What a year it was! 2021 was full of changes and adaptations for BEST and our programs. We overcame pandemic challenges and bounced back from 2020 to offer the programs and services you all missed, and created many new programs too! Thanks to the continued support of our sponsors and loyal members, clientele, and volunteers, we are gearing up to make 2022 an even better year!
The Bicycle Valet
Since 2006, BEST’s Bicycle Valet has been providing professional, secure, coat-check style bicycle parking in and around Metro Vancouver.
In 2021, the Bicycle Valet was active at 122 event days, parking a total of 8,303 bikes and 9963 bags. In comparison with the previous 2020 season, this was a 52.3% improvement in bike parking, largely due to the circumstances surrounding COVID-19 and the cancellation of many key festivals and events in 2020. We also increased our bag capacity with new hook equipment, ensuring that all bags were kept safe, dry, and off the ground. Offering a bag check supports those who do not drive their own vehicles to events by offering a free, secure place for them to leave their bags and gear while at an event. We often had at least one cargo bike with seats for children and/or stroller, and saw a significant increase in the number of e-bikes we parked. We regularly had repeat customers emphasize how important it was for us to offer a safe option for them to store their bike when enjoying a game or event.
We are expecting a significant increase in our event days and bike parking in the 2022 Bicycle Valet season starting in the spring! We have already begun preparing for the high volume of returning events with large capacities next season and can’t wait to start parking your bikes again!
Living Streets
The Living Streets program encourages British Columbians to walk for physical and mental health, and to seek creative solutions to active transportation barriers in their communities. We are interested where people walk, what they see and do along the way, what makes them feel safe and what encourages them to walk more often. Our 2022 plans for Living Streets include expanding our programs and walking and transit networks, partnering with more organizations, and expanding to more municipalities!
Walk30 Challenge Burnaby/New Westminster
The Walk30 Challenge is a campaign organized by Living Streets that promotes healthy, active living, and walking as transportation. It is a fun and friendly competition between neighbouring municipalities to see which community can motivate their citizens to record the most walking minutes! In 2021’s Challenge, people in Burnaby and New Westminster were encouraged to walk 30 minutes per day over a five-week period spanning May 10 to June 13. For each week, we focused on a different theme: Social Connection and Mental Wellness; Inclusion and Accessibility; Active Transportation; Healthier Planet; Walking in Pandemic Times.
Many previous participants returned to take part in the challenge again, and 1556 new people joined us in 2021. A total of 1.96 million walking minutes were recorded by 1492 active participants! Survey results showed the campaign was effective, reaching young and old in all parts of the two municipalities. A majority of survey respondents reported they were walking more during the Walk30 Challenge than they did before the challenge started! Great work, everyone!
Women4Climate
Women4Climate is an initiative launched by C40 Cities to empower and inspire women to lead the charge against climate change. The Living Streets program was selected to participate in this mentorship with Isabel Garcia, BEST’s Living Streets manager. She is an avid advocate for walking and public transit as an accessible, healthy means of getting around without relying on personal automobile ownership. The City of Vancouver was the eighth city to launch a Women4Climate Mentorship Program! Read more about Isabel’s work with Women4Climate here.
Isabel’s Walks
We created Isabel’s Walks as a pandemic-adapted response to promote walking and transit. When events and social gatherings were prohibited, we recorded individual walks and published them online. Living Streets manager Isabel Garcia took her child in a stroller to different locations around Metro Vancouver to explore the areas around SkyTrain stations! As a result, there is now a collection of recorded family-oriented and accessible walking routes in New Westminster, Burnaby, Coquitlam, North Vancouver, Vancouver and Surrey published on the Living Streets blog! All Surrey walks are part of the City of Surrey WALKit map.
Winter Festive Walks
We proudly partnered with the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House to launch our Winter Festive Walks to promote walking in the winter months. We created these events with the goal of encouraging people of all ages and abilities to enjoy a walk/roll in the darker hours of the winter season and to show how being outdoors any time of the year can be fun! Going for a walk in your own neighbourhood or a new area you aren’t familiar with is an excellent way to connect with the local community, become more familiar with the city, and develop more sustainable transportation habits.
We organized three Winter Festive Walks in different areas in Metro Vancouver: the Spirit Trail/Lonsdale Quay on the North Shore, Lafarge Lake in Coquitlam, and Mount Pleasant in Vancouver. TransLink kindly provided Compass Cards for participants when we used transit to get to our location, and we showed participants how to reload their cards for future use! The walks were wonderful and everyone enjoyed themselves. Read more about what we experienced on the walks here!
Seniors’ Transportation
BEST is committed to developing better transportation options for seniors through initiatives, collaboration, and leadership. BEST’s role is to conduct outreach to senior-serving agencies and seniors’ groups and help facilitate programs and workshop sessions. This includes coordination, marketing, reaching out, logistics, helping promote, facilitating in person, and liaising between partnering agencies - anything to help make the workshops a success for instructing and learning together.
We are in the process of reaching out to more senior-serving agencies in the new year! In 2022, we are planning to offer more transit training and trip planning workshops with TransLink/CMBC and HandyDART. We also plan to work with ICBC Road Safety instructors on workshops focused on driving cessation, accessible and affordable public transit, and active transportation.
Our long-term goal is to have seniors become more familiar with and be comfortable with taking public transit again after the pandemic. Through transit training and trip planning skills teaching, it is our intention for older adults to learn to enjoy and have fun on transit, be social, and explore new destinations across Metro Vancouver. COVID-19 has been a major life disruption for everyone, including many seniors. Being able to have access to affordable and reliable public transportation again will be a great contributor to seniors’ health and community life. BEST looks forward to being able to help facilitate these planned initiatives with and for seniors, and with TransLink too.
Seniors on the Move
Seniors on the Move is a three-year joint project with United Way BC (2021-2024) led by seniors and funded by a Vancouver Foundation Systems Change Grant. It seeks to encourage individuals, communities, and institutions to plan better for age-related changes in transportation and make more options available for alternatives to driving, with a provincial scope. We have a Seniors’ Advisory Committee that meets monthly or bi-monthly to discuss current initiatives and to gain their insight.
Provincial Seniors’ Transportation Survey
The purpose of this survey, available online until January 12, 2022, is to collect information and opinions on how well the existing transportation system is working for adults 55 years of age and better in BC. Responses to the survey will provide BEST with the baseline data required to make the case with government and transportation providers to improve seniors' mobility in the province! The survey is offered in four languages: English, Punjabi, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. The results of the Seniors’ Transportation Survey will be available in the spring of 2022.
Upcoming initiatives
In 2022, Seniors on the Move plans to release a video focusing on the personal experiences of elders. The video will demonstrate how transportation options play a key role in giving lives meaning and purpose, and how it contributes to overall health and wellbeing.
BEST is also working to create a toolkit with prompts, questions, information, and guidelines to facilitating conversations about driving cessation and transportation with seniors in any community. This toolkit is currently in production and will be ready by spring 2022!
2022 will be a busy year for BEST as we expect programming to return to pre-pandemic levels, or above, as many reports indicate that active transportation for recreation has increased in the preceding two years. We look forward to seeing you out on a walk, parking your bike with us, or on transit!
