New report calls on Hamilton to make transportation safer

The Bay Area Climate Change Council (BACCC) has released a new report calling on the cities of Hamilton and Burlington to address barriers to residents choosing environmentally friendly transportation options.

The report, which is called “Options for Travel: Giving Residents a Real Choice”, will be presented to each council within the coming weeks. Hamilton and Burlington residents can contact their councillor and ask them to commit to reviewing the report’s solutions in three easy clicks.

Providing a roadmap to ensure that residents of Hamilton and Burlington have a real choice in how they get around, the report recommends measures such as expanding bike share operations, ensuring all roads have sidewalks, improving bus frequency, and better aligning local buses with GO train services.

“If there are significant barriers to walking, cycling, or taking public transit, we can’t reasonably expect residents to choose those forms of transportation,” said Bianca Caramento, manager of the BACCC. “The solutions in this report would see our transportation system become more safe, reliable, convenient, and accessible for residents. More residents will choose environmentally friendly transportation options if we remove the barriers preventing them.”

The BACCC consists of organizations across Hamilton and Burlington that are committed to moving the needle on climate change at all three levels of government, allowing others to skip right to the “action” part of climate action. “If residents decide to take low carbon forms of transportation, even just some of the time, we’ll see our greenhouse gas emissions go down,” says Caramento. Currently, almost 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the Hamilton-Burlington Bay Area come from transportation.

The full report can be viewed here, with the BACCC requesting that the city councils in Hamilton and Burlington formally receive the report and commit to a full staff review of its recommendations.

Lead photo by @wheresmonti

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• environment
• Hamilton
• HamOnt
• Transportation