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“We are not increasing cars on the road, but the cars on the road are bigger, bigger trucks, and we need to start transitioning vehicles on the road to electric,” said Smith. “That’s a big challenge.”

Overall, the city reduced community-based GHG emissions by 12 per cent from 2007, a far cry from its goal of 33 per cent.

“That’s not going to happen,” said Smith bluntly.

While the city does well compared with other cities — Vancouver has the lowest GHG emissions per capita of any major city in North America — it’s not good enough, he said.

The slow pace of progress partly prompted the city to declare a climate change emergency in April to turbocharge its work in reducing emissions.

Dr. Rose Murphy, a sustainability expert at Simon Fraser University, said she isn’t surprised Vancouver failed to hit its GHG targets because there is only so much a city can do. Vancouver has exceeded the performance of B.C., which only had a two per cent reduction in GHG from 2007 to 2016, and Canada, which had a four per cent reduction between 2007 and 2017, she noted.

“Vancouver is trying to achieve very dramatic reductions in GHG emissions from transportation,” she said. “They did great, but do not have the tools to do the other parts of transportation policy, which is smart regulations that impact fuel types or types of vehicles.”

The province and federal governments have recently stepped up with fuel regulations and legislation to increase sales of zero-emission vehicles. If all three levels of government remain committed to this issue, “there is reason to be optimistic” about Vancouver’s progress in the coming years, said Murphy.