[PRCo] a different sort of Library streetcar

[Derrick Brashear]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 11:22 AM, Fred Schneider
<fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
> Thanks for the mobile library film, Derrick.
>
> What I find astonishing is how those Canadian prairie cities have grown while ours remain marginal at best.   Much of it is their oil boom.   A lot of it was simply Canadians hunting cheaper homes than they could have in metro Toronto … they were escaping.   The Canadians also seem to accept living in smaller homes close together and riding transit more willingly than we do.   As a result, even though they live farther north than we do, and there are a lot more degree days that require oil or gas to heat their homes, their per capita oil consumption is only 12.8 oz higher per day than us … and it is all for heating, not driving.   Our car ownership, per capita, is 36% higher than the Canadians.  I was astonished on on my my trips there a few years ago to see crowds waiting for city buses in the rush hour in Victoria, BC, a city of then of about 75,000.   In a city of that size in the USA, the buses might have three or four people on them at five o'clock, not six or seven people boarding at every street corner.
>
> The library trolley film that Derrick sent tells us Edmonton, the capital city of Alberta, had 92,000 people when the flick was produced in 1942.   Wikipedia tells us that the current population is 812,000.   A little farther to the south is Calgary, which had around 100,000 in the war years and now has a city population of 1.1 million and is the center of a metro area of 1.215 million.  Amazing isn't that last number … the city is 90% of the metro area, not 25% of the metro area like a lot of our big cities.   The people of Calgary live in Calgary, not 40 miles away in the suburbs.
>
> And because of living in the city, they have amazing transit utilization up in the middle of no where.

Tho Edmonton got rid of their trolleybuses. Not sure what that generalizes to.