Statscan public transit spin is out of control
NEIL REYNOLDS
Globe and Mail Update
May 28, 2008 at 6:00 AM EDT
Public transit is making progress of a kind in Canada – though it's not always visible.
In its report called Commuting Patterns, Statistics Canada noted last year that the percentage of Canadians who drive to work fell to 80.0 per cent in 2006, a decline – wait for it – of 0.7 per cent in the past decade. The car maintains its enduring edge over public transit across the entire country.
Thus, 78.2 per cent of Quebec commuters get to work by car (the lowest level in any of the provinces); 90.7 per cent of Prince Edward Island commuters get to work by car (the highest). In Ontario, it's 79.2 per cent.
In New Brunswick, it's 89.1 per cent. In Saskatchewan, it's 86.5 per cent.
Statscan nevertheless manages to declare a victory of sorts for what it calls “sustainable transportation” – an arbitrary classification that appears to measure advances in public transit but slyly encompasses everyone who walks or cycles to work. By this definition, an exhaust-belching bus is “sustainable” but no car ever is. From a supposedly objective statistical agency, this sort of manipulation is a perversion.
More people walk to work, by the way, than you might think. Indeed, in some cities, far more people walk to work than use public transit. In Kingston, for example, 10 per cent of workers walk and another 2.2 per cent cycle – together, three times as many people as the 3.5 per cent of workers who use public transit.
Using this lenient definition, and analyzing selected municipalities, Statscan confidently asserts a feel-good conclusion: “Between 2001 and 2006, 20 of the 25 municipalities with the highest number of workers reported an increase in the use of sustainable transportation.” By this standard, 43.0 per cent of Toronto workers now use “sustainable transportation,” an increase of 1.9 per cent (the largest increase in the selected municipalities).
Statscan finds further progress in public transit still by arbitrarily distinguishing between workers who drive cars and workers who merely ride in them. Thus: “[In the period from 2001 through 2006], there was a decrease in the proportion of drivers, from 73.8 per cent of workers to 72.3 per cent.” The agency concludes, again confidently: “The proportion of drivers is decreasing.”
But wait. We already know that 80.0 per cent of Canadian workers drive to work, right? How can Statscan simultaneously report that only 72.3 per cent drive to work? Well, quite easily – by not counting the passengers in the 10 million cars, vans and pickup trucks that (as the agency appears to imply) carry only “drivers.”
Elsewhere, Statscan concedes that 714,900 additional workers chose to drive to work in 2006 (compared with 2001) – and finds solace in the fact that a larger number still (1,000,000) chose cars over public transit in the five years from 1996 through 2001.
The proportion of commuters who used public transit did increase marginally from 2001 through 2006 – from 10.5 per cent to 11.0 per cent. Halifax went from 2.8 per cent to 2.9 per cent. Saint John went from 4.3 per cent to 4.4 per cent. Vancouver went from 11.5 per cent to 16.5 per cent – an extraordinary increase.
Helpful though this increase may have been in producing a statistical increase in public transit use, this particular success was essentially phony, arising as it did from the infamous public transit strike in 2001 (which many Vancouver drivers still recall as a Golden Age of hassle-free commuting).
On the other hand, notwithstanding its apparent rise in “sustainable transportation,” Toronto fell from 22.4 per cent to 22.2 per cent. Windsor fell from 3.1 per cent to 2.9 per cent. Trois-Rivières fell from 3.0 per cent to 2.4 per cent. Saskatoon fell from 4.1 per cent to 3.7 per cent.
In fact, the biggest real change in this five-year period was probably the increase in passengers in cars. In 2001, 6.9 per cent of workers got to work as passengers in cars; in 2007, 7.7 per cent. As Statscan does note, this was a significant increase – an honest-to-God increase of 22.6 per cent (or more than 200,000 people). In the previous five-year period, passengers had increased by only 2.7 per cent.
Public transit is important enough as a commuter service, notably in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa.
Yet there is no good reason to exaggerate this importance – especially since the subsidies provided for it inflate the use of it. Cars routinely get 80 per cent of people to work in this country. Other forms of transportation (walking, cycling, inline skating, snowmobiling, etc.) routinely get another 8.9 per cent of people to work.
(Without benefit of subsidies, these self-reliant commuters equal public transit users, or outnumber them, in five provinces.)
Here is the measure of Canada's reliance on public transit to get people to work: Newfoundland and Labrador, 1.9 per cent; PEI, 0.5 per cent; Nova Scotia, 5.9 per cent; New Brunswick, 2.0 per cent; Quebec, 12.8 per cent; Ontario, 12.9 per cent; Manitoba, 8.9 per cent; Saskatchewan, 2.2 per cent; Alberta, 9.2 per cent; British Columbia, 10.3 per cent.
All in all, only a very small minority of Canadians appear to need much help getting to work.
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