I recieved an email tonight from a constituent in my riding regarding the horrible bus service she, at 50 years of age, has to endure. Given that I'm a low-profile candidate, I've not really had an opportunity to talk about my two favourite subjects in this election: transit and energy, so I was quite happy to write about it at length.

After I got it all down though, I realised that I've never done that before: written out exactly what needs to be done. So I'm posting it here, if only to use it as a checklist for my future work in this area.

I'm afraid that what I have to tell you may not be what you want to hear, but will also be true and it will be everything I know about transit and community building.

You are living in the classic North American conundrum. You've moved into a quiet neighbourhood away from the noise and traffic of the city because it's comfortable and peaceful. The air is cleaner, the pace slower and on the whole, you're happier for it. It's just that transportation in and out of the area is difficult.

The natural request for people in your position then is that if only the bus service were extended or simply had its frequency improved then life would be perfect. This line of thinking makes sense, but when you start taking into account the financials of such a plan as well as the needs of the rest of the province things start looking less and less plausible.

Low-density communities are very difficult to service not only because the residents are far apart, but because the entire community is often built with the car in mind. Residents are expected to own a car, and transit is always an afterthought: it's for those who can't drive. What's worse, if you extend transit into these areas, the land value increases and this drives sprawl further away from the centres, recreating the initial problem. For these reasons transit extensions into low-density areas are very expensive and have a low return on investment in terms of ridership achieved and carbon footprint reduced.

Now, with all of the above said, I'm not going to tell you that the Green Party has no intentions of extending transit into your area, far from it. However, I need my answer framed with the above in mind.

The Green Party is all about building healthier communities with accessible transit and lots of public space. In a perfect world, transit in the Lower Mainland would be a collection of mixed-density communities interlinked with high-speed transit corridors and independently covered in a mesh of light rail streetcar lines. You could walk from your home to a transit stop a block or two away, ride the regular line to the central hub and then hop the high-speed to wherever you need to go.

But we don't live in that world, we live in this one, and in this one your transit needs aren't being met. So I'm going to tell you what I want to do to move us closer to that ideal world while we do what we can for your situation as well.

For starters, the transit routing needs to be simplified. Straight lines, dedicated lanes and regular times are the key here. Even if the bus only comes every 20min, so long as it's predictable, people can start to see it as a viable alternative to a car.

Second, we slowly need to restructure our communities to serve as a series of hubs. From models as simple as Toronto to systems as complex as Seoul, we know that constructing your community predicated on the assumption that everyone just wants to use transit to commute to and from work is a flawed one. We visit friends and family, we go out for dinner, and see movies or walk on the waterfront, and in a community that constructs its transit primarily for commuting, all of these activities necessitate a private vehicle. Following a hub model would foster private commercial development in the transit interchanges and allow us to better plan the growth of the community by placing residential blocks near hubs or along future light rail corridors.

It should also be noted that both of these actions would require support from the municipal levels of government as well as the province.

For you, all this would mean that in the short term, your mobility should improve with regular (albeit not every 5 minutes) and that in the medium term, you should be able to get on any bus, going any direction and know that it will eventually end up at a transit hub where you'll find a library, community centre, shopping district or the Seabus.

That was a rather long-winded answer, but I hope that it's addressed your questions. It's always nice to talk to a constituent about transit, since it's one of the primary reasons I got into this in the first place. On the off chance that I don't win the seat for North Vancouver-Seymour, you can be sure that I'll continue to push for the above kind of reforms in this city because I know that it's the right way to go for us.

Thanks again for your interest and support.