BCBusiness

40 BCBusiness JUNE 2016 kEiTh sOnEs lives in squamish. he loves his view of howe sound and the coast mountains and how close he is to everything he likes to do, including hiking and paddleboarding. but the company he's president of– allteck, which produces high-voltage and telecommunications equipment–is located in aldergrove. so each day he sets out between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m. and drives for an hour and a half to two hours to get to work. he figures that in a year, he drives between 50,000 and 80,000 kilometres. for sones, the trade-offs are worth it. he actually enjoys the thinking time his drive allows him–using the time to ponder company problems, which he can't do at the office, where he's bombarded with calls and demands to put out this fire or that. in his ford explorer, though, he can go into strategic-thinking mode. he has a recorder with him so he can hang onto his ideas. the one alternative form of transportation that's ever appealed to him? "there was one time i had to fly, so i took a helicopter from squamish to the yard. it was 22 minutes. i thought, 'this is the way to go.'" LONG-DISTANCE DRIVER * transportation planners focus all of their research on the work commute even though those trips represent a minority—in the lower mainland, 23 per cent—of all trips. that's because the work commute, say experts, is the one that has the biggest impact on cities, transit planning and even other trips. the work commute is the biggest mass movement of the day, and systems have to be planned for that maxi- mum. and, once a worker bee decides among walking, skateboarding, cycling, transit, driving or flying, that person often tacks on the other types of trips—school drop-offs, shopping, socializing—to the same mode. commuting behaviour—how ever yone i n Copen h agen switched from mostly cars to mostly bikes (approaching 50 per cent within the city) in the last 20 years as the city aggressively expanded cycling paths, or how commuting from Nanaimo to Vancouver by plane is now a thing. But the real- ity, say many transportation experts, is that commuting behaviour actually doesn't shift that quickly. We have our pre- ferred patterns and it takes a lot to dislodge us from them. An Italian physicist, Cesare Marchetti, came up with the idea in the 1990s that humans have held to a total commute time of about an hour throughout his- tory. That mental travel budget stays the same whether people are walking, on a donkey, in a BMW or travelling by bullet train. They'll accept about 30 minutes each way and not much more, on average. A city that provides faster ways of travelling—a high- way, a rapid-transit line—will •nd that it doesn't shorten aver- age commutes since many peo- ple will move out to the new 30-minute mark. According to the best commuting statistics for Metro Vancouver—TransLink's 2011 trip diary—regional com- muters travel an average of 13.2 kilometres to work*. National Household Survey statistics say those travellers clock in at an average of 28.4 minutes on their commutes. That hasn't budged in years. While travel behaviour is slow to change, it's also getting a lot more complex. As the authors of the report Commuting in America, released in January 2015 by the American Association of State Highway and Transpor- tation O©cials, put it: "The keys today are more disparate, with multiple factors at play. Instead of a single dominant pattern, demographic, technological, economic and cultural changes are interacting to push patterns in diverse directions—sometimes counteracting and sometimes reinforcing each other." Transportation planners aren't just trying to •gure out what the millennials (and subse- quent generations) will do next. They're also having to factor in the impact of boomers, who are working longer than expected because they are not as well o' as they expected. Recessions and then recoveries. Two-career couples who have to negotiate the trade-o's for two commutes, not just one. Telecommuting and self-employment. Housing that cities allow to develop along transit lines (and thus encour- age their use). Improvements to transit (or a lack thereof ). The cost of gas and cars. And the changing patterns of city devel- opment and work location. Those changing patterns are especially relevant in the Lower Mainland, where the emphasis on developing a regional plan with multiple town centres has produced a metropolitan region that's distinct from Calgary or Seattle. In those cities, all the blood is sucked into the beating heart of downtown during the day and released at night. The Lower Mainland, by contrast, is increasingly polycentric—with transit patterns that look more like a bunch of chopsticks that fell on the ›oor than a simple conveyor belt. "Every munici- pality is trying to have a one-to- one ratio for jobs, but it creates a challenge when people are living in one suburb and work- ing in another," says Metro Vancouver board chair Greg Moore, who led the charge on the mayors' transit plan. Even in the city of Vancouver, fully 39 per cent of residents commute out of the city to their jobs—including 30 per cent from that bastion of urban living, the West End. While this kind of scattered commuting makes something like ride-sharing much more di©cult, it can also help make the transit system more e©cient commuter profile

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