I remember talking to an Edmonton friend about the Kyoto Protocol back when sophisticated opinion in Alberta held the thing to be little better than a Communist plot.
"What's the alternative?" he asked sarcastically, after a long, detailed denunciation of naive environmentalism. "Public transit?"
He was so scathing he shut me right up. But at the time we were riding a minivan through suburban Calgary, which is to say Calgary, so what could I say? Public transit was not an alternative. To suggest it was would have been blindly Toronto-centric.
A Montrealer might have made the same mistake, but the fact remains: The only Canadians for whom public transit is a welcome alternative to car travel generally live within a few kilometres of two, maybe three, widely separated city centres.
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"Residents of Calgary and Edmonton are more dependent on their cars than those living in other large census metropolitan areas," Statistics Canada reported yesterday, summarizing the findings of a new study. But why single them out? With respect to car dependency, they are identical to Canadians in medium cities and small towns, indeed everywhere else except those few constrained centres.
Transit-dependent, pedestrian-friendly Canada - urban Canada, in effect - is vanishingly small in size.
Only 29 per cent of Montrealers living in the very centre of town travel everywhere by car, according to the study, compared with 43 per cent of equivalent Torontonians. But a majority of people living farther than five kilometres from the centre of each city travel everywhere by car. A majority of all Vancouverites, no matter where in town they live, still go everywhere by car.
No wonder successive national governments in this country, alone in the developed world, have pretended they aren't responsible for public transit: Seen clearly, the challenge seems hopeless.
It isn't getting any easier, according to Statistics Canada, despite demographic trends that are piling more of the country's population into urban centres.
Depressingly, the share of adult Canadians "who went everywhere by car" has risen from two-thirds to three-quarters since 1992, according to the study. Over the same period, the share of Canadians who occasionally walked or rode bikes has dropped from one-quarter to less than one-fifth.
Transit in Canada? A joke.
"How can we explain why Canadians, most of whom live in large metropolitan regions, now need their cars more than ever to go about their daily business?" the study asks.
There are lots of potential answers, beginning with the fact that there is still nothing remotely urban about so-called urban development in Canada today. But attitudes always show up. Age and sex are just as likely as location to create driving dependence, according to the study.
Male baby boomers, no matter where they live, are the worst offenders. They are also the ones, according to my own experience, who complain most trenchantly about the lack of alternatives. But if every car trip is so necessary, why do older people take more than twice as many of them as younger people? The answer is that they can afford to. Even given a reasonable alternative, Canadians who own cars overwhelmingly choose to use them, more and more, for every conceivable trip - including millions of unnecessary ones. They rationalize by saying there is no alternative, which is often true but just as often not.
Look to the future and what do you see? Suburban Calgary from sea to sea.
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