One person per car is colossally inefficient

Re: “Committee doesn’t need to meet in person,” letter, Oct. 20.

I noted that some of the letters critical of Mike Hicks’s request to change the Capital Regional District committee meeting time were written from Victoria addresses, so I assume they came from people who don’t have to drive into town from the western communities.

The rush-hour situation around Victoria is a disgrace. The vast majority of vehicles in the Colwood Crawl carry only a driver — which gives us a rough average of a 150 “horses” (horsepower) per person. That’s wasteful and colossally inefficient. It shows the barrenness of our collective thinking, citizens and politicians alike. And to think that a hundred years ago — with a much smaller population — we had several train and tram lines to serve the Greater Victoria area.

In 1990, it took me 35 minutes to drive from my house near Sooke to my downtown office — at rush hour. Now, the same trip can easily take twice that time. It’s clearly time to develop other options than an everexpanding highway network, light-rail transit, for example, that does not use the highway system. To get that, we need property developers to bear a much greater proportion of the wider traffic/transit-related infrastructure costs that have resulted from the explosion of development we’ve seen in the last few years.

What I don’t understand is why, when most of our 13 municipalities fall over themselves to “broaden the tax base,” our taxes never actually go down. Michael Elcock Victoria