Puzzling, powering, and the transit funding gap: Learning from the 2015 Metro Vancouver Transportation and Transit Plebiscite

The 2015 Metro Vancouver Transportation and Transit Plebiscite was the first direct democratic vote on public transit funding held in a Canadian city-region. Using qualitative methods and a conceptual framework based on orders of policy learning, this research investigates the learning of TransLink's Mayors' Council on Regional Transportation in the five years following the 2015 Plebiscite. The findings are that the Mayors' Council engaged in second and third-order policy learning, enabling them to creatively utilize their limited political, organizational, and relational resources to achieve multi-level funding agreements with senior government partners on significant parts of the 10-Year Plan left unfunded in 2015. Their learning led them from a stance of puzzling out policy options to a phase of powering, building political leverage which they had lacked during the 2015 Plebiscite through a campaign communicating the possibility of higher senior government contributions to regional transportation investments.