September 8, 2022
The pandemic-related car-buying spree
and its ramifications for BC's climate targets
Associate Professor Alex Bigazzi (of UBC Civil Engineering and an associate member at SCARP, as well as the head of UBC’s Research on Active Transportation Lab), spoke in the news recently on the interrelationship between the pandemic and climate goals, and possible paths forward.
Several large BC cities had been making gradual progress in reducing vehicle congestion, in the hopes of a greener city and a brighter future. In 2021, after a dip in vehicle purchases, there resulted a surge that unmade that progress. Bigazzi reports that the number of vehicles in Vancouver grew triple the rate of its population since 2016.
Overall, this level of private vehicle adoption in such a short amount of time is very bad news... [and definitely a big step backwards from our climate goals.
[They’re] kind of baked in, these changes, so they’re going to be with us for the long-term, which in the transportation world is 10-plus years.
The full article is replete with fascinating and sobering statistics, and a discussion of how to move forward.