With carbon-emissions concerns and massive recalls, car travel has been taking a beating. Transit is faster, cleaner and cheaper within Canada's major cities, and to get between many of the business centres in our nation of geographic excess, driving would take days.
Not surprisingly, business travellers often opt to fly. How else to explain Air Canada's 10 flights a day, each way, between Ottawa and Montreal - a distance of only 190 kilometres?
Or Porter's 17 week-day flights between Montreal and Toronto.
Or the 26 daily flights Air Canada and WestJet offer between Calgary and Edmonton. With an average of about half an hour into and out of each airport, plus the recommended hour waiting at the airport before your plane departs, that 51-minute flight becomes a three-hour trip.
But with air travel both time consuming and environmentally unfriendly, and with train fares relatively high, it may actually make more sense for business travellers to hit the road when venturing from one business hub to another.
Consider the Calgary-Edmonton route (for which there is no train service): The cost to fly return is just under $300 (including fees and taxes); or you could drive the 300 kilometres in about three hours, with travel expenses of about $190. (I worked this out using the Canadian Automobile Association's recommended gas, depreciation and maintenance costs of 32.1 cents a kilometre.)
If you fly, you still need to get around once you land, either by taxi or rental car (which costs at least $40 a day, plus gas, insurance if you need it and mileage if you cover lengthy distances).
But for many business travellers, it's about time, not money.
Jeff Walker, the CAA's vice-president of public affairs, says the car-convenience threshold for Central and Western Canada is about 4 1/2 hours of drive time. But in Atlantic Canada, where flights are less frequent and train service is often not an option, even a much longer trip may make better sense in a car.
Via Rail officially considers its main competition in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor to be cars, not airlines. "You can leave when you're ready and you can return when you're ready," Via spokeswoman Catherine Kaloutsky says, "whereas if you're flying or taking the train, your schedule has to align with your departure times."
However, she points out you can work on the train, that service is frequent in the Central Canadian corridor (six trains a day between Ottawa and Montreal and four between Montreal and Quebec City) and that, unlike with highways and airports, bad weather has only closed the railway lines once in the past 15 years.
Train travel has become increasingly important overseas: Just last week, all air service was permanently grounded between Zhengzhou and Xian, two Chinese cities recently linked by high-speed rail. Air travel between other closely paired cities, such as Madrid and Barcelona, and Frankfurt and Munich, has similarly withered over the past decade.
Of course, a one-way business seat on Via from Ottawa to Montreal is about $115; the average car-travel cost is $60.
And factoring in the carbon cost? You'll always come out ahead on a train, and air travel beats only cars for short hauls when the planes are full.
Travelling by car will always be cheaper, it can be surprisingly fast (unless you're doing business on a long weekend) and, unlike on a plane, you can be on your Bluetooth the whole way.
But the clincher may be the one thing you'll never get on a plane or a train: a never-ending parade of roadside fast food.