Five areas of focus
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Over the course of the transportation summit, a handful of themes emerged. The following list consolidates the ideas within each theme and summarizes the priorities that leaders in business, government, and civil society must act on to seize this moment and bring solutions to scale.
Transport Sector Leader, Government & Public Services
apau@deloitte.ca
Canadian and BC companies and leaders are at the forefront of the new economy. Made-in-BC solutions can have global impact—and government, industry, and academia all have a role to play in helping to bring them to market:
The aviation sector, which accounts for 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, faces challenges when it comes to reducing its carbon footprint. BC company Harbour Air believes it has landed on a solution for emissions-free flight, at least on a regional level: the Harbour Air ePlane. To date, 80 test flights have been completed successfully, putting British Columbia ahead of the curve, and putting Harbour Air ahead of competitors in other jurisdictions. But innovation is outpacing regulation. Truly commercializing this innovation will require addressing regulatory hurdles like the current certification requirements and establishing the necessary charging infrastructure at origin and destination.
Hydrogen is critical for decarbonizing the logistics sector, as it is capable of powering passenger buses, cargo transportation trucks and ships, and even airplanes. British Columbia is home to this growing hub of hydrogen innovation and excellence.
Existing energy companies like Fortis are already exploring ways to produce hydrogen. But the rest of the ecosystem is also present—from climate technology innovators like Loop and Powertech, to end-use customers like YVR, the Port of Vancouver, and the national railways, to regulators like Transport Canada, the BC Ministry of Transportation, and industry associations.
There is a real opportunity for the province to lead Canada in hydrogen transport, in the same way that southern Ontario leads in EV battery manufacturing. Achieving this future will require every level of government to drive a smart, industry-informed industrial strategy and create a market that BC innovations can serve.
Purolator is on a mission to decarbonize its regional parcel delivery network. It’s an immense undertaking with multiple moving parts, including modernizing its fleet, establishing a domestic supply of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), securing new cargo aircraft, and decarbonizing all the equipment “under the wing” (i.e., ground support equipment like conveyors, trucks, and tractors).
YVR is supporting Purolator’s mission by improving the efficiency of cargo movement in its facilities through digitalization—reducing wait times, truck idling, and carbon emissions.
These initiatives are at various stages of development, from planning through to proof of concept, working prototype, and early commercial deployments. But they do have something in common: they’re solutions for challenges we’re facing today. They must be brought to scale and commercialized, with support and collaboration from regulatory authorities, government, and the business community.
Transportation is an ecosystem—with multiple systems and multiple actors working together to get people and goods where they need to go. Enhancing transportation, therefore, requires a holistic perspective and recognition that collaboration across all sectors and silos is necessary.
With an ecosystem approach, players will:
British Columbia is known as Canada’s Pacific gateway, with the efficiency of goods movement in the province affecting the entire country’s competitiveness and prosperity. And the economy of our region extends beyond that: many of the cities in the Cascadia Corridor are major exporters.
It’s worth considering an integrated freight/goods movement plan with other regional jurisdictions to ensure that goods can readily get to market in all regions and across the border.
At present, public transportation between cities in the region is poor. The SkyTrain is designed to bring people from the suburbs into the core, but making connections between suburbs is difficult. Outside TransLink’s operating area, inter-city transit connections are also poor.
With growth in urban centres outside of Vancouver, inter-city connections will need to be improved and capacity increased.
This might look like the improvements envisioned by the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension. Or the Cascadia High Speed Ground Transportation initiative being led by the Washington State Department of Transportation. If the vision for this initiative comes to pass, a traveller could move between Seattle and Vancouver in the space of a single hour—a transformational opportunity to improve connectivity for the people and businesses of the Pacific Northwest.
Transit infrastructure within cities must also be upgraded in any plan for growth. This means improving capacity where needed, such as south of the Fraser River. It also means integrating active transportation like bicycles, e-bikes, and e-scooters into transit and mobility plans; the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain project has a $90-million budget earmarked for this express purpose. And finally, it means integrating land-use planning with transportation objectives. To make public transit and micromobility solutions viable, people should be able to get to work in less than 45 minutes.
We’ll have to rethink the way we separate employment and residential areas, and create places where people can live, work, and play without having to travel far.
The shortage of industrial land in Metro Vancouver is well understood. The region’s housing crisis is putting immense pressure on municipalities to rezone land from industrial to residential use. But in doing so, the supply of industrial land in the Lower Mainland is eroding significantly. This has implications for goods movement. Industrial lands are needed to warehouse goods and road resources must be used efficiently. Metro Vancouver has an industrial land reserve and municipalities ultimately make decisions about land use, but there are opportunities here for collaboration—for municipalities to work closely with all levels of government and industry to understand the consequences of rezoning industrial land and pursue a more integrated and balanced system.
As the population grows and there are more demands on a limited and constrained land base, we may need to consider alternative solutions for shipping. This might mean increasing the allowed density of industrial lands to encourage vertical warehouses or establishing time-of-day restrictions for freight traffic to ensure that freight and commuting uses of the road are not competing for space.
There are reasons for optimism: YVR’s new Land Use Plan and the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 proposal will both add to the region’s industrial land base. But land use is only one part of the solution, as the shortage of warehouse and transmodal facilities must also be resolved.
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The way we purchase things has fundamentally changed since the pandemic—and the way we move those things is fundamentally changing along with it. The problem, at its root, is that roads, ports, and airports are struggling to cope with the demands being placed on them. In addition to commuter traffic, urban freight delivery has increased significantly, driven in part by e-commerce “invisible freight” through food delivery services, personal automobile and bicycle couriers, and ride-shares.
In public policy circles, a common response to this problem is a simple one: road user charges. This approach uses market mechanisms to allocate scarce road space to the most efficient uses. But it’s also politically thorny. Voters, many of whom live in car-dependent neighbourhoods so need their cars to live their daily lives, understandably find such charges difficult to accept, particularly in the context of high inflation and a high cost of living.
A way to work through this political challenge must be found. It could start with increasing awareness of how sprawl is subsidized or that gas tax revenues will need to be replaced in the low-carbon future. In the nearer term, we can make more effective use of scarce road space through better planning and public policy.
British Columbia is growing and its ports, roads, and airports need to keep up. To prepare for this growth, we can:
Look at alternative models, such as short-sea shipping Many of the Lower Mainland’s transportation problems come down to a lack of space; more specifically, a lack of land. But what if freight could be moved by sea?
Short-sea shipping, where goods are moved across the water over short distances, could help to alleviate some of the pressure on congested city roads.
Key stakeholders in the region’s air cargo network, like YVR and Purolator, have set the ambitious goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2030. It’s a bold target, but boldness is what’s needed. As climate change and its effects worsen, the associated costs will only increase, making right now the best time to invest in decarbonization.
The SkyTrain and the West Coast Express are built to shuttle commuters into the core. But in an era where hybrid work is the norm for many and office vacancies continue to rise, ridership to and from the core is recovering much more slowly than in areas south of the Fraser River.
The provincial government is acting on this with its investment in the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain. TransLink is also taking action, working directly with municipalities to prioritize transit, including on signal priority and high-occupancy vehicle lanes.
Outside of the SkyTrain network, getting people out of their personal vehicles means giving them easy, comfortable, and convenient transit services across both long and short distances. This might include the creation of a bus rapid transit (BRT) system, which, as described in TransLink’s 2050 plan, could help satisfy growing demand in many of the region’s congested corridors. Across short distances, it might mean enabling more micromobility solutions like e-bikes and e-scooters, especially as recent changes to the BC Motor Vehicle Act strengthened safety and enforcement measures for this mode of transportation.
Much of the demand on road space stems from rising consumer expectations—of same-day or next-day deliveries, of app-ordered food delivered on demand. While this is very convenient for the end-user, all those same-day e-commerce packages and hot meals from online food order and delivery companies mean that a lot more delivery vehicles need to use BC roads.
There are solutions that could help improve the effectiveness of road use, such as leveraging digital technology to make curb spaces more efficient. Others, like parcel boxes for the last mile, will require better management of consumer expectations.
The convenience of having things delivered to your doorstep is brought to you by an increasing number of vehicles and an increasing number of stops in unplanned areas—all contributing to congestion, which comes with costs borne by the community.To improve the situation, delivery traffic must be appropriately managed. While some of this management can be accomplished through smart policy, like regulated loading zones, choices must ultimately be made to balance individuals’ desire for convenience with the capacity of our common infrastructure.
Positioning for the future requires technological innovations, as well as the markets for them. It also requires making the province’s existing networks and supply chains more efficient—increasing the velocity of people and cargo transport, and getting the most use out of every asset.
These both demand world-leading data-sharing and data-processing technologies. Canada is home to firms that are finding transportation solutions:
D-Wave is applying quantum computing to solve complex supply chain problems. By creating a digital twin of the container terminals at the Port of Los Angeles and running simulations on quantum computers, the port was able to streamline its operations, increasing the number of deliveries by 60% and reducing truck turnaround time by 12%.
Geotab is a leading telematics company that produces data-driven solutions to aid in large-scale vehicle electrification strategies. Electric vehicles, and the associated charging infrastructure, rely heavily on data to optimize the charging process. With nearly three million telematics devices deployed, the company’s dataset, when aggregated, can help city planners understand traffic patterns, help forecast future electricity loads for highway charging networks, and help manufacturers understand how EVs perform under different conditions.
Data is most useful in aggregate to understand broad patterns and to predict future behaviour. Getting the most out of the transportation ecosystem’s collective data will require strong governance, including strict rules on who houses, who accesses, and who controls it. Not only will this bolster consumer trust, but it will also increase data throughput and benefit every player in the sector—and every resident.
Solving emissions, congestion, and goods movement challenges requires will, investment, and innovation. Partnerships between government, regulators, and business are also needed as each has a key role to play in helping innovators commercialize their solutions.
Smart policy can be used to create incentives to reduce emissions—creating the markets that innovators can serve and increasing the region’s productivity and prosperity.
This means looking at regulation as an enabling factor, not a constraining one, and working collaboratively with industry to identify and remove barriers to success.
This model has been successful in British Columbia, where recent amendments to the BC Motor Vehicles Act will help enable micromobility innovation by strengthening road safety for cyclists, defining micromobility vehicles and personal mobility devices, and defining and allowing for pilot projects.
Outside Canada, organizations like CALSTART in California are creating regional, national, and now global markets for clean transportation technology. According to CALSTART’s working model, government and industry must work in parallel to:
Align regulations to science-based targets
Make capital available for pilots of new technology
Provide other incentives, like purchase incentives
Spur more manufacturing and job creation
California is following this model for zero-emission trucking, and the early results are promising, such as increased adoption and deployment.
Regulators in British Columbia can do more to ensure that clean transportation technologies gain widespread market traction:
Whether it’s for fuel, transportation, or battery standards, the harmonization and standardization of technologies and regulations smooth the way to adoption of new technologies. At present, the different types of zero-emission vehicles all use different batteries. These batteries will eventually need to be standardized, as is already happening in other jurisdictions, such as Australia.
While the need is clear for consistent battery standards, it may be difficult for manufacturers to get on the same page.
If industry can’t arrive at a self-determined standard, it’s likely that regulators will need to intervene, like the European Union did with smartphone chargers.
From automobiles to the Harbour Air ePlane, refuelling infrastructure is required to commercialize any electric vehicle. It’s also needed to catalyze the hydrogen fuel cell sector.
Hydrogen is difficult to transport at large scale (its physical properties rule out pipelines, and internal combustion engine trucks erode the carbon savings/offsets), making widespread, hydrogen-specific infrastructure a critical priority. Early adoption and construction could take place for short-haul routes near production facilities, with mobile refuelling units accessible on popular long-haul routes. As adoption improves, the infrastructure that supports it will also need to improve.
