Post-October conference Top priority Items

From Common Energy UVic

[edit] Top Priority Items as of Nov 17 2007

• Campus wide upass by 2010
• Develop and implemenet a plan for fleet emissions reduction
• Institute vehicle and bike share program across all depts/faculties
• Video Teleconferencing use and improvements funded by revolving green fund
  • Create and run campaign to raise awareness of air travel impact
  • Travel offsets and unused travel budget placed in revolving green fund
• Institute higher parking fees for higher emission vehicles and provide incentives for hybrids, electircs, small cars (e.g., favoured parking)
• Plan and run a regular (quarterly?) university-specific walk/bike to work >> day

[edit] Status of Top Priority Items

The material under the planning projects captures the overall status pre-conference. Chris Bennett has some additional notes on VTC that I had with Lance Grant who runs this technically at Uvic. Some material from the conference has not made it onto the Wiki yet.

Research status on Campus-wide upass - 1 meeting with Sarah and Neil revealed that it is infeasible due to union contracts to put this in place before 2010 (when contracts are renegotiated). Todo - initiate discussions with unions on this and survey to ID who would use it and when and where they commute from/to.

Fleet emissions reduction - no research on this to date. An audit is in progress that includes these emissions (TBD - who is doing this and where will the resultsbe published?)

Vehicle and Bike share program - Sarah says this is implemented in many but not all departments - no exact figures. Common energy could do some research here to ID departments that are not currently doing this as well as to understand the existing system.

VTC - Discussion with Lance Grant, technical head of VTC at UVic - Chris has notes on this meeting, but the basic outcome was the understanding that video teelconferencing at Uvic needs better funding and that the travel budget could be used for this via an offsets mechanism. Common energy could discuss this idea with the folks who look after travel budgets.

Sliding parking fees and preferred parking (perhaps new spaces for smart cars as done in Victoria downtown) were discussed with Sarah and Neil. They have previously considered the sliding scale but were concommital on implementing this now. They would consider additional or perhaps re-painted spots to favour small cares/high efficiency cars. Common energy could do leg-work to ID possible locations for these and propose a plan.

Re a uvic bike to work day - Discussed this with Sarah and Neil and they were interested, with UVic providing promotion and incentives (prizes).

[edit] Other high priority stuff

At the conference a high priority item was a Transportation all candidates debate, but this is something outside what UVic can do (a good thing to work with all local transport groups on)