This week folks in the Lower Mainland are voting on whether or not to support a 0.5 per cent congestion improvement tax and The Potentiality strongly encourages readers to vote ‘Yes’ in the plebiscite. Better public transit will get us to and from work faster, make our air cleaner, reduce stress, and even enhance our creativity. In an effort to influence you to influence your community to also vote ‘Yes’ let’s explore how investing in public transit enhances workplace potential.
Voting ‘Yes’ is a simple decision for me. I’ve lived in Vancouver for seven years and worked at the University of British Columbia for five of those years – my commutes were from Commercial Drive and Main Street to the Point Grey Campus. So I took the 99 B-Line bus down the Broadway corridor. And it was – and still is – a pretty terrible experience. People push and shove to cram themselves into the bus, which then careens down a congested street, unsafely tossing around its passengers. Not wanting to be one of the thousands of commuters stranded on Broadway, I quickly learned “competitive transiting”, which saw me jostle, shove and glare my way on to the bus. Riding the 99 B-Line was a terrible experience and got each day off to a bad start, cramping my professional potential. Thousands students and employees of UBC suffer the same fate today.
There has got to be a better way, people. If you are still on the fence, here are nine reasons why better transit infrastructure will create more productive and happier workplaces.
Congested commuting kills!
Around 66% of people in the Lower Mainland drive to work. Only 20% take transit. As the population grows and the infrastructure – more or less – stays the same, this means that more people, often alone, are cramming cars on to highways and streets from Surrey to North Vancouver. Metro Vancouver police and fire chiefs warn that more gridlock will cause more accidents and that congestion hinders emergency vehicles responding to crises. Sure, you can practice mindfulness as your car sits motionless on Oak Street, but this practice is required to deal with the incredible stress of a congested commute. Better public transit means less stress and increased safety when you’re traveling to and from work.
GHG makes it hard to focus on work
According to the David Suzuki Foundation, cars are responsible for 31% of the region’s greenhouse gas emissions. If we don’t expand options for bussing, training, cycling, and walking to work then the one million more people and 600,000 more cars due to arrive in the Lower Mainland over the next 30 years will increase congestion and toxic emissions in our communities. I don’t know about you but I will have a harder time focusing on my work when so many of my colleagues have asthma and other ailments brought on by dirty air.
Taking transit enhances physical health
Commuting to work in a single occupancy vehicle requires a lot of sitting. You walk into your garage or driveway and sit down in your car. And then you sit in your car. And then you arrive at work, walk up some stairs or ride an elevator. And then you sit at your desk for eight hours. Wow. That’s a lot of sitting (which is the new smoking)! For transit users, usually the day starts with a brisk walk to where the bus or train picks you up. You might have to stand for parts of your ride. And you probably don’t get dropped off exactly at your office. These short walks add up, especially if you’re carrying grocery bags or using transit to run errands on the way home. For these simple reasons taking transit is miles better than driving.
Time is money (and love)
Right now, Canadians are wasting billions of hours due to long commutes. Urban gridlock costs Canadians an average of 32 working days per year. According to Inc’s Jeff Haden, longer commutes correlate with higher likelihood of divorce, too. So, for love and for productivity we need to drastically reduce our commutes.
Time is educational
On average cars get us to work about 41 minutes faster than public transit. Not only will better public transit help close the travel-time-gap between cars and trains – although this video clearly shows a bus/train combination defeating a car – but it will also create more space for sitting, reading, listening, and thinking. Reading a book, preparing for a presentation, learning something new from a podcast, or crafting hilarious tweets are all examples of how a better commute aboard a bus, boat or train can result in your arriving to work with better ideas and a fresher perspective. Try doing that in your car and you’ll wind up with a ticket from a police officer for distracted driving.
Social connection foster creativity
It’s not for everyone, but talking to strangers enhances your career potential. Human beings naturally crave connections with each other (it’s sort of one of the reasons we invented cities in the first place). By encouraging more people from different communities to take public transit we are deepening the social fabric of our communities, including our workplaces. Companies with healthy employees who have concern for their community encourage their people to take transit, which is made easier when the commuting options are more plentiful. Offering commuter credits is a low-cost way to make employees happier and more productive, too.
Parking lots can be re-imagined
I’ve written about the potential of church parking lots. Better public transit means fewer cars on the road, which means fewer cars in parking lots, which means more space for the cool stuff that helps people realize their professional potential! Empty parking spots can be turned into basketball courts, bike storage rooms, climbing walls, or community gardens, which are some of the spaces and places created by Canada’s Top 100 Employers. All of these options foster far more engagement, collaboration and inclusion amongst employees than does a concrete space that holds a 2010 Corolla for eight hours.
More money for the real economy
According to Vancity Savings Credit Union, shifting just 1% of our household spending to local businesses can generate $600 million in economic activity. My assumption is that commuting via public transit will expose people to more opportunities for buying local than the drive-through culture of the single-occupancy-vehicle commute. Bus drivers and local businesspeople could be part of this increased economic activity, too, which is one of the reasons that the Vancouver Board of Trade is supporting the ‘Yes’ vote.
We should build cities for the future
Over 70% of humans will live in cities by 2050. And there will be around 9 billion of us. Needless to say, cities of the future will not be designed around cars – such an approach would be ridiculous and, frankly, impossible to execute. Whether transit moves us to and from vertical cities or we fly around greener cities on super-fast solar powered trains, the point is that urban planners from all ideological spectrums are focusing on transit options that speedily move as many people as possible to as many places as possible. No smart people are thinking about how to design or the car, which is why we should vote ‘Yes’ for more transit infrastructure and play a role in eliminating congestion in the Lower Mainland.