Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I really do appreciate the invitation to present to you. I'm very pleased to be participating in what is a very critical and timely conversation.

My name is Brent Toderian. I have been a practising city planning, city-maker, and urbanist for 23 years in five provinces and one territory. I spent about six years as Vancouver's chief planner, and about six years in key planning roles in Calgary as well. I also advise cities all over the world, as far away as Auckland, New Zealand, and Medellin, Colombia, on issues relating to transportation and infrastructure in particular, but I'm actually a generalist. I look at all issues of city-making.

I'm going to start my comments by saying it's my observation and the observation of the organization that I'm the founding president of, the Council for Canadian Urbanism, that Canada is badly in need of a cohesive and comprehensive national urban strategy, which would address a number of national issues, including affordable housing, urban infrastructure, and urban transportation. I'm going to focus my comments today specifically on urban transportation.

I'm sure I don't need to quote to this committee, Mr. Chairman, the many studies that have been done to quantify the massive costs to the economy, both local economies in our city regions and the national economy, of traffic congestion. In my opinion, the billions of dollars often cited in those studies don't take into account the full cost of traffic congestion to our economy, including the ripple effects around public health care costs, social inequity, and climate change.

In short, no matter who's doing the math, the math is probably bigger than we think and the consequences of the status quo are massive, in the billions of dollars, at both the local level and the national level.

A national transportation strategy should include, in my opinion, smart, significant, stable, and predictable funding for urban infrastructure projects for municipalities and city regions around Canada. Given that municipalities receive about 8¢ of every tax dollar in Canada, I think the tendency to expect local governments to fund a third of such projects, which is a typical expectation, when they don't come close to collecting a third of the actual tax revenue, really fundamentally needs to be rethought. We're seeing that notion play out in the incredible tensions in metro Vancouver right now, as our transit plebiscite is going on at the behest of the provincial government.

It's also critically important that we rethink what we're spending our infrastructure money on. As the previous speaker suggested, what are often called shovel-ready projects, the idea that anything is smart spending, really needs to be replaced with a focus towards prioritized smart projects that have a demonstrated track record of success in achieving our stated goals and particularly in terms of return on investment.

Cities like Vancouver, which I formerly planned for, and smart cities around the world that I'm working with now have shown clearly and irrefutably through data and analysis that continuing to fund and prioritize car-oriented road projects is very expensive. They provide less of a return on investment in everything from tax revenue generated to job creation, and most importantly, they actually don't work to solve the problem of traffic congestion.

We've understood for decades that because of what we call induced demand or the law of congestion, new road projects just fill up with new drivers and new trips as people change their behaviour in reaction to the new capacity. New development projects are built based on the anticipation of that car capacity, often referred to as sprawl in the suburban context. Studies have shown that anywhere between four and eight to ten years after construction, the lanes all just fill back up again.

It's a never-ending process of public spending, building, failing, spending, building, failing, and it just keeps going and keeps going. We've known this from way back in the 1950s. A very famous city expert, Lewis Mumford, said back in 1955 that building new roads to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to solve obesity. We know it doesn't work. It just induces more people to drive.

Vancouver and other progressive cities around the world have shown that the combination of smart land-use decisions, which is of course a local government role... We often say in Vancouver the best transportation plan is a great land-use plan. If you get your land use right, it does an awful lot of the work for you, in combination with smart, prioritized funding for walking, biking, and public transit—and particularly in the context of this conversation, public transit. That infrastructure prioritized over car infrastructure spending is the only thing in Canada that has proven to be successful in actually achieving the many definitions of success that we as city planners and city-makers set for ourselves in terms of mobility. Lower commute times and fewer vehicle miles travelled are the things that traffic engineers and city planners around Canada say we want to achieve, but the only city that has actually achieved them is Vancouver.

We achieved lower commute times and lower vehicle miles travelled by first of all saying no to freeways in the 1960s and early 1970s and by prioritizing walking, biking, and public transit infrastructure. For example, we never had to have the debate that Toronto and Montreal have been having lately about tearing down their freeway infrastructure, because we never built it in the first place. In doing that, and in doing smart land use combined with prioritized transit, walking, and biking spending, we actually made it easier for everyone in the city to get around, and for goods movement and economic activity to occur, with fewer actual cars in the city.

It's very important to say that everything I'm saying is not an anti-car message. We know, and the facts show, that if you design cities for cars, it fails for everyone, including drivers. But if you design a multimodal city that actually prioritizes transit, walking, and biking, it works better for everyone. It works better for the economy, because more economic activity can move in less space and with lower costs. It works better for everyone, including drivers. I'm going to repeat that: including drivers. It shows that this is not a war on the car. That's a bit of lazy political message that happens sometimes in some sensationalist and irresponsible media. The facts and the data show a much more interesting storyline about the potential success of our cities.

Based on the successes of Canadian and international best practices, Canada should be prioritizing infrastructure spending that makes transit, walking, and biking more inviting. This is not for ideological reasons, and not because voters are increasingly liking public transit and increasingly liking bikes, for example. It's for very pragmatic reasons. It's because it costs less, because it takes up less physical space in cities and city regions, and because it generates more spinoff effects in taxes generated and in job creation. The data shows that. Perhaps most importantly, it's because it actually works in improving the traffic congestion picture and addressing the economic consequences of traffic congestion on our economies.

This isn't a right or a left issue politically. This isn't about political ideology. This is about smart or dumb. It's about successful or unsuccessful. It's about more expensive or less expensive. Continuing to prioritize car-oriented infrastructure in shovel-ready projects or in any other way we prioritize Canadian infrastructure, despite all the data and evidence to show it's more expensive, takes up more space, has less spinoff benefits, and doesn't work, really has to be considered ideological.

I'll end with some good news, Mr. Chairman. The good news is that demographically speaking, we in Canada have a huge opportunity that we can either seize or squander. The millennial demographic group is predisposed, we know, towards urban choices, towards putting off getting their driver’s licences and owning new cars. They're choosing transit, walking, and biking where they invest, where they live, and where they bring their creative talents if the infrastructure is there to support that choice for them.

At the same time, their parents, the baby boomers, are also aging and are also increasingly choosing the same things. The Wall Street Journal even coined the phrase “broken hipsters”, because as they age, the baby boomer generation is starting to behave and make the same kinds of choices as their so-called hipster children.

That's a huge demographic tailwind. It says that the two largest demographic groups in human history are predisposed towards different priorities in infrastructure in transit, walking, and biking. It's just that our infrastructure decision-making hasn't caught up to that kind of thinking. If we do, our cities in Canada, and our nation as a country, will succeed against very smart global competition.

Many of the cities that are our competition I'm actually advising and working with around the world, and I can tell you that they're very smart. They're making smart, strategic decisions on what they want to spend their money on. If we don't smarten up, they will outdo us. But if we do smarten up, then we can beat the competition in terms of attracting the talent, the creativity, and the capital and investment. We won't just continue to be stuck in traffic.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'll stop there. I look forward to your questions.

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