> > > San Diego area, which, I am told, has insufficient and essentially unusable public transportation. A lot of California cities sprung up very quickly during the gold rush [San Francisco, Sacramento] and as such were not particularly planned for the huge growth that state has experienced since. Insufficient public transportation is but one of the symptoms.

> > One of the (relatively new) light rail lines here in Los Angeles ends virtually at the back door of my workplace, but I've never used it. Why? Because I'd have to drive 20 minutes to get to a station, then ride the train for another 45 minutes to get to work. Driving my own car directly takes me just 40 minutes with more privacy and comfort.
> >
> > ...and then there's the status thing. It's been said that "if you don't own a car in Southern California, you're a nobody". Well, I'm not a gearhead status seeker myself, but there is a definite car culture here.

> > The wonderful freedom of an automobile is that you can go relatively anywhere. Trains and subways run in pre-determined directions at pre-determined times...and you'd need to live within walking distance to the subway/train depot too.
> >

A definite "car culture"? I gather that, out West, one basically needs a car in order to do most any type of significant travel within state. California simply does not HAVE the mass-transit infrastructure to support city-to-city commuting. This is unlike Europe's Eurotrain system (or at least, unlike the fast interurban trains I've been on in the UK -- which has a similar landmass size to California, except bearing twice the population density). As Howard suggests, it's likely that a similar increase in US population will someday force the West Coast to develop mass public transportation because, eventually, there will be no choice. Personal SUVs become a pointless luxury if you end up with no place to 'park' them (except on the freeway itself, during bumper-to-bumper congestion. :-) We're already seeing that "rush hour traffic" in Toronto and its outlying regions lasts pretty well ALL DAY... except for maybe a slight dip at 2 pm in the afternoon.

I note that California wants to roll back its original zero-emissions pollution mandate from its 1988 Clean Air Act policy (CCAA). The regulation had required that zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) make up at least 4% of all new cars and light trucks offered for sale in California by automakers, starting in 2003. The problem is that we've been having trouble developing the battery technology necessary to power electric cars over long distances. We do have Ballard Fuel Cells (proton-exchange membrane fuel cell stacks) which convert any hydrogenated fuels into electricity -- cleanly, without combustion. But do we even *have* a functional ZEV cell transport product yet? Huh. Ballard Power Systems is located in Vancouver... I think I would've enjoyed wandering over there for a visit.


> In Canada, we take this one step further. [...] Canada has very low population density, and most of our population lives very close to the US border [...] If you need to travel between cities, though, public transit loses its appeal. The first issue is distance-- With those sorts of distances, the concept of commuter trains is almost completely infeasible because of economics. [...]

> [...] I used to take the Greyhound to get home for holidays and such, and when I finished and got a job, I bought a car. With Greyhound, I would pay about $100 to get to Medicine Hat and back; with the car, the gas costs me about $20 (maybe as much as $30 with the present inflated gasoline prices). [...] by car, you take whatever you want to bring. For me, that has even included my cat--litterbox in the trunk with a seat folded down, food and water on the floor in the passenger side.
>

Wow. You can actually transport Mocha for distances of 285 km *without* a pet carrier box????????
I'd be afraid of having my cat get underneath the pedals at a crucial time, which has already happened with Pixel. Dave and Graham can drive their 8-yr-old cat Fluffy around in the back seat without a cat crate (Fluffy thinks she's a dog and is really earnest about it), but if Mocha is calm enough to actually want to eat, drink and USE the litterbox while inside the car... then she really MUST be the Ultimate Kittay of teh World!




> Such an arrangement would be out of the question on the bus. Anyway, the point here is that if one ever wants to travel outside one's own city in Canada, it is almost necessary to have a car. The economics alone make that the case.
>

You must mean the economics of convenience, not of cost. If you ever sat down and worked out the total time and cost of properly maintaining a car (in purchase payments, registration and license fees, liability insurance, tune-ups, and parts and labour and two sets of good tires on rims for our Canadian winters, as well as the gas), then after tallying the score, you might very well decide to call up taxis -- or even stretch limosines -- for the rest of your life whenever you want to go to work or to the grocery store.

Other than a mortgage and having children, I don't know anything that eats into a household budget more than owning a car. It's even more pathetic in that by using your car daily in Canada, the relentless road salt and winter conditions effectively limit the car's lifetime to eight to ten years. At that point a car may become more expensive to maintain than buying a new car, and you're back in a cycle of transportation debt again.


> I have been very lucky with my bussing. [...] parking in downtown Calgary is bad enough that the time it would take to drive down, find parking, and then walk from the parking spot to my building would be more than the time it would take to simply bus down, and the bus pass cost $50 a month while parking every day was about $240 a month (which I learned during our transit strike). Overall, our transit system sounds pretty good, if you base it on my experience.
>

Vancouver has a 30 km light-rail transit system called the SkyTrain, which was developed for World Expo '86. It is aboveground and suspended in the air, much like Disney's monorail system -- the views of the city and the harbour side, as seen from SkyTrain, are described as "stunning". It's designed completely as an automated electric, and is very quiet -- it works by induction, and requires no driver or operators. In fact, while I was in Vancouver, the ticket-takers and other attendants were on strike, but the SkyTrains were still going by every 4 minutes. Handy. Of course, unless someone develops an extended open-air canopy system, these trains would be completely useless for winter cities like Edmonton or Montreal. But the concept is handy nonetheless.


> sprawling nature of my city. Public transit to the downtown core is fine, since we have a lot of people and businesses there, but getting around from suburb to suburb is very difficult.
>

What's with the @#$! tendancy in BC and Alberta to have streets that are broken up in multiple places? In Vancouver for example, not only might you have a street called "Douglas," you have FIVE streets side by side called "Douglas" which are entirely disconnected and not easy to switch to, should one happen to drive into the wrong "Douglas" segment. In Alberta it's a little better -- each segment might be further qualified as Douglas Drive, Douglas Crescent, Douglas Blvd, Douglas Place, etc. Even so, we grew to loathe the numerically strict N/S street and E/W avenue topography, arranged by city quadrant (NE, SE, SW, NW). We'd be looking for 20 Av (right-left) SW and end up chasing 20 St (up-down) SE on the map instead, only to find that 20 Avenue SW is on the wrong side of the highway divider. This numeric street designation is the sector cartography method used in both Calgary and Edmonton. Dave's great-grandfather developed it when he was major of Edmonton. I wish I had a time-travel loop so I could hop back and tell him how it was a nice and noble idea, but it's still confusing when the streets fan out all over like curly amoebic scrawl.


> There is a lot more I could say on this subject, but I think I've said enough to make my point about Canada--or at least, the sprawling cities of western Canada. Maybe some other time, I'll talk about how terrains like farmland, forests, and tundra have affected our city placement.

I'd like to hear about that sometime, if you have time.

Wolf "whirlwind tour through geo economics.... meow" spirit