It’s harder to change driving habits than expected, survey finds
WATERLOO REGION — As governments lean on us to drive less, we’re driving as much as ever.
Residents in three local cities drove for 71 per cent of weekday trips they took in 2016, new government data shows. That’s up from 70 per cent, which held steady from 1996 to 2011.
People are driving more often despite better transit, thinner roads, more bicycle lanes, constraints on suburban housing, and warnings of environmental peril.
“I think that it is challenging to change habits,” said Mike Boos, spokesperson for Tri-Cities Transport Action Group, a grassroots lobby that promotes walking, cycling and transit. “Most people will choose to get around by the way they did the day before.”
Boos argues there’s good reason to drive less: it makes us healthier, is safer, eases pollution, and helps to limit climate change.
“If our goal is to severely cut back on (climate-changing) emissions, yes, we are driving in a way that is doing damage to our ability to live on this planet,” he said.
Yet he understands why people drive. His family drives its car less than most households, but uses it for grocery shopping and daycare.
Driving is on the rise partly because residents are taking more trips to and from the region, government data shows. Driving dominates intercity travel.
Yet people are slightly more likely to drive even for trips that stay within Kitchener, Cambridge and Waterloo, where transit, walking and cycling options are more available.
The findings are revealed in a comprehensive transportation census conducted every five years for the Ministry of Transportation. It measures where people go, why and how they get there, based on a travel survey of almost 400,000 people across southern Ontario.
In Kitchener, Cambridge and Waterloo, residents aged 11 or older make just over one million trips on a typical weekday, the travel census found. They go to jobs or schools. They go shopping or run errands. They go out to entertain themselves.
For 85 per cent of these trips, people drive or are passengers when someone else drives. People walk for six per cent of trips they take, followed by Grand River Transit at five per cent.
Cycling has doubled across three local cities since 2011 yet still accounts for only one per cent of trips taken.
Advocates for change argue that better buses, sidewalks, cycling lanes and other measures to dissuade driving are working even as people drive more often.
“If we weren’t doing those things, I think we would be seeing a much greater increase in driving,” Boos said.
“It’s taken us 50 years to get where we’re at with the car being dominant,” said John Cicuttin, regional manager of transit development. “It’s not something you can turn around in a hurry.
“Every day you have to improve the alternatives, and also make your land use more supportive. And we’re seeing that.”
The biggest transportation change since 2011 is a decline in automobile passengers. Data suggests some former passengers are now driving. Others are
walking, some are cycling, and some are riding school buses.
With Kitchener and Waterloo poised to launch a $1-billion rail transit system, travel findings for Grand River Transit are mixed.
Local buses have advanced since 2006 to attract five per cent of all trips taken in 2016. This was accomplished in part by a decade-long expansion that increased bus service by more than one-third.
Yet people were less likely to ride transit in 2016 than in 2011, findings show.
This is consistent with other data showing Grand River Transit experienced the biggest drop in ridership in Ontario between 2013 and 2016. That’s been blamed on low gas prices, construction detours, a provincial transit downturn, changes in student housing, and greater use of school buses.
Advocates for rail transit assert it will change how people get around, when it finally launches after delays.
They cite electric trains running more frequently than buses, more express buses to feed passengers into trains, passenger affinity for trains, and more housing and jobs near train stations.
“I think the balance will tip in the next five years,” Cicuttin said.
Waterloo with its university students has become a cycling capital of sorts. Three per cent of all trips there are now taken by bicycle. This matches cycling in Toronto.
“I’m not at all surprised that Waterloo is by far the leader of the pack,” Boos said.
He said Waterloo has developed its cycling network more systematically than Kitchener.
The travel census reveals you’re twice as likely to cycle in Waterloo as in Kitchener and five times more likely to cycle in Waterloo than in Cambridge.
Taxis, ridesharing (such as Uber), motorcycles and GO Transit remain marginal choices for getting around. Combined, they account for just one per cent of trips taken in 2016.
The Ministry of Transportation secured local findings by surveying 9,790 households representing 23,109 people in the fall of 2016 for what’s called the Transportation Tomorrow Survey.
It’s billed as the largest travel survey ever undertaken anywhere.
The sample size, representing five per cent of local households, is expanded to estimate the full population, adjusted for age and gender using the 2016 census as a guide. Findings were recently made available to planners and researchers through an online portal.