April 28, 2010
Vancouver and British Columbia are well positioned to become leaders in sustainable transportation, according to Dan Burden, an expert on pedestrian and cycling issues. As yet, he says, we’ve only scratched the surface. The 66-year-old resident of High Springs, Florida, visited Vancouver to give a lecture at SFU Harbour Centre on April 21, where he delineated decades of work devoted to planning walkable communities that encourage citizens to become less reliant on cars.
Burden and his wife will relocate at the end of this summer from their current home to Port Townsend, Washington, where Burden will start work on what he describes as his final project, the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute. The organization, which opened its doors in December 2009, aims to train the next generation of people who will build sustainable communities that are walkable as well as bike- and transit-friendly. To achieve this, the Institute will connect people from a variety of professional backgrounds — architecture, engineering, urban planning, and others — so they can better understand how their fields are integrated and, by extension, how they can work together more efficiently.
The Institute is strategically located in the Pacific Northwest, Burden says, because he considers the region a hot-spot for sustainable transportation. “There’s nothing that comes anywhere close to it,” he told WE in an interview last week. “A lot of projects got kickstarted here, and, therefore, give people confidence to do more things.”
Burden counts Vancouver’s recent Burrard Bridge bike-lane trial as one of the city’s great successes. He hopes it will motivate citizens to support other sustainable-transportation projects in the future.
Encouraging people to embrace change, Burden says, has been one of the most significant ongoing challenges of his work. “I find there’s a reluctance for people to support or endorse or get excited about change, simply because they are so used to one thing. They think anything that would be different has to have some problems that they don’t know [about], so they’d rather go for the certainty... That is why it’s so important to come up with projects that prove that new ideas work, and to start at whatever level a community can.”
A case in point is Burden’s current work in Vernon, where he was called in to consult with municipal staff on how to rebuild the city centre. Local retailers are concerned that a possible loss of parking spaces could jeopardize their businesses, but Burden is encouraging them to rethink the situation within the context of revitalizing Vernon’s pedestrian life.
Burden is optimistic for the urban future of Vernon and other cities in B.C., but the future of some North American cities, he believes, is grim. “Some of them are just not going to make it; those that don’t make it are not going to attract the new jobs,” he says. “The new job market is going to be based around place-making, where people want to live... The towns that just simply remain drab, ugly — sometimes frightfully so — they’re just not going to be attracting the new workforce.”
Burden echoed those sentiments during his well-attended SFU lecture. People used to flee the cities for their health, he told the audience. Now, people are returning to cities as a way of improving their health, since cities are planned around foot travel more than suburbs.
“This temporary hiccup that we’re in, which started somewhere around 1930, is nothing more than that: It’s a lack of a focus... to how everything works, because we invented a machine — the automobile — and made it affordable for everyone, so much so that we decided to design our city for our cars,” Burden told WE. “It’s just a matter of time before everybody gets it right again, and understands that you can’t design for anything to be sustainable or to work... until you go back to the human foot. It’s the right scale, it’s the right level of social integration, the right social equity.”
