Although a large proportion of the world’s population live in large cities, in Canada, 40% of the population live in mid-sized cities (50,000 to 550,000 people) [1]. Mid-sized cities often face different challenges when it comes to sustainable transportation compared to large cities, but are important to focus on as well.
Community members living in mid-sized cities are often heavily reliant on vehicles. Most mid-sized cities in Canada are relatively new and were built during the automobile era, which allowed for infrastructure to be spread out. Zoning laws in cities also make it hard for its residents to use multimodal modes of transportation due to the large size of neighbourhoods and how far away they are from daily amenities.
The reason that public transportation works so well in large cities is because there are a lot of people traveling in the same places, which means that buses can run more often and be more reliable. In smaller towns, it is a challenge to get people to take public transportation because they often have to bike or even drive long distances to get to the bus stop, making the use of public transport a hassle. In addition, traffic delays in mid-sized towns aren’t problematic enough to promote other modes of transportation, because people ultimately want to choose the fastest and most efficient ways to travel.
Being from a mid-sized town myself, I was curious to look into the green transport initiatives that my hometown, Kelowna BC, is taking. The Kelowna metropolitan area has a population of nearly 200,000 people and it is rapidly increasing. It is expected that 50,000 people will move to Kelowna in the next 20 years [2]. With a rapid increase in population comes a lot of opportunity for sustainable initiatives going forward.
The City of Kelowna hopes to increase the ease of public transport use in the future by prioritizing buses over other traffic at key locations, and increasing the frequency and reliability of public transport. Rapid transit systems such as bus rapid transit, or light rail traffic are not economically feasible for the City of Kelowna at this point, but may be examined more in the future. The majority of Kelowna residents currently feel that automobile transport is the only viable transportation option, and one of the City’s main goals is to shift this mindset in the coming years [3].
References:
[1] https://urbansystems.ca/driving-change-sustainable-transportation/
[2] https://kelownapublishing.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?DocumentId=16871