Thank you. Hopefully this will be better.
The consequences of our transportation are not unavoidable things about modern society or economy. They are an echo of our infrastructure choices, particularly 70 years of a single-minded focus on building around the car.
Going forward there are three things we need to do to improve the equity and sustainability of our transportation infrastructure. First, we need to stop making things worse and move away from investing in fossil fuels and automobile-oriented development. We need to invest in no new highways, no road widening, no extensions of our current automobile infrastructure.
Highway construction incentivizes low-density, high-cost land use. It pushes more people to drive farther and it permanently damages our natural lands that are necessary to resilient systems. For a long time we thought of roads as being key drivers of economic benefits, but for a long time now they have been a very low return while maintaining very high costs.
Second, we need to invest in low-tech, low-carbon, low-cost infrastructure now. We have all the tools we need to build sustainable development; we don't need any new inventions. Two of the best tools we have are largely underused in Canada: building infrastructure around the bicycle and around the bus. We can do this rapidly and affordably. It's accessible to all, and once it is done, it tends to be very popular, as has been shown in cities across Canada and around the world.
Finally, we need to be big and ambitious about our long-term projects, but these will take up to 10 years or longer to build, like subways or fast intercity rail. For this we need to establish forums for stable long-term planning and long-term funding. A lot of infrastructure in Canada takes decades to deliver and we've talked a lot in the public discourse about cutting the red tape and making things go faster, but a huge driver of what's making our projects slow is the time it takes to get to the starting line, to prioritize and to get dedicated funding.
In summary, going forward, I hope that we will see more infrastructure in Canada that doesn't prioritize the car, and more focus over what we can do now with technology that works really well, like investing in bicycles and buses, and more long-term planning for infrastructure systems with dedicated funding.
Thank you for your time and for your patience with the tech trouble.
I look forward to your questions.