Can this really be true?
StatCan is reporting that residents British Columbia slashed their driving last year—and by quite a lot. Total passenger miles in the province fell rom 56 billion passenger miles in 2004, to 51 billion in 2005. Meanwhile, driving in Canada overall edged upwards.
Translink, the lower mainland’s transit authority, attributed the fall to rising gas prices and rising transit usage. According to a spokesperson:
“If they do the same survey a year from now, there will be less driving because the price of gas has gone up so much…We have seen a significant shift to transit ridership this year, and we have to attribute that to a rise in the price of gas.”
Hm. Color (or, rather, colour) me skeptical about this.
I’m usually willing to believe that BC is capable of things that are out of the question in the US northwest.
But adjusted for population growth, StatCan’s figures suggests that personal travel declined by about 10 percent in a single year. A 10 percent decline in road miles is huge. Huge. And in a single year, it’s pretty much unheard of—especially in the middle of a surging economy (as BC’s seems to be).
So if I were a betting man (and I’m not) I’d wager that the data are mistaken.
StatCan’s figures are based on random samples, and there’s always a margin of error in those kinds of studies. That’s not StatCan’s fault; blame the laws of mathematics for that. So the fall in passenger miles in cars and trucks could just be a statistical outlier.
Plus, this appears to be the result of two separate trends: average car occupancy fell from from 1.7 to 1.6 (roughly 6%) and total vehicle miles fell from 33 billion to 31.5 (roughly 4%).
I can believe (barely) a 4 percent decline in vehicle travel; it’s still a big drop, but it’s possible. But I’d bet that a simultaneous fall in vehicle mileage and vehicle occupancy is spurious. It’s exactly the opposite of what one would expect from a fall in car travel—you’d expect to see more carpooling, not less.
At any rate, I’m going to hold off on celebrating on this one, until I see some numbers that confirm the trend.
Alan Durning
I agree completely. It seems unlikely. A small decrease, I’d believe. This huge one? No.
John Newcomb
BC commute times could be a spurious statistic, although recent article in Vancouver Sun (below) attributes it to combination of Vancouver’s residential growth in the core and employment growth in the periphery. Still…Commute times prove controversial planning decisions have paid off Vancouver SunMonday, July 31, 2006 It may be cold comfort for commuters stuck on our increasingly congested roads, but the fact that Vancouver is the only major city in Canada where the average time spent commuting has not increased over the past 13 years is nonetheless a remarkable achievement.Commuting consumes a significant portion of our lives. The Statistics Canada study on commuting times released this month found that Canadians are commuting longer distances and it is taking them longer to get to work and home again.In Calgary, for example, the average commute time increased by 14 minutes a day between 1992 and 2005. That may not seem like much, but 14 minutes a day is an hour and a half over a week. In a month, it’s an extra six hours and, over a year, it’s the equivalent of working an extra two weeks of eight-hour days.In Vancouver, the average commute time actually went down by three minutes, from 70 to 67 minutes for a round-trip.How can that be when we know there are more cars on the road, the population has been growing and few new arterial roads are being built?The answer seems to be an endorsement of the way Vancouver has grown over the past two decades and a good indication about how we should continue to plan for the growth we know is coming over the next few decades in the Lower Mainland.Time spent commuting is a function of not just the speed with which we are able to move, whether by foot, bicycle, bus, train or car, but also the distance we have to travel.In Vancouver, many commuters have been able to shorten the time they spend going to and from work by living closer to their place of employment.That has been made possible by two factors: the thousands of new homes that have been built in downtown Vancouver and by the dispersal of workplaces throughout the Lower Mainland.It is also a reflection of policies that have encouraged dense growth, rather than urban and suburban sprawl and the longer commutes that go along with it.The study of commute times confirms that we have profited here from controversial planning decisions taken in the past, including the decision widely credited for our world-beating quality of life here, the decision taken more than three decades ago not to push expressways into the heart of the city.As we plan for the next half-century when our population is expected to double, we have the benefit of evidence such as the commute times studies that show we have been on the right track by promoting mixed-use developments that allow people to live near to where they work, high density development that creates the critical mass needed to support affordable transit and investments that reliable public transit requires.Now the emphasis will be on the issue raised recently by Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan, the question of whether civic leaders in the Lower Mainland have the political will to implement what they already know works.Will they have the will to overcome local opposition in neighbourhoods that have resisted high-density developments in the past? Will they be willing to continue to promote investments in transit by insisting that senior levels of government return more of the fuel tax revenues back to cities?These are tough decisions to take, but the evidence that they can pay off handsomely has never been more clear.http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=f3849231-aa0c-444f-8daa-560f38048a8b
John Newcomb
Yet another article suggesting that something oddly “counter-continental” is happening in Vancouver…Vancouverites least obese, says national reportCBC News22 August, 2006Vancouver has the lowest adult obesity rate in the country, says a new report released on Tuesday by Statistics Canada.The survey shows Vancouver had an obesity rate of 12 per cent in 2004, about half the national average of 23 per cent.It was also lower than Toronto’s rate of 16 per cent.The report says adults who live in big Canadian cities are less likely to be obese than those who live in smaller centres. Statistics Canada’s figures show 20 per cent of city dwellers are obese, compared with 29 per cent in outlying areas.The figures relate to adults, and the city-town differences were not reflected in children whose average obesity rate is 26 per cent higherthan the average for adults.More social pressure in cities, says fitness trainer Cat Smiley, who runs the military-style fitness Boot Camp in Whistler, says a recent survey of her clients, or “recruits” as she calls them, confirms the Statistics Canada report.She says people from the smaller community of Whistler were heavier on average than people from Vancouver.”I think there is a lot more pressure to be thin in the big cities or in the cities than there is in the small towns,” she said.Smiley, twice named Canada’s top fitness trainer, says the answer to obesity is not found in crash diets, but in lots of physical activity and eating fruits and vegetables.”A good body is a body that moves freely without pain,” said Smiley.”[Try not to] see exercise as a separate activity, but more of a way of life.”http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2006/08/22/bc-obesity.html