housing” (page 13)
• Paragraph 1.6 on page 17 has the same priority list as the 1990 plan saying that mixed-use infill should be the highest priority development pattern for the City
• Paragraph 1.8 on page 17 says that “Residential Development will continue…[to encourage] pedestrian linkages, mix of uses, wide range of housing types and densities”
• “The Sahali/UCC Town Center will discourage the use of automobiles and automobile projects” (page 23, paragraph 2.2.3)
• “The city will discourage further strip development” (page 27, paragraph 2.11)
• “Building forms should be encouraged to promote a more transit and pedestrian friendly environment” (page 27 paragraph 2.13)
• “Residential should be encouraged above the ground floor in commercial developments”

The 2004 OCP finally identifies specific metrics related to alternative transportation on page 5;

The 2010 Sustainable Kamloops Plan has the IDENTICAL metrics on page 17.

The 2010 Sustainable Kamloops Plan, which is already adopted and ratified also has this to say;

However, RS-1/2/3/4/5 zones, which regulate almost the entire land area of the city, amended last in 2017 – have a COMPLETE MAXIMUM density of 21 units per hectare.

As we can see, there really isn’t all that much new in the latest version of the Transportation Plan. In fact the drawings of land use types on Pages 31 and 32 are lifted directly out of the 2004 OCP and 2005 Downtown Plan. Identifying 30% of trips be through Alternative Transportation is the same goal that was identified and ratified in the 2004 OCP verbatim. That goal is already part of the OCP by-law created at that time. 

That same goal is already part of 2010 Sustainable Kamloops Plan, and it is already part of the 2018 OCP review. In fact, the goal identified in the 2010 plan says that we should have achieved the 30% Alternative Transportation Goal by 2020.

• What has changed since we identified Mixed-Use, Infill, Density and Alternative Transportation as goals and ideals of Kamloops and its future in 1990, 30 years ago;We have maintained that transit must recover costs at 30%, while streets and infrastructure maintenance budgets are roughly 1.6x higher with no cost recovery mechanisms
• We have widened numerous roads in areas to great expense to prioritize high vehicle speeds and automobile capacity
• Reduced the amount of mixed use and blended use zones
• Reduced the areas where dense housing types like duplexes, four plexes and townhomes can be built from over 80% of the cities land area in 1984 to less than 11% of the land area today
• Increased the minimum parking requirement from none in 1984 to a 19 page complicated document in 2019
• Decreased the Lot Coverage that is allowed to be built on
• Failed to complete anything resembling a continuous and integrated bike transportation network despite being an international biking destination
• Spent roughly 197x the capital budget on automobile projects as compared to alternative transportation projects in the last decade
• Used new BC transit hours to run empty buses to Heffley Creek and Juniper Ridge while buses to the university, downtown and North Shore are so full that the bus skips stops as it can’t allow more people on the bus
• Reduced the access to using the bus as a casual user by eliminating transfers
• Reduced the number of places that someone is able to purchase a bus ticket or pass from
• Demolished many mixed-use buildings downtown for parking
• Tranquille and Downtown has had on-street parking removed in places to facilitate faster vehicle speeds while reducing the number of crossing opportunities for pedestrians 

Not only do I think that the Downtown Transportation Draft has more than enough support from 30 years of past public engagement through all the OCPs, it is also fairly superfluous as it does not actually introduce any new goals that have not been part of the OCP since at least 2004. Where the rubber needs to really meet the road, car pun intended, is to move forward on all the implementation pieces. Our OCPs say one thing, and our zoning and bylaws encourage the opposite.

The transportation plan is not mandating that all people will need to take all trips by alternative transportation – it is saying lets make it easier for some people, to take some trips, some of the time, by alternative means.

Most of the busiest and most successful restaurants in town are in areas of town that have no or little parking. Many restaurants like Milestones, Montana's and Red Robin are failing despite having tons of parking. Our plan to continue subsidizing personal automobiles and wondering why people choose to drive everywhere has to change, and the Transportation Master Plan is one of the first planning documents in 20 years to actually have some teeth and projects as part of it. I would really encourage us all to revisit this vote and start fulfilling some of the 30 year old OCP goals.

Thanks for your time!