I really didn't want to get into a tit-for-tat Canada vs. U.S. argument, but I have to say that Canada is alot bigger and I really don't see your point. I can, and have, taken the city bus to anywhere I wanted to go--even the country. I'm sorry that you can't take mass transit to more places but don't fault me for that.
If you live in a city you're in a transportation hub and can travel to many places. If you live outside of the city, however, you have no such choices without traveling into the city to go somewhere else not on the same line. I know Ottawa rather well and there's not much of anything around Ottawa. Try to see the situation from the perspective of people who don't live or work in Ottawa. They just want to get from one podunk town to another, not in and out of Ottawa. They don't earn Ottawa salaries either. For them, increased gas prices are crippling.
We have similar problems with urban sprawl. We have cities (Barrie, Burlington, Kanata, for example) that are giant suburbs, but you can still take the bus pretty much anywhere you want.
Then you have a great system. You also have a country where 75% of the people live within 100 miles of the US border. That concentrates your population heavily along a single band where the great majority of people can get to the great majority of other people. The transit system doesn't have to be as widespread. Here in the US however, rural areas run from the Canadian border to the southern border over much of the interior of the country.
Burn more oil until the acid rain dissolves the buildings and then your problems are neatly solved.
Well that's mostly the coal plants out in the midwest. I agree, they're awful though I don't think your solution is ecologically or economically feasible.
I sympathize, but a change is needed, regardless. Dependance on oil does no good to anybody. Changing a country's infrastructure would be incredibly expensive, but not impossible. It's a shame that you didn't start it decades ago, but instead you Yanks will be scrambling to catch up when the wells start to run dry.
I hope you realize, "you Yanks," sounds like your standing in front of me pointing an indignant finger at my chest. It comes off as rude.
Yes, change is needed, yes it's expensive. The reason it didn't start decades ago was because it wasn't economically feasible to do so. Building suburbs is cheaper than rebuilding cities. Building highways was seen as the way of the future because carrying people and freight was cheaper and faster than rail. All those wonderful just-in-time practices that make one business survive while the other dies rely on trucking and fossil fuels. When the baby boom began we had to put all those people somewhere and all that open rural space using a highway to get to the urban areas was the cheapest way to put a couple, their 2.5 kids, and their car in business. Time went on and houses got bigger, cars got bigger, and still people ran to the suburbs as soon as they had babies to avoid raising their kids in cities that were on the decline. Office and industrial parks could be built off existing highways for far less than building rail. Many of these places have people working in them who live from all different points in the surrounding area. There's no way you could manage a bus system for all or even most employees of these sorts of facilities.
Couple this with a declining standard of living, and it's disaster. There are people who commute to New York every day from nearly 100 miles away not because they want to live in the sticks but because they can't afford to live in a safe neighborhood on what they earn. Where I am, 50 miles outside New York, rents and housing prices are astronomical because most people here work in the city and make city salaries. The people who actually work in my county can't afford to live in the county and so they commute from even further north and there is just no way you could devise a workable mass transit system that collects 2-3 people from one town, 10 from another, and 2 from yet another when those towns are 15 or 20 miles apart on 2-lane roads. People would never get to where they work.
No hypocrisy here. I've spent plenty of time in the U.S. and I've been near your neck of the woods quite often. I've been to all four corners of the US, and I've seen some great solutions (I love Seattles monorail) and some awful solutions (10-lane highways in L.A.). Have you ever been to a country, like Denmark, Iceland or Canada where there is far less depencence on cars? The problem isn't oil, it's attitude. I am honestly shocked that you take offence to somebody who suggests that America should become less dependent on cars.
Denmark is tiny, flat, and most of the population is concentrated in and around Copenhagen. Iceland has about 300,000 people, most of which live right around Reykjavik and the rest live on a ring road surrounding the island. Canada would be most like the US save that vast areas of Canada are nearly or wholly unoccupied. To make mass transit work you need to have densely populated areas with the rural areas not terribly far from any densely populated area. Europe did not embrace the suburb/exurb/rural model to anything like the extent of the US because it was not feasible and even in the few places that did, like the moribund housing estates of the home counties around London, the distances are many times smaller while the densities remained higher.
Here in the US, the most common desirable suburban lot is 3 acres. Towns in building booms increase lot size to offset uncontrolled growth and make those lots low-density single-family homes because the towns don't have the money to support services for high-density housing. Here in my town everyone I grew-up with has left because they were priced out of town by the astronomical property taxes and the taxes are astronomical because essential services have to be spread over such a geographically large area of low density homes. And the whole reason this happened to my town was because the suburbs closer to the city were gaining so much in value that people there were priced out. It's a domino effect and it's occurring because, as a nation, we're getting poorer, not richer, and the gulf between rich and poor is widening. Our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents who lived through the biggest economic boom in the history of the world that was the United States couldn't imagine that the country would decline. Sure there might be setbacks, but on the whole, they thought the United States would last for 1,000 years and built the country we're inheriting to resemble a prosperous nation of unlimited energy and economic prosperity. These are the same generations who enacted social programs that will benefit themselves and leave the younger generations with a huge bill that they can't afford. Social Security is a pyramid scheme and grew like one because no one in power foresaw that costs would outstrip earnings and that the baby boom would be followed by a baby bust. There's a mythic culture in the US that says you will do better than your parents. You will have a bigger house, nicer car, more bling. When you look at the average closet space in a house built in the 1920s (a time of prosperity) and now, you find that new houses have closets that equal the entire floorspace of the 1920s house! We were told by people who fervently believed it, you will be better than we were, you will have more of everything if you just work hard in school, get a degree, and work for a good corporation your entire life. And they not only programmed their kids and their kids' kids with that message, but built what is over half the country in that image. Europe and the rest of the world didn't have that. For their part, they have had the same frontiers they've always had, the same limited space. Canada does have the space, but not the same mythos.
