Better city planning could help your commute
Posted October 2, 2012 8:59 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The CEO of Port Metro Vancouver says people living in the Lower Mainland are going to need more places to work in the future and now is the time to start planning.
“We obviously need places for people to live, work, shop and places for people to enjoy life outside of those places like parks,” Robin Silvester says. “But if we just focus on one type of land use and exclude others like industry, we end up changing the character of the Lower Mainland in a very negative way in the long term and that worries us.”
Silvester believes if planners focus solely on housing and ignore industry, it can lead to all kinds of problems.
“We could see the Lower Mainland progressively become a community where people live but don’t work, like Florida,” Silvester says. “Florida is a great place to live and people go to live there, but they go there for the last phase of their life when they’re finished working because they can’t go there and work.”
Census data from 2006 shows more than 30 per cent of Vancouver commuters work in another municipality.
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts believes that number has grown.
“The trends have been shifting for quite sometime,” Watts says. “We know that about 70 per cent of future growth will be south of the Fraser. You have the expansion of Delta Port and the expansion of Fraser Surrey docks, so there are a lot of elements here that we have to be paying attention to make sure infrastructure is being planned and is moving forward.”
It’s not just people who live in Vancouver who are commuting outside of the city they live in.
Tiffany Gurden lives in Surrey, but drives to work in Chilliwack.
“Everyone says I go the opposite direction, so [the commute] is no big deal,” Gurden says. “It’s not too much of a deal until the summer when everyone wants to go camping on Friday when I’m trying to get to work. It can also be a challenge in the winter because the Fraser Valley gets a little more snow.”
Gurden says if she buys a home, she’ll consider Chilliwack because it’s cheaper and it will cut down on her travel time.
