Advocacy Committee Report (January) (2013)

December 19th meeting between Complete Streets Strathcona and the City of Edmonton's transportation department Present were Tyler Golly, Brian Latte, Audra Jones, Bob Boutilier, Ross Goodine and myself. It took place in a boardroom at Century Place on Dec. 20. The city staff were given a printed version of the report that Chris Chan drew up.

• It started out amicably as Bob made it known that the transportation department is undertaking a bit of a course correction when it comes to the bike plan. They are going to focus on quality bike infrastructure in targeted areas as opposed to focusing on the amount of painted lanes. This will come up in council in the new year, they will tell us when this will happen and EBC will put in an application to speak. This was gratifying to hear. As Chris Chan's presentations and advocacy has made clear, painted bike lanes on busy streets with parking and other similar on-street bike infrastructure is actually detrimental to increasing the amount of cyclists on the road.
• He acknowledged that they fell into the habit of painting lanes and counting kilometers.
• He stressed that organizations like ours need to provide political cover to council and administration for projects like the one we're proposing.
• He's going to get this proposed project into the next capital plan. which is 2015. Unfortunately the $22 million that was earmarked for sustainable transportation in the last capital budget is mostly spoken for. We talked about phasing in a plan for 83rd ave because of the capital budget time lag. We need to ask for more specifics on this case. I like this idea as we can introduce community members, residents and cyclists to the fact that 83rd will become the east-west bike corridor for the area.
• The transportation department will look into the feasibility of our ask for the Calgary Trail counter flow bus lane. That's something we have to follow up on as well as it does involve a lot of work for them. Would probably go into the 2015 capital budget as well.
• He wants us to increase our advocacy efforts, more work with community leagues, more talking to community members.
• On the whole it was a very positive meeting and we plan on following up in the new year. They're willing to work with us to get the best possible bike infrastructure for this project but they're mostly worried about political blowback from residents and council. I get the feeling they're confident they can install good infrastructure if only the city would let them. Let's create the conditions so that these people can do the best they can do.

January 15th - Complete Streets Strathcona meeting at Strathcona Library

• A lot of discussion around the report. Who is it for? It's for administration on guidance for the design and it's for council to convince them that this is needed infrastructure.
• A move away from the design team drawing fully featured mockups of the whole route. Instead, an overview of the whole route plus a couple of examples of blocks for people to react to at the open house.
• I am going to email Tyler Golly and get CSS to speak whenever Transportation gets in front of council to talk about reframing their priorities.
• The research report should be completed and important parts should be drawn out for people to react to at the open house which we're tentatively planning for late April, early May.
• That research report will be submitted with the summary of findings from the next open house.
• We need to chat with Murray about that open house and getting business owners to participate in it.
• I have a CACCL meeting that I'm doing a presentation at in February. From that I need to get feedback in order to draw up a letter of support that the community leagues and OSBA could sign onto.