Using Sustainability Indicators to Improve Access to Public Transit in Rural Residential Areas: Alternatives for the Georgia Basin, British Columbia

Abstract

The consequence of our dependency on the private automobile is well documented in the literature. Roadway congestion, injurious and lethal traffic accidents, atmospheric pollution, groundwater contamination, suburban sprawl, social inequity, and fossil fuel depletion are a sampling from a long list of negative externalities associated with automobile dependency. Two observations from this literature have motivated this research. First, the bulk of the current automobile dependency literature applies exclusively to the urban landscape. While urban areas are certainly deserving of this attention, rapid population growth in rural residential areas threaten the sustainability of these areas. Second, while there is broad agreement that public transit offers a viable option to automobile dependency the sustainable transportation literature offers few examples of how community access to public transit can be enhanced in non-urban areas. This paper looks to the practical contributions from the sustainability literature, namely the use of sustainability indicators as a means of measuring community access to public transit in rural residential areas. A set of sustainable transportation indicators is developed based on three indicator types: land use, community design and transit policy. Using these indicators a questionnaire was sent to eight municipal transit systems serving non-urban areas within the Georgia Basin of British Columbia. This research points to the promise of sustainability indicators as a means of providing improved community access to public transit. Keywords Sustainability indicators, sustainable transportation, public transit, accessibility, mobility, automobile dependency