Canadian cities are falling behind globally when it comes to efficiently moving people. Long commute times, high congestion rates and infrastructure that is vulnerable to climate change are symptoms of a mobility crisis.
Authors
Betsy Donald
Professor, Department of Geography and Planning, Queen's University, Ontario
Shauna Brail
Associate Professor, Institute for Management & Innovation, University of Toronto
Mobility is an essential public good, and modern policies aim to move people in a safe, efficient, accessible and non-polluting way. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and worsened existing vulnerabilities in Canada's urban mobility systems, undermining progress toward these goals.
Our new book, Urban Mobility: How the iPhone, COVID, and Climate Changed Everything, explores how technology, the pandemic and climate change have shaped, and continue to shape, urban mobility, particularly for those with inadequate transportation networks.
Population growth outpacing transit
One of the primary challenges Canadian cities face is that they have grown faster than their sustainable transportation options. While urban populations have expanded, investment in public transportation has not kept pace, resulting in a gap between capacity and potential.
The COVID-19 pandemic also impacted city life in profound ways, and urban life and economies in Canada are still being affected to this day. Remote work became the norm for many, reducing the number of people commuting and causing a significant drop in public transit ridership.
Additionally, the shift to hybrid work has permanently altered how Canadians engage with their cities. People are shopping online more, using public transit less, and central business districts and physical retail spaces are seeing less foot traffic.
Urban economies, which have been designed to rely heavily on the movement and presence of large numbers of people through public transit and local businesses, are still grappling with this new reality. Activity levels, for instance, are down by about 20 per cent from pre-pandemic levels in many downtown spaces still.
Tech platforms and mobility
Digital platform firms like Zoom, Uber, Amazon and Instacart adapted quickly during the pandemic, offering safe work-from-home options, private transportation and online shopping services to people. These platforms disrupted the traditional urban economic model, which relies on transit, physical stores and foot traffic.
Ride-hailing services drew passengers and their fares away from local economies into foreign-owned ride-hailing companies. Transit systems not only depend on the massive built public infrastructure, but also passenger fares and other government funding to maintain the public system over time.
In addition, these tech platform companies come with equity and accessibility concerns. Research on the use of ride-hailing and public transit during the pandemic found that its usage in Toronto was clearly organized along class, neighbourhood and social lines. People identifying as one or more of the following were more likely to continue riding transit during the pandemic: low-income, immigrant, racialized, essential workers and car-less, in large part because other options were not available to them.
Similarly, in Calgary, private technology experiments in electric scooters privileged wealthier neighbourhoods. Electric scooters were used more in wealthier neighbourhoods, and as poverty levels increased at the neighbourhood level, the use of them dropped. The researchers concluded that greater attention needs to be paid to ensuring all communities, regardless of economic status, have access to micro-mobility options.
Canada has a history of importing technological solutions, rather than creating its own. Montréal, however, offers a successful example with its Bixi bike program, the third largest bike share system in North America after New York and Chicago, with 11,000 bikes and almost 900 stations. A non-profit runs the program, Rio Tinto Alcan provides aluminum for the bikes and Cycles Devinci manufactures them in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean.
Canadian cities need to build innovation opportunities that promote economic development and improve mobility at the same time. Canada's technology sector is woefully undersupported at present.
Climate crisis intensifying challenges
The third, and perhaps most pressing challenge facing Canadian cities is the growing climate crisis. Cities are both instigators and victims of climate change. They contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, but are also heavily impacted by severe weather events, heat waves and other side effects.
These impacts are becoming increasingly concerning with the intensification of wildfires, urban flooding and other extreme weather events.
By the end of the 20th century, most large Canadian cities were heavily investing in strategies to encourage people to use alternatives to cars, such as transit, light rail, biking and walking.
However, shifting priorities, ideologies and budgetary adjustments led to government cutbacks to transit funding and a lack of new transportation innovation. In Ontario, for example, the government continues to push unrealistic road-building ideas at the expense of more active transit options.
This failure to effectively move people around has left an opening for new mobility experiments led by private companies, but some of these programs don't really integrate well into the Canadian urban mobility ecosystem. Many of these mobility options - such as ride-hailing - are also costly and exclusive. Others, like electronic scooters, can lead to e-waste.
Building a better future
The disruptions caused by technology, the pandemic and climate change are reshaping how people and goods move in cities. To build a better future, Canadian cities must address the interconnected challenges of three transitions: digital, health and environmental.
While all sectors need to invest, strong leadership and policy action from governments at all levels is needed to create a more climate-friendly, economically vibrant and equitable urban mobility future. Governments will need to embrace bold, innovative solutions that address all three of these challenges.
This means policy frameworks that reduce carbon emissions through climate action plans, leveraging political will and funding in efforts to shift away from private automobiles and toward transit, bike lanes and pedestrian pathways, and experimenting with digital mobility services while still prioritizing sustainability.
Betsy Donald receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Shauna Brail receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
