This session will qualify for PDH credits for attendees. The registration deadline for this event is January 22, 2025.

Workshop Description

A community’s design plays a crucial role in shaping residents’ living costs, particularly transportation expenses. One effective way to ease this financial burden is by creating “car-lite” communities where life without car ownership is convenient, pleasant, and sustainable.

However, designing or retrofitting such communities requires a collaborative, thoughtful approach from land use planners, transportation planners, and engineers. The good news? Successful examples from around the world provide clear principles to guide the way.

The Half-Day Course is Divided into Four Modules:

1. What Makes a Community Car-Lite and Why Does it Matter? The training will start by thoughtfully defining what it means for a community to be “car-lite”; that is, for a resident of an area to have sufficient access to other modes of travel, and car ownership is not required for convenient travel. We will link transportation affordability with overall affordability and discuss the opportunities for transport planners to make life more affordable for Canadians.
2. Examining Car-Lite Communities in Canada and Elsewhere. We will discuss policy trends across Canada and review several master-planned communities. We’ll discuss the ambitions for each, review the quality of the built infrastructure and mobility services provided, and draw conclusions on the strengths and weaknesses of each development. Exercise #1: Participants will then be asked to complete their own network audit of an existing mixed-use community.
3. Designing Complete Networks. This part of the training explores how to design mobility networks for new or intensifying communities. We will discuss different types of urban traffic environments that prioritize different modes of traffic and how to lay these out at the network level using Safe Systems principles. Exercise #2: Participants will gain hands-on experience and design a transportation network for themselves in the breakout exercise.
4. Understanding the Barriers to Implementation. The final block will discuss practical implications and challenges that an engineer or planner may encounter in trying to implement some of the concepts presented in the course. We will explore the shortcomings of the traditional process of laying out a street network solely based on auto-oriented functions (arterial, collector, local) as well as the alternatives (prioritizing corridors based on mode), and discuss how land use designations fit in.

Overall, the course will leave participants with a stronger understanding of the building blocks for car-lite communities and actionable takeaways for their work in producing transportation master plans, secondary plans, plans of subdivision, and transportation impact assessments.

Learning Outcomes

As a result of attending the training, practitioners will be able to:

• Describe the role of transportation practitioners in addressing Canada’s housing crisis
• Explain the concepts of being car-dependent, car-free, and car-less and its impacts on access to opportunity and mobility poverty
• Understand examples of various communities and neighbourhoods across Canada that have been designed to support car-lite living
• Evaluate a proposed or existing community layout for its likelihood of supporting multimodal travel by looking at its street design, land uses, and network structure
• Design a multimodal street network for a new or retrofitted urban neighbourhood

Target Audience

Transportation Planners, Land Use Planners and Transportation Engineers who are interested designing more sustainable, affordable and inclusive communities.

Trainer bios

Matt Pinder, P.Eng., M.Eng.
Lead Trainer

Matt has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in civil engineering and nine years of experience in transportation planning and engineering. Matt is an emerging expert in the planning and design of streets, intersections, and communities that address the needs of all road users. He has advised on and completed concept and detailed designs for dozens of complete streets and bikeway projects across Canada including the City of Toronto’s ITE-award-winning York University Cycling Connections project. He has contributed to award-winning design guidance documents including the Ottawa Protected Intersection Design Guide and the Ontario Protected Intersection Guide.His experience also includes leading trainings, including for the Ontario Protected Intersection Guide, as well as the updated OTM Book 18: Cycling Facilities which he has delivered to over 600 professionals. He was also a trainer for the April 2024 ITE Canada training session on multimodal traffic signal operations

Narayan Donaldson, M.Sc.
Assistant Trainer

Narayan has a bachelor’s degree in urban planning and a master’s degree in civil engineering, and seven years of planning and engineering experience in Canada and the Netherlands. He was the lead trainer for the 2023/24 ITE Canada training session on multimodal traffic signal operations and has co-led in-person workshops such as a network planning exercise at the 2024 Winter Cycling Congress in Edmonton. He has been applying Complete Networks principles in roles such as the Mobycon project leader for the Renfrew County transportation master plan, and a planner implementing the Town of Canmore’s town centre streetscape plan based on the Complete Networks principles of the Integrated Master Plan

Arianne Robillard, M.Sc.
Assistant Trainer

Arianne has a Master of Science in Civil Engineering specializing in Transportation Planning. Her experience includes transportation and mobility research, active transportation, transit-oriented development, and accessibility. Her academic publications include cycling access to transit-oriented development nodes and measurement of access to parks and green spaces, and has presented at conferences in Brussels, Portland, Quebec City, and Montreal. She spent four months in the Netherlands studying at Utrecht University studying Human Geography and Spatial Planning, contributing to the design of accessibility indicator tools.

The registration deadline for this event is January 22, 2025.