A veteran transportation planning consultant has been named the city’s first director of transit and sustainable transportation.

Hilary Holden, who has worked for major transportation consulting firms since the 1990s, will report directly to Toronto’s chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat starting in mid-August.

The new role underscores the city’s commitment to reducing its dependence on the automobile.

“The role isn’t transit, walking and cycling. It’s transit and sustainable transportation because of the importance of things like apps, policies and prices, all sorts of things which can contribute to the greater use of transit and importantly, less on the private use of cars,” said Holden.

She will represent the city in many conversations, including with provincial transportation agency Metrolinx and expects to wrangle all sorts of interests ranging from grassroots community groups to business and different levels of government.

Holden has already worked as a consultant with the city’s planning team on the second phase of its Feeling Congested campaign, consulting the public on a less gridlocked future.

Holden says she’s spent her career making business cases for multi-modal transit investments. As a professional transportation planner, it’s her job to look at not only the engineering of the city’s streets and infrastructure but the costs, real-estate impacts and social-equity issues. Even global economics play a role, she said.

“We’re positioning Toronto globally and making sure that’s at the forefront — that the city is visioning, working at the level it needs to be at globally and that’s delivered within a framework that is fair and efficient,” said Holden.

Taking direction from political decision-makers will be new to her, but Holden said, “It’s not my role to support anything. I see myself as politically neutral.”

The 39-year-old Brit expects her first priorities will be the four projects that have been at the top of Toronto’s transit priority list: the downtown relief line; SmartTrack; the Scarborough subway; and GO regional express rail.

Holden, who came to Toronto five years ago and has been with international transport consultant Arup for nine, has worked with Waterfront Toronto, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, and the York University and Vaughan Metropolitan Centre stations of the Spadina subway extension.

“I understand where (those agencies) are at and what their priorities are, and I can redefine it from a city perspective and hopefully work together. That’s what I like to do, and that’s what I’m good at,” said Holden.

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A High Park resident who loves to careen about on her garage-sale bike, Holden doesn’t own a car.

“I cycle to work, I do my grocery shopping on a trike, and I walk my son to school. I want to show everyone that it is possible, and more than possible, it is enjoyable in so many unexpected ways,” she said.

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