Do you still consider Surrey a suburb?
Posted October 29, 2013 7:49 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
SURREY (NEWS1130) – Surrey is home to the largest school district in the province and it’s BC’s second biggest city, but has it outgrown its status as a suburb?
Council got a snapshot of how the city has changed over the last decade in a report on the 2011 Census at last night’s meeting.
Only 13 per cent people who call Surrey home commute to work in Vancouver, and even if Burnaby and Richmond are thrown into the mix, the number is still less than 30 per cent.
“We no longer see Surrey as a suburb,” Councillor Barinder Rasode tells News1130.
“We’re building a downtown core and we’re one of the fastest growing municipalities in Canada. We have more children than any city in the country and as you can see, we’ve worked diligently to promote industrial based job creation.”
More than 100,000 people moved to Surrey between 2002 and 2012. Over the same time frame, council has made it a priority to give residents the opportunity to work in the community where they live. As a result, new jobs have been created in Port Kells, Campbell Heights, and in the City Centre area, which is home to SFU’s Surrey campus.
The Census data also illustrates the impact SFU and Kwantlen University have had on the city’s workforce. The number of people employed in the fields of social science, education, government, and religion has nearly doubled since 2006. There’s been a ten per cent increase in people with trades certificates or diplomas and roughly a five percent spike in the number of people who have university degrees.
Rasode acknowledges the report also highlights a major issue that needs addressing: a lack of transit service. Public transit use climbed modestly from 10.9 to 12.8 per cent between 2006 and 2011, but the overwhelming majority of people in the city rely on their cars as their primary means of transportation.
“As we’ve been having industrial companies that employ large numbers of people move to Surrey, one of the things that we hear from them very frequently is there’s a lack of transportation and that’s a missing piece of the puzzle,” she says. “It’s a challenge that we need to continue to work on and that’s why we’ve proposed ideas like an LRT system.”
Click here to read the full report.
