Abstract Manager

Many cities have declared climate emergencies and developed ambitious climate change plans to work towards the important target of net zero emissions. The future cities depicted in climate change plans represent a major change from the status quo and transportation planning has a significant role to play in working towards these futures. Working towards a more sustainable future requires seismic shifts in travel behaviour, in addition to electric vehicle uptake, placing a significant expectation on transportation plans to be major drivers of behaviour change.

However, there are numerous factors that contribute to travel behaviour, many of which are outside the purview of typical “transportation plans,” making it difficult for transportation plans to meet the high expectations alone. In particular, transportation planning is often conducted within a fixed land use context defined in another planning document. This is happening in the context of significant population growth and, while intensification often grabs headlines, suburban expansion is continuing in municipalities across Canada, contributing to numerous challenges, including meeting transportation-related climate change goals.

This presentation will share strategies for how transportation planning can contend with this challenge, including developing transportation targets that are more closely tied to land use and travel behaviour, using vision-based planning to identify the specific steps needed to bridge the gap between the present and future, and communicating the relationship between all of the factors that influence travel behaviours, among others. These strategies are geared towards developing transportation plans that equip decision makers with the information needed to implement actionable recommendations that are linked to the broader urban environment – recommendations that contribute to the multi-faceted effort required to meet the challenge of addressing climate change, and ultimately bridging the gap between climate change plans and transportation planning.