We held a Livability Forum this morning in downtown Vancouver, launching our consultation on our proposed 10-Year Plan!

The 10-Year Plan outlines the first steps we’ll be taking toward Transport 2040, our region’s 30-year transportation strategy. (We’ll be consulting on it from June 1-30, so please come to our in-person events or visit BePartofthePlan.ca to contribute!)

At the forum, we got a huge group of people in Metro Vancouver together to talk about the related transportation and liveability challenges facing our region. Plus, we heard from experts on similar challenges in other major cities.

And at the end, we got everyone to do a consultation exercise—a board game activity called “It’s Your Move,” that lets you plan and select funding for our region’s transportation priorities.

You can try the board game online, too, at our newly relaunched BePartofthePlan.ca site. (I’ll have more on the new site in a bit.)

Here’s a few more details about what we did today, including details of our draft 10-Year Plan and the financing options available to us, and PowerPoints from all the talks given!

(By the way, this event was originally called the Transportation Forum— I talked about it in May.)

Four experts talk transportation in San Francisco, New York, and more

Petra Todorovich , director of America 2050, talked about long range planning for sustainable growth, and discussed strategies for the New York region at the national, regional, and local levels. At the end, she emphasized that while things do take time, we should dare to make grand plans! A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Here’s the Power Point from her presentation (7.1 MB).

Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, talked about the challenge of financing New York City’s regional transportation system. This was a great talk that examined the difficulties of securing funding for transportation and how politics and the state legislature come into play. Here’s the Power Point from his presentation (5.8 MB).

John Howe, general manager for investment strategy and projects with Toronto’s Metrolinx, discussed his region’s big plans to cut vehicle use and shift more people over to walking and cycling. John actually mentioned that TransLink was a big influence on the formation of Metrolinx and called us leaders in the transportation field! Here’s John’s Power Point presentation (4.1 MB).

And last, we had Steve Heminger, executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the regional transportation planning and finance agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. Steve gave a great and really funny presentation on tolling: they use extensive tolling in the Bay Area to finance their system, and it seems to work quite well for them. Here’s the Power Point from Steve’s presentation (10.6 MB).

Tom Prendergast presents the draft 10-Year Plan and the liveability challenge facing our region

Our CEO Tom Prendergast also gave a presentation, talking about our proposed 10-Year Plan, the liveability challenges faced by our region, the funding mechanisms we can currently use, and the future revenue sources we are looking to pursue.

You can check out the three choices presented by the draft 10-Year Plan at our newly relaunched BePartofthePlan.ca site: here’s choice 1, choice 2, and choice 3.

But our media relations team actually did a really great video with Tom’s narration over the slides, so you can just sit back and listen to the presentation if you like. Here it is, in three parts:

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

It’s Your Move: the consultation exercise board game

Last, we got everyone to do that consultation exercise—the board game activity called “It’s Your Move” that lets you make the transportation decisions in our region.

Essentially, you get to pick the transportation priorities for our region, then choose how to pay for it using our existing funding sources.

If you can’t get the numbers to balance, you can also tell us which possible future revenue sources we should go after.

And again you can try the board game out online, too, at our newly relaunched BePartofthePlan.ca site. Honestly, I’d really recommend trying it out—it is a great way to pick your own plans for the region, and see the kind of decisions TransLink has to make when designing these plans.

I’ll have more on the new BePartofthePlan.ca website tomorrow!