Active Transportation

by Ingrid Buday

November and December have been busy months for Active Transportation!

In November, Etobicoke Climate Action participated in the United Nations World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. Roads have prioritized vehicles since the 1912s when Kansas City passed the first ordinance requiring people to cross streets at crosswalks, the birth of “jay walking”. Here is an interesting article from the BBC regarding the evolution of how we view our roads today.

Since then millions of people have been seriously injured or killed on our roads; and on November 21st we walked down Avenue Road from Dupont to Bloor, honouring those who suffered at the hands of drivers and lack of political will to make our streets safer. You can see more here: Biking in a Big City

In addition, a study was conducted on the Killed or Seriously Injured Data from the Toronto Police Services Open Data Portal (see documentation here) where if an injured person had to be admitted to hospital, even if only for observation at the time of the collision, should be included in the data set. As it turns out, the dataset is incomplete. This dataset is now being completed through crowdsourced methodology where people can check the data on a map, determine if their crash is included, and if not add it to an auxiliary dataset. You can check that out here: Road Traffic Victims Count

To make our streets safer and hold drivers accountable, Jessica Bell, Bhutila Karpoche and Doly Begum brought forward the Vulnerable Road Users Law (Bill 54) and it passed its second reading. A video highlighting the proposed Act can be found here on Twitter. There is lots of work to be done; next it goes to committee, then a third reading, then royal assent. Etobicoke Climate Action supports this measure to make drivers accountable for the actions they take when it involves harm to people and their loved ones.

December’s highlight was the Council Meeting on December 15th where 2020 ActiveTO bike lanes were made permanent and a plan for 100 km of new bikeways in three years was approved. This includes extending the Bloor bike lanes to Six Points by 2024. Even with this new plan approved, each bike lane proposed in the plan will be subject to public consultation and will return to City Council for final approval. We will need to stay active and participate in consultations as they come up. For bike info and petitions you can read more at Two Wheeled Politics.

The downside is that both Etobicoke North’s Councillor Michael Ford and Etobicoke Centre’s Councillor Stephen Holyday voted against it. We have some serious work to do in the upcoming elections to make Etobicoke a safe place for everyone on our roads!

Etobicoke Climate Action will now have two Neighbourhood Climate Action Champions! Brian MacLean will be joined by Ingrid Buday in the upcoming cohort of the City of Toronto’s initiative for local leaders to engage community residents on environmental issues and inspire climate action. More to come on this as well.

Lastly, if you think that you need a car for hauling stuff around, check out this page that showcases different cargo bikes and what you can do with them! Bromptoning

Just remember:

e spent a bunch of time these last two months working on a submission to the Net Zero Advisory Body (NZAB2050) to recommend what we should do to Achieve Net Zero Buildings by 2050. That link will take you to the report – please have a look and share your thoughts on the ECA Google Group.

The elevator speech goes something like this:

This is an important area to focus on – buildings are the 3rd largest source of GHG emissions in Canada. By getting going early, we lessen the GHG impact, and create a great economic opportunity for Canada and Canadians.
We think the key technologies are shallow retrofit, Cold Climate Air Source Heat Pumps (CC-ASHPs), District Heating and Cooling (DHC), and Solar. The opinion is divided on CC-ASHPs or DHC being the most important.
Finance is critical – we need some good thinking on how to make sure that property owners, developers, utilities (including new DHC utilities as well as existing electrical utilities), educational institutions, businesses, and governments have access to the required capital to quickly scale up to deal with this opportunity.
Rules, regulations, guidelines, training – By making sure that we have consistency across the country, we make it much easier for skilled workers, and production of components to be easily used across the country, which makes scaling up as well as costs easier to manage.
Scalability – Ensure that the solutions to each of the above components (technology, finance, regulation, training) can be scaled-up to meet the requirement. To retrofit all buildings in Canada by 2050, assuming we are in full motion by the beginning of 2023, we will need to do 2,000 buildings per day. This means that a good deal of thought must be put into ensuring the proposed solutions are massively scalable.

The version linked to above was sent to NZAB2050 on 2021-12-22 – the last day for submissions.

We plan to continue improving this document, and we will make sure that the website has an easy-to-find link to the most current document. We would love to hear your thoughts on where to go next with our effort to define and advocate for a path to net zero buildings by 2050. Our current thoughts are:

Identify federal politicians, both in the government and in the opposition, who we want to ask to consider this report, and start sending them letters to share the report.
Ditto for the provincial government
Ditto for the City of Toronto
As well as the politicians, identify the key civil servants at each of those government levels and share the report with them.
Create a discussion forum for “Net Zero Buildings by 2050” and share this widely. Google Groups? Some other technology?
Start sharing this report with other organizations working to address the climate crisis, and see if we can get them to help us share these ideas further.

Month: December 2021

2021-12 Newsletter: Active Transportation

Active Transportation

2021-12 Newsletter: Zero Emission Buildings (NZAB2050 Report)