Yesterday I received an email with a link to a new Active Transport(ation) Design Guide recently accomplished in a genuine peer city to Sydney in a peer state in a peer country.

I had worked with this person previously – they was hired as a consultant – in generating an active transport guide.

The email is as follows:

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The Province (of British Columbia, or BC) is currently hosting the first ever BC Active Transportation Summit this week, where the Ministry officially released the BC Active Transportation Design Guide yesterday.  I wanted to share it with you as it’s quite a comprehensive resource (34 chapters and 577 pages!) and hope it’s a document that gets widely used throughout the Province and internationally. 

Look forward to any thoughts or comments you may have.  We see this as a leading edge document not just in BC but internationally, so I would encourage you to share this far and wide with your Australian (and International) colleagues. 

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Feel free to look through it. There are many designs and safety thresholds that are highly relevant. Bear in mind it was mostly completed by/for engineers schooled in classic motor-vehicle throughput considerations as a default, so there are some trade-offs which may not be as perfect to all tastes. Without changing a series of traffic laws, perhaps needing debate on the floor of the legislature (maybe worthy, but certainly out scope), this is what is achievable at this point.

This is a guide to clearly understand space and cost in an urban or rural setting. It does not automatically mean this is how any street will be. No, politics and budgets and physical space all will dictate what gets built. Yet, once these considerations are agreed on, this will ‘guide’ the design in lieu of a void.

Such a public guide (!) also serves as a subterfuge (these who prepared this know that, but unspoken) as it gives the public the palette of options otherwise unknown.

The difference between this and other such guides, as the NACTO series, is that there are thresholds and dimensions by which traffic engineers do make choices in final designs.

Lastly, the design guide I worked – on with this same person – was for the Province of Alberta. That guide will be released soon too. There are peer jurisdictions making clear moves on the mobility front.

Thank you,

Cole