The Capital Regional District is taking steps to squeeze out a role in regional transportation planning and co-ordination.
Left unchecked, congestion and vehicle emissions are only going to get worse, CRD staff say in a report recommending that the region create a new transportation service.
“I’m not advocating at all creating more bureaucracy at the CRD, by any stretch of the imagination,” said Acting Sooke Mayor Rick Kasper, vice-chairman of the CRD transportation select committee. “But, instead of doing things in a piecemeal fashion and a Band-Aid fashion, let’s do it properly.
“Right now, we’re driving through everybody’s jurisdiction and there doesn’t seem to be that co-ordination and there hasn’t been,” Kasper said. “There’s an opportunity here . . . to have the municipalities working together.”
It’s not anticipated that a new CRD function would be overseeing construction of transportation infrastructure, says the report to be considered by CRD directors today. Provincial legislation does not allow for transit to be included in a new CRD service.
Instead, the focus of the new CRD department “would be on identifying major regional transportation projects, attracting grants to offset regional taxpayers’ costs and requisitioning to fund remaining costs.”
Capital projects would be delivered by the same players that currently deliver infrastructure projects.
Victoria Coun. Geoff Young, a select committee member, said: “If we were a single city, the idea that we would have some outside body decide where we would have our buses run and where we build intersections in the city and overpasses would seem pretty ridiculous. But because we’re 13 or whatever municipalities, it seems normal that the provincial government is going to be making these major decisions for us.
“I think it would make all kinds of sense for the regional government to make decisions about regional transportation and I think it would seem normal in the context of a unified city.”
Select committee chairwoman Saanich Coun. Susan Brice said staff are following earlier direction from the CRD board. Efforts have been underway to form a transportation service since about 2010, Brice said.
“I think everybody wants as much co-ordination as possible, but [we] would not be looking for something that was going to be a costly new department in the future,” Brice said.
The staff report says the new service could “take on functions such as co-ordinating prioritization of transportation projects, pursuing grant funding and partnerships, exploring new revenue streams, requisitioning and borrowing, planning, programming and promoting active transportation, managing transportation demand and delivering web-based and multi-media transportation platforms, and providing electoral area transportation assistance.” All can be done under existing provincial legislation, the report says.
The CRD currently has minimal transportation functions within its mandate, such as regional trails managed by CRD Parks, transportation modelling, bike and traffic counts, and origin and destination surveys, the report says.
