Applying CUTA’s Transit Vision 2040

The Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA) has developed Transit Vision 2040, a bold 30-year plan for optimizing mobility in Canadian society and ensuring that the Canadian transit industry plays a significant role in advancing urban mobility.

The Vision recognizes that transit is key to improving national challenges including economic prosperity, climate change and public health. Its six themes will place the Canadian transit industry as a leader in developing a strategic approach to emerging challenges, with actions designed to anticipate and respond to opportunities and obstacles.

Below, we take a look at how three of these central themes are applied to projects that Steer Davies Gleave has recently worked on.

Theme: Revolutionizing service

Expanding regional rapid transit networks, integrating operations and governance, and building better service in smaller communities will all serve to transform the transit experience for customers, build ridership and improve urban mobility and access.

Communities across the country are working to expand regional LRT and BRT and Steer Davies Gleave is involved in working with some of these communities – including Surrey, Hamilton, Mississauga, the GTA and Edmonton –  to tackle the issue of providing service in low demand areas.

In small and rural communities, Steer Davies Gleave’s has established what we call the three Cs – Communicate, Customize and Connect – this framework serves to establish a service base on which to build an effective transit service. A fourth C – Coordinate, explores the community response to maximizing the use of available resources.

Theme: Focusing on customers

Focusing on customers – putting the customer first – is vital to the success of any project and to moving transit forward. This often means taking a step back to bring a fresh perspective focused on the customer, to guide the design. It also means being positioned to respond to the needs of a growing population, with changing dynamics of diversity in age, culture, and mobility requirements.
In all of our projects, we work to understand the customers’ needs and put those first. Our large system projects work to identify “Integrated Transit Solutions”- integrated with other transit modes, integrated with local communities, and integrated with wider, long-term development plans. In smaller communities,  a focus on customers means a sensitivity to unique travel patterns and demands of low density areas – developing systems that meet customer needs within the available funding envelope.

Theme:  Putting transit at the centre of our communities

Transit facilities should be fully integrated with community planning and design in order to transform centres into high quality, safe, accessible and sustainable urban transit hubs.

Steer Davies Gleave understands the relationship between customer needs and their physical environment, and our work in this area helps to ensure that transit facilities are fully integrated with community planning and design to transform centres into high quality, safe, accessible and sustainable urban transit hubs.