Media Clipping — Saturday, December 2, 2006, The Chronicle-Herald

GPI report: a speed bump for car culture

By Ralph Surette

IF WE'RE going to get serious about the environment, which we seem to have at least started doing recently, one of the first things we've got to talk about is transportation, the largest source of pollution, direct and indirect, locally and globally.

Talking about transportation, however, is not easy. The car, the truck, highways – these are virtually the icons of a secular North American religion. To argue that we need less highway-building, not more, and incentives to discourage driving and encourage more benign forms of transportation and social organization is more or less to blaspheme against the accepted order.

It just happened again. GPI Atlantic, which tracks the true costs – mainly the hidden environmental costs – of various social and economic phenomena, puts out a large report pointing out the true cost of auto transport and saying we have to change our ways; and the provincial transportation minister, sticking to dogma, essentially says "no way." "It's a fact of life that you do have to travel to hospitals," said Angus MacIsaac, doggedly missing the point. "You do have to travel for services in central areas. You have to travel to shop." End of story.

Or not, as we high-road our way to environmental and economic unsustainability, polluting freely and making ourselves ever more vulnerable to the fuel price shocks of the future. GPI points out that Canada has the second highest – after the U.S. – transportation energy consumption, a staggering 70 per cent above the average of the 30 countries of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). And in Nova Scotia, 38 per cent of energy use is devoted to transportation – a percentage surpassed only by P.E.I.

Meanwhile the move to more car travel, more urban sprawl around metropolitan Halifax, more truck freight at the expense of rail, more minivans and SUVs, continues unabated. This as, says GPI, "increased motorized transport has started to reverse in many democratic countries." This is in keeping with the energy pattern generally – Canada as out-of-control Global Energy Hog No. 2, behind the U.S., while European and advanced Asian countries forge ahead in controlling greenhouse emissions and other pollutants.

The point that grabbed the headlines was that transportation is becoming less affordable, that it is in fact the largest cost faced by Nova Scotian households, and apparently getting larger. This leads to GPI's deeper contention: that the more we spend on cars, highways and associated costs, the more we drag down our own finances and the whole economy (not to mention the environment) because we don't make either cars or car parts. Except for minimal sales and service, that's all money headed elsewhere.

GPI makes some 18 recommendations. Most of them are about urban planning and traffic control relevant mainly to Halifax Regional Municipality, which has been working on a big plan for 25 years but somehow keeps losing to the automobile imperative, but also comes up with the intriguing notion of linking insurance and registration fees to mileage driven.

But ultimately, this is the kicker: an increase in fuel and vehicle taxes, offset by tax decreases in non-transportation fields. On the broader scale, this is your "carbon tax," that ideally would go hand in hand with a cleanout of perverse subsidies all over the tax system that encourage energy waste, and would happen at both the federal and provincial levels. To various degrees, this is the way European countries have put the brakes on the car culture.

Are we ready to talk about that? Unfortunately, no. Any political party making that suggestion will get its head blown off. So instead of the gradual increase in fuel prices which would encourage a gradual change in habits and infrastructure, and that would be both environmentally and economically beneficial, we're going to sit around waiting for the next price shock and howl at governments and oil companies when it happens.

Transportation has been a hot topic in the Maritimes forever, with the environmental aspect introduced about 40 years ago. Except for the blocking of an idiotic "harbour drive" project along the waterfront of downtown Halifax in the late 1960s, the car culture has rolled over every objection since. There have been reports before. GPI's is the most sophisticated by far, and will hopefully go some way to putting the brakes on a problem that's rolling downhill with increasing speed.

(rsurette@herald.ca)

Ralph Surette is a veteran freelance journalist living in Yarmouth County