Pollution, climate change, environmental consumption and urban sprawl, are all urgent and pressing issues facing the GVRD and its municipalities as the region continues to grow at a rapid rate. The automobile is the prime culprit implicated in the environmental crisis now affecting the GVRD and urban regions the world over.  As urban spaces have become dominated by auto traffic and auto infrastructure, the principle influence on their design and form is the automobile. The automobile mania that has gripped North America, most dramatically over the last fifty years, has had a profound effect in the Lower Mainland region of Vancouver. The widespread popularity of the car in the GVRD, and its domination of the GVRD transportation system, has resulted in a low density, dispersed, horizontal, and segregated urban form that separates residential, commercial, industrial, and entertainment/retail activities. This sprawling spatial distribution of activities results in dispersed transportation flows from many origins to many destinations, making transit, walking, and bicycle use undesirable, and creating the perception that these are unfeasible modes of transportation. Single family residential developments, massive shopping complexes characterized by ‘big box’ stores, enormous parking lots, and mammoth, low rise office complexes are becoming ubiquitous in the Lower Mainland, all connected together by an extensive network of highways, freeways, and expressways. By maximizing both the use of land and distances between origins and destinations, urban and suburban sprawl, once promoted by the auto, is now dependant on it as the urban form of the lower mainland has become low density, spread out, discontinuous, and often beyond the reach of transit. “The automobile has allowed the suburbs to sprawl more freely, and farther, than mass transit could ever have done” (Freund, 1993; 111). The result is an unprecedented dependency on the automobile of which the consequences are numerous.

         The automobile and the sprawling, horizontal space it has produced in many parts of the GVRD is responsible for most of the environmental problems facing the region. The emissions from the over 2 million insured vehicles in the GVRD (ICBC, 2002) has resulted in severe deterioration in the lower mainland’s air quality, exacerbated by the particular meteorology and topography of the lower Fraser Valley and the surrounding mountains (Wynn, 1992).  The immense pollution produced by lower mainland drivers is also contributing to the looming crises of global warming that, if left unchecked, will have catastrophic consequences on the earth’s biosphere (Suzuki Foundation, 2002). The sprawling, horizontal space of the automobile has  resulted in massive environmental consumption in the GVRD, eating up agricultural and forest lands as well as eco-systems and precious, natural habitat. (Better Environmentally Sound Transportation – 2002). And the ubiquitous single detached dwelling, while requiring large amounts of energy to operate on a daily basis in terms of heating and maintenance, also requires large amounts of materials to build, and large amounts of land to build on.

As environmental problems in the GVRD continue to worsen alongside increased population growth, 'green-field' development, and renewed threates by the current government to weaken the agricultural land reserve, there is a growing urgency for a more sustainable urban form that reduces environmental consumption and reliance on the automobile. Increasingly, environmentalists, planners, architects, and even some developers, are recognizing that the modernist paradigm of yesteryear has to be re-evaluated in favour of a new paradigm of community design  that brings where we live, work , and play closer together, into more dense, mixed use, transit and pedestrian oriented communities, increasing the viability of less polluting modes of transportation, and reducing the amount of resource and environmental consumption (Calthorpe et al, 2001; Beatley and Manning, 1997).   As the underlying basis for this new approach to planning, the notion of sustainability and sustainable development, defined by the Bruntland Commission (1987) as that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (qtd. in Beatley and Manning, 1997; 4) is fundamental.

            One way to implement more sustainable community planning and design practices is to look at the region and the individual communities that make it up and identify those areas that are exhibiting more sustainable patterns. In this way, communities showing comparatively high levels of sustainability in the region can serve  as a model to those areas identified in the region as being comparatively less sustainable. Also, the evaluation and comparison of the sustainability of individual communities that make up the region provides us with a foundation with which we can conduct further research into what factors are contributing to sustainable/unsustainable development patterns in the region. Two of the main characteristics of sustainable communities identified by Peter Calthorpe, Timothy Beatley, Kristy Manning, and other leading sustainability planners, designers and architects are high-density residential dwelling developments and sustainable transportation modes.

           This  goal of this project is to compare and evaluate the sustainability of the various communities (by census sub-division) that make up the GVRD based on factors related to transportation modes and dwelling types so as to provide a basis for further research into developing ways of doing development in the GVRD more sustainabley. The analysis conducted in this report is very preliminary, providing a foundation upon which further research and analysis can be conducted with whitch to evaluate and compare sustainability in the GVRD. The results will be useful in several ways. First, by mapping the individual factors used to evaluate and compare sustainability in the GVRD, we can get a picture of how individual sustainability factors, such as wether people are driving, biking, or walking to work, are distributed throughout the GVRD. Second, the final results will give us a picture of how the municipalities compare to one another when evaluated based on the sustainablitiy factors used to conduct this analysis with which we can look to as models of how to/how not to carry out future development in the GVRD. Also, the individual factors can be analysed statistically and spatially to see what, if any, the correlations are between the individual factors. Finally, the end results can be used to examin possible correlations between sustainability and other factors not used in the evaluation, such as income. After conducting the main analysis comparing the sustainability of  GVRD CSD's, I will conduct two statistical analyses to see what, if any, correlation exists between:1) low density residential development and automobile dependancy, and 2) sustainability and income.

        First, before comducting the analyses, I will describe the data I used, and where it came from. Then I will discuss the steps I took to conduct the analyses. I will then conduct the spatial and statistical analyses, showing the processes used. Finally, after showing the results, I will discuss operational and procedural errors that may have affected the analyses, as well as make some suggestions for further research.

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