Car still king in Canada
Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 05:33PM Public transit options may have grown over the past decade, but the car is still king in Canada, a new study suggests.
The Statistics Canada survey based on 2007 data, released Tuesday, showed that while 68 per cent of Canadians lived within five minutes of public transit, only 41 per cent of them actually hopped on the bus or train.
And of those households, almost half used public transit for non-work travel, while the rest used it for both work travel and non-work travel.
But the authors still tried to paint a rosy picture of the use of public transit in the country.
"The percentage of Canadians using public transit for the commute to work has increased slightly since the mid-nineties," Statistics Canada said, noting that the number inched up to 15 per cent in 2007 from 14 per cent in 1994.
Canadians who lived in areas where transit was more readily available were more likely to have used transit and also more likely to have used it to get to work.
Households that did not own a vehicle, households with teenagers and those in low income categories were most likely to have used some form of public transit.
Meanwhile, most of the households not using public transit said that having access to a car prevented them from using public transit regularly, while those that did not own a vehicle said they were too close to need public transit.
Other reasons given for not using public transit included inconvenient scheduling, transit being too slow, and the service being too infrequent.
The cost of transit was not an issue for the majority of respondents, the survey suggested.
Regional trends were also noticed in the survey, as Torontonians, of which 90 per cent claimed access to transit, showed to be the most dedicated to public transit. Conversely, those in Quebec City, where 79 per cent of households claimed access, only used transit regularly 31 per cent of the time.
Age played a factor in use as well with adults and teenagers making up 65 per cent of those that used public transit, while seniors 65 years and older used transit only 23 per cent of the time.
Much of the data was derived from a 2007 household and environmental report as well as census data from 1996 and 2006.
Source: CBC News
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2010/06/29/canada-transit-study.html?ref=rss#ixzz0sHQDK8HJ
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