Month: March 2026

Trip Dairy 2023

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I could have sworn I already wrote this post, but looking through the archives, I apparently never did! It is the long-awaited follow up to this post, where I reported on the results of the 2017 TransLink Trip Diary and what is says about how New Westies get around.

The Trip Diary (2023 results here) is the most comprehensive survey of regional transportation use in the TransLink area. Unlike the census data that only asks folks their most common way of getting to work (or school), the Trip Diary counts all trips over a week, and asks that people report on all modes used, not just their most common mode, and also collects more data about trip distance, municipal-level data, and more.

That last post I did in 2019 (there were actually two, here and here), reported that between the 2011 and 2017 Trip Diaries, New Westminster had grown 8.9% in population, the number of trips taken by New West residents during the survey went up a little more than this, but the number of car trips actually went down. All new trips generated were by transit, walking or cycle. In the second post, I dug a bit deeper to show that the change in the number of car trips does not correlate with population change. Turns out there are many factors driving traffic and traffic congestion other than the simplistic rubric that population=traffic.

The data form the 2023 Trip Diary has been out for a while now, so I can update those tables to see how things have progressed, and there is both good and bad news for sustainable transportation. Here’s the chart:

Though population continues to increase in New Westminster (30% between 2011 and 2023), and the number of trips over the same period increased by about the same amount, the headline is that the number of trips as a driver has only gone up 4%, and the driver mode is now less than 50% of all trips. We can now confidently say most New Westies don’t drive for most of their trips. But there is a lot of detail hidden in this chart.

The number driver trips did increase slightly from 2017 to 2023, which offset the decrease over the previous 6 years, while passenger trips have gone up steadily. This may have something to do with the rise of ride share services (which would translate to more cars on the road and worsening traffic), but may also represent an increase in carpooling (which would not result in more cars on the road).

The number of trips by Transit has gone up 19% over the same 12 years, even as it has gone down slightly over the second half of that period. No doubt the impact of COVID is showing up here, and though post-COVID ridership recovery was well on it way in 2023, it wasn’t until 2025 that ridership across most of the region returned to pre-COVID levels. Unchanged from 2017 is the headline fact that New Westminster has the highest Transit ridership of any City in the Lower Mainland (see below).

Where we see the biggest shifts are in Active Transportation – walking trips up 153% over the 12 years and cycling trips up 338%. Overall active modes doubled over the 12 years and were clearly the biggest growth area. New West has always been a walkable city, and is slowly becoming a cycling one (and yes, E-bikes are a big part of this, because hills). Here are the major modes compared across the region:

Yellow highlights three highest numbers in the region, green highlights the three lowest numbers.

New Westminster, when compared to the region, has the highest transit ridership, is third highest (after only Vancouver and North Van City) in walking, is seventh out of 17 for cycling, has the third lowest (after Vancouver and Burnaby) number of drivers and the second lowest (after Vanouver) number of people in cars. As one would expect from a compact, dense, livable community with exceptional transit service.

Council – March 9, 2026

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

This week’s Council meeting was relatively short one, with a shortish Agenda that started with a less-common-these-days Public Hearing:

Heritage Revitalization Agreement (1121 Eighth Avenue) Bylaw No.8550, 2026
Heritage Designation (1121 Eighth Avenue) Bylaw No. 8551, 2026
The owner of this property in the Moody Park neighbourhood want to build a new house and a duplex on this lot while also granting permanent protection to the heritage home on the lot. A Heritage Revitalization Agreement is the tool to do this, it works similarly to a rezoning, with the heritage preservation as the “community benefit”. Unlike most residential rezoning in the City where public hearings are forbidden by Provincial regulation, an HRA requires a public hearing, despite the compliance with the Official Community Plan.

The 1909 house on the site would be permanently preserved and restored, a new 1,500sqft detached house would be build beside it, and a new 3,600sqft duplex would be built on the back of the lot, facing the alley. This mean 4 homes where three are currently permitted (though the City is working on a response ot the new provincial housing regulations that would permit up to six units on this property). This property will have an FSR of just under 1.0, and the new housing regulation would permit up to 1.0. The model here is to stratify the four units.

We received no correspondence and no-one spoke to the Public Hearing. Council voted unanimously on third reading of the Bylaws.

We then approved the following items On Consent:

Appointment of Acting Financial Officer
Our CFO has taken another job, and this is one job that Council has to officially appoint as it is a “statutory position”, meaning they have legislative responsibilities under the community charter, so we are appointing the Senior Manager of Financial Services as the interim while HR does the work of getting a CFO hired.

Housing Agreement Bylaw and Development Variance Permit to Vary Residential Parking Requirements: 430 Ninth Street – Bylaw for Three Readings
This 29-unit rental building in the Moody Park neighbourhood is going through a significant renovation of the envelope, windows, accessibility and including mechanical cooling (!), and they want to also include the addition of a couple of suites, to raise the number to 31, and remove a couple of parking stall that mean they will have 3 fewer than required by zoning, therefore requiring a Development Variance Permit. In exchange they will sign a housing agreement guaranteeing rental tenure for 60 years or the life of the building (whichever is longer).

Then we addressed these items that were Removed from Consent for discussion:

Official Community Plan Amendment and Rezoning Application: 807-823 Sangster Place and 39 E Eighth Avenue – Application Update
This application is a bit of an unusual one, and led to a bit of discussion at Council, as it is not common for Staff to bring a project to Council while also recommending against its approval. However, there are various overlapping issues here that required some time for Council to unpack. The proponent however communicated with Council and requested that we defer decision making until next meeting so they could get some stuff sorted out, and Council voted to defer.

Our City, Our Homes: Implementation of Transit Oriented Development Area Extensions and Regional Planning
The City recently adopted its response to the Transit Oriented Development regulation of the Province from Bill 47, but for technical reasons related to other decisions the City has to make about townhouses and infill density, we did not include the “edge cases” of the circles drawn by the provincial mandate of 800m from a SkyTrain Station. The circle-on-a-map process means there are many blocks where part of the block is under TOD (permitting up to 8 storeys) and parts are not. Through some public consultation, staff have identified 104 properties that are “on the edge” that they recommend be included in the TOD areas, to “square the circle” so it fits into the context of existing neighbourhoods.

There are also some changes here to the statement about how our OCP aligns with the Regional Growth Strategy and adoption of some climate action into the OCP. This is first and second reading, and these changes to the OCP will go to a Public Hearing, so I won’t comment too much more until that process occurs.

The New Westminster Age-Friendly Strategy
I recently attended an event at Century House where Alison from the Senior Services Society and Dan Levitt the provincial Seniors Advocate spoke about the challenges facing many older adults in our community, from housing precarity to the lack of senior government supports to make aging in place an option for more people. This is an increasing concern as the “baby boom” generation journeys though older age, and as austerity governments resist investing in the supports this growing community needs.

The City got a grant in 2024 to update our Age Friendly community policy, and here it is. There are 59 recommended actions in here, and one of the first ones is to appoint a community working group – a task force of Older Adults from the community to oversee and prioritize the implementation – which I see as a key to making this work. And though I appreciate the 28 people who helped put this together, I think the implementation working group could be smaller and centre the older adults in the community.

We then had a single Motion from Council:

Queensborough School Bus Program
Submitted by Councillor Minhas

WHEREAS over 230 Queensborough based students and their families rely on the Queensborough bus service to enable students to attend New Westminster Secondary School in a safe, secure and timely manner, without which journeys take three times as long and students are often passed over by overcrowded buses causing them to arrive late or not at all; and
WHEREAS a pilot service launched in January 2024 at cost to parents is slated to end on June 30, 2026 despite a campaign promise made on October 8, 2024 that if the NDP government were re-elected, this service would be made ‘permanent and free’; and
WHEREAS New Westminster is the second most dense city in Canada, with only one high school, and the acceptance of this density should have already unlocked new funding from senior orders of government;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Mayor be requested to write to our three government and opposition MLAs asking they advocate to secure the necessary provincial funding to ensure the Queensborough school bus program becomes ‘free and permanent’ as previously promised; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the Mayor write to the Minister of Education and Child Care requesting that additional funding be granted to School District 40 for the Queensborough school bus service to continue and be made permanent (beyond June 30,2026) and without cost to local families until such time as a new high school is built in the Queensborough community.

Advocacy for this service has been consistent and relentless since the previous dedicated transit service was cut in 2013, and thought the School District was able to secure support for the pilot project, in my mind, you run a pilot to determine if a project works and has community support. It is clear after two years that the students and families of Queensborough support this program, and it’s time for the province to step up and make the bus service sustainable. I have a meeting booked in early April with Minister Beare, and along with discussion of future school sites and advocacy for seamless childcare support in the community, the bus issue is on the agenda.

And we closed with a single Bylaw For Adoption

Development Cost Charge Reserve Funds Expenditure Bylaw No. 8572, 2026
This Bylaw that authorizes applying $10.5 Million from our DCC reserves to our 2026 Capital Plan was adopted by Council.

And believe it or not, we were out of there by 7:00, just like the old days.

IWD 2026

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Today is International Women’s Day, and it always feel weird to be “Mayorsplaining” the experience of women and girls to the majority of the City who are not cis guys. Especially as I am surrounded by so many smart, strong, and bold women who are leading in New Westminster. So I’ll take this opportunity to highlight a few of the books that have guided my learning about cities and hope some of the dudes who follow me do their own learning and work to support more equitable and just cities as a path to a more equitable and just world.

The obvious first book is Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”. Still relevant 65 years after it was written, the book was written as a critique (attack) on orthodox city planning and became an important part of the paradigm shift that changed the planning profession.  My own copy has suffered greatly from dog-earing and marginal noting, as I return to the many insights in here round the role of sidewalks as social places, the value of framing the experience of children in a public space, and the difference between a City designed for cars an one designed for people. https://tinyurl.com/5ezdpkx2

When Janette Sadik-Khan wrote “Streetfight”, she had just left her role as Transportation Commissioner of New York City, where she led bold (and ultimately highly successful) initiatives to give the streets back to the people of New York, a City where most people don’t include driving as part of their everyday lives, but most public space was still given to cars. She was instrumental in making New York a cycling city, in the redesign of Times Square and other public spaces to emphasize gathering and community in the most famous city in the world. And one quote in this book is burned in my head: “When you push the status quo, it pushes back. Hard.” https://tinyurl.com/bdaj7e8d

One thing these two books reference, sometimes obliquely, is that cities are traditionally designed to serve an outmoded ideal – the single male breadwinner of the nuclear family. This is simply not how most people live today, and we need to change how our cities work if we want to address the needs of today. This is more explicitly set out in Leslie Kern’s “Feminist City”. This book opens up new ways to see a city and a community (at least new to folks like me), and asks a lot of questions, even if I think it falls short of providing answers to those questions (I’m hoping for a sequel!) https://tinyurl.com/szt42f3y

Have a meaningful International Women’s Day, and pass the knowledge!