August 1, 2012

For the fourth year in a row, the City of Waterloo took the first place trophy for the highest Commuter Challenge participation in the over-500-employee category in the region.

This is a challenge I have been pleased to personally participate in both of my years on Council – more on that in a moment.  

The Commuter Challenge is a national initiative locally hosted annually by the Region of Waterloo.  The goal is to encourage people across the region to leave their vehicles at home and walk, cycle, take public transit or carpool to work or school for a week. 

The fantastic showing of the City is an important one. Last year, Council adopted a new Transportation Master Plan, the first municipal plan in Ontario to incorporate a Complete Street philosophy (whether someone chooses to drive, cycle, walk, or take transit, all are possible to do safely on a complete street). Our employee’s continued leadership in the Commuter Challenge means that we are actively looking to practice what we preach in policy, and more leadership will be coming as we improve our transportation demand management initiatives commensurate with the shift to paid parking for City employees.

As a long-time champion for and practitioner of alternative transportation options, my participation in the challenge doesn’t involve leaving my car at home. That’s because I don’t own one. Whether a Commuter Challenge week or not, my primary mode of transportation is using Grand River Transit, followed by walking, and, when I know I absolutely need a car to get where I’m going in the time I have, the occasional booking of a car with Grand River Car Share or a rental car company. My life as a full-time University of Waterloo employee, a City Councillor, a community volunteer, and a husband keeps me busy with meetings and events all over our region. My commitment to having transportation options meant ensuring I live near a regular transit route with car share or rental options nearby.

In this challenge, my participation this year meant converting some transit trips to walking. Taking transit to get to work or back home from Uptown had become so automatic in my routine, that I had stopped considering other options. Because of the challenge, I found that it often did not take that much more time to walk, which added more exercise opportunities into fairly full days of sitting in various meetings across the city. It also afforded me time to clear my head and think through some of the challenges on my desk at work, allowing me to dive right in when I got back to the office.

Whether you’re able to walk to some of your destinations or not, the challenge allows all of us to get a sense of what options we have other than our daily patterns. Taking the challenge forward to the rest of the year, simply setting a goal of leaving the car at home once per week will open up possibilities, while also reducing your carbon footprint and saving money on gas.