On September 28, civil engineer, author, and planner Veronica O. Davis presented Bravery in Public Office to highlight ways public transit can be made more accessible. The event, hosted by SFU Renewable Cities and Movement YVR, intended to teach attendees about the municipal choices that need to be made for transportation to be more inclusive.
The event was split into two portions. An examination of Davis’s book Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities was followed by a panel discussion with Alison Gu, Andrea Reimer, and Nadine Nakagawa, three outgoing city councillors from across the Lower Mainland. Davis shared with The Peak that Manifesto was written with “students in mind,” based on many of Davis’s experiences as a planner — including her failures — and is built on the importance of fully believing in a project and the community it serves. While Davis discussed her book and specific examples from Houston, the ensuing panel provided a Metro Vancouver portrait of each councillor’s approach to transit.
Davis told The Peak that “as a civil engineer, civil comes from being able to support and create places for people. And that’s just really where my heart is always gonna lie.” She highlighted “silently suffering” in her talk and her book, a concept where people who suffer silently are in positions of low power and influence. She asked, “How can I ensure that that is who we are centring as we’re making decisions and as we’re thinking about how we make investments in transportation?”
“I’ve never sat out there more than maybe five minutes because the buses keep showing up. And that to me is what bus service is.” — Veronica O. Davis, civil engineer, author, and planner
Davis was Houston’s director of transportation and drainage until 2024, and is a supporter of commutable neighbourhoods, including reliable bus service. Davis identifies a “two-part problem” of unreliable bus service: where bus stops are placed, and how often the buses come. Living near a busy bus line herself, Davis told The Peak, “I don’t actually know when the bus is supposed to come because I’ve never sat out there more than maybe five minutes because the buses keep showing up. And that to me is what bus service is.”
Movement director Denis Agar explained to The Peak one takeaway of the councillor’s panel was that “there’s more to it than just electing a so-called ‘brave’ politician. We need politicians that have the same values as us.” He raised SFU students as a group with important transportation needs, stating that politicians need to be “responsive to students” and “they need to feel there are real consequences” to under-serving the university student demographic.
The event was preceded by tabling from the likes of Vision Zero, Dogwood, and Movement. Agar sums up why students should care about events like these: “If you are sitting on that 145, R5, bus going, ‘Man, I wish this was better. I wish this was less crowded, faster, more frequent, I wish it came at night more often,’ like those kinds of things? Well, we have answers for those ‘why’ questions. We can’t solve them immediately, but we’re working on them.”
