You are putting some excellent questions. Thank you.
We have just completed nine months of work on visioning the future, on trying to get a sense of what Canadian communities will look like in 30 years, and how public transport, particularly local community and regional transportation, can best serve those needs.
We've learned about an aging population. We've learned about yet increasing concentrations of Canadians in cities. We've learned about the difficulty of access to cheap energy and mobility and the need for more collective transportation of all kinds and about the willingness of Canadians to move away from low-density to more mixed-use, higher-density, compact communities.
I think ultimately that's what it's going to come down to--where Canadians will live, where Canadians will work, where we go to school, where we play, which determines our transportation needs. It's clear from all the research we've seen that has gone into this visioning exercise that the vast majority of travel is going to be regional and local. It's going to be within and around the communities where people live. But the willingness to move from personal to collective transportation, from driving alone in a car, for example, to riding together in a bus or a train, is going to be driven by the locational advantages of access.
To me, getting to a high-speed train is going to depend on whether there is an easy way for me to get to that station by transit, by bus, by taxi, or by commuter train. Or am I going to drive? And if I drive, we're back to the same model. Once I'm in my car, how far do I take it? Do I take it to the airport or to a train station, or do I drive all the way to my destination?
So it's a complex question you've asked, and I've probably presented you with a complex answer, but it's very interrelated. I think people's willingness to change their lifestyle to be more sustainable is there. It's going to be up to us to provide those integrated systems of land use, and that's a municipal question of where we grow and how we grow our communities to what sort of transportation systems we put in place to serve the needs of those residents.