About the Coalition

Welcome! The Burlington for Active Transport Coalition is a grassroots, volunteer-run group of Burlington residents working to improve the holistic active-transport network of our city — walking, cycling, rollerblading, wheeling, and every other human-powered or micro-mobility way of getting around.

Why we started

Burlington truly is an excellent city. I’m Joshua — an avid cyclist living in the Palmer neighbourhood — and I’ve lived here my entire life, watching it grow and change, for better or for worse. But active transportation is something the city has often neglected. Even with many proposals coming from the city government in recent years, the overall approach to active transportation has been misguided at best, or, worse, actively useless — failing time and again to address the real shortcomings of our infrastructure and missing easy wins that can actually make active transportation viable for everyday use.

Burlington is a city worth moving through under your own power. But for too many trips, our active-transport network is disconnected, inconsistent, or simply missing. The result is that walking, cycling, and rolling — the healthiest, cheapest, and most climate-friendly ways to get around — are longer, harder, and more dangerous than they should be. That, in turn, forces many day-to-day trips onto personal motor vehicles — cars, trucks, and SUVs — taking up more and more room on our roads, causing congestion, delays and pollution, and wasting everyone’s precious time and money.

We can do much better.

I started the Burlington for Active Transport Coalition because I believe that organizing neighbours, raising awareness, and advocating with evidence can change that. My hope is that “I” can become “we”: a group of like-minded citizens helping to make Burlington the best it can be, and a leader in active transportation.

What we believe

• Navigable without a car. Burlington has excellent bones — what it needs is the vision and planning to make getting around car-free genuinely viable.
• Connectivity is everything. A path that ends in the middle of nowhere is a platitude, not a network. We push for continuous routes between the places people actually go.
• Active transport is for everyone. Safe, dignified routes for people of every age, ability, and income — not just brave, able-bodied adults.
• Safety is non-negotiable. Nobody should risk their life choosing a bike or their own two feet over a car. Separate people from fast traffic; manage the risk where it can’t be avoided.
• Good data and good plans win. We ground our advocacy in evidence, published plans, and daily lived experience — not hypotheticals dreamed up behind closed doors.

What we do

• Raise awareness of the gaps, hazards, and missed opportunities in Burlington’s current active-transport systems.
• Advocate to city, regional, and provincial governments, and the wider community, for concrete improvements and forward-looking plans.
• Publish proposals — detailed, actionable documents that lay out specific improvements we’d like to see.
• Build community among the residents who walk, cycle, and roll across Burlington every day.

Get involved

This is just the beginning. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be publishing our first formal proposals for concrete improvements, sharing news and commentary on the blog, and showing up where decisions get made.

If any of this resonates with you, we’d love to have you. Head over to Get Involved to learn how to add your voice — or just email us at hello@burlingtonactivetransport.ca. Together we can build a city that’s safe and welcoming to move through under your own power.

Let’s build a Burlington that moves.

— Joshua M. Boniface, on behalf of the coalition

LLM Usage Policy

As a very small organization with limited time but committed to data-driven, factual analysis and proposals, we use LLMs (“AI”) extensively to assist us in research and in drafting our content. All content is reviewed thoroughly by humans before posting.

LLMs are tremendously powerful in our view: the ability to perform comprehensive research of historical records, generate viable engineering data, and write in a clear, consistent manner, are all areas that LLMs excel in.

We respect and acknowledge opposition to these tools, for myriad reasons. We will, however, use whatever tools are available to us to achieve our goals, which include LLMs at this time. We appreciate your understanding.