Episode 8 - When Driving is Not an Option (with Anna Zivarts)

Now entering Wilberton.

Doors to my left.

We've all brought like a piece of news from our local contexts.

Maybe Emily, do you want to go first?

Yeah, so I guess I have a couple of pieces of news.

Not a lot of super major transit news, but one thing that's just came out in Edmonton, which is really cool, is the information about the Housing Accelerator Fund numbers that Edmonton has been putting up.

So Edmonton has been doing a lot of really good work building missing middle housing, building housing that is really serving demand in the city and building transit-oriented development.

And the status as of March 31st, 2026, of the target 36,235 housing supply growth target number that has been projected, Edmonton has hit 33,768 So that is a really good number.

And in that missing middle, the projection was 8,059 and we're over 13,000 there.

So just

really working on that missing middle.

And yeah, that's just really awesome for transit use and just giving more options for people to not live in the suburbs or they need to be car dependent everywhere.

So that's pretty cool.

And kind of the piece of prairie news, I was reading today that there is a study, the Interventions, Equity, Research and Action in Cities team has gotten federal funding for their transit and public health study.

So it's a study looking at how transit may improve health.

Obviously, this is something that, you know, people who take transit, big transit advocates are always talking about, always pushing for.

even a five minute walk to a bus stop can be really life-changing for somebody who needs the exercise as opposed to taking a car everywhere.

So yeah, just that federal funding, the program's been going on for about 10 years, but that's out of, I believe Saskatoon, Montreal, Victoria, and somewhere else.

I'm sorry, whichever city I'm forgetting.

Yeah.

I have a question about the housing thing, like for people that haven't been to Edmonton, like what is it? So Edmonton is just smoking every other city in Canada in terms of building homes that are close to good transit that already exists.

What does that

actually look like? Like if you take if you take out a single family home from a lot that's like near good transit, what what could you do with it in Edmonton?

You can do a lot.

So our zoning bylaw renewal that happened a few years ago was really broad it basically banished the concept of a lot zone for a single family home so there is no longer a restriction on lots that any lot can now have a multi-family home on it there's like a small scale housing zone but it can still have multiple homes on it it can have um basement suites secondary suites those sorts of things there's a big big culture going on sort of alley above the garage type suites as secondary suites as well.