Calgary commuters use sustainable transportation — transit, cycling and walking — slightly more than the national average, according to newly released Statistics Canada data from the 2006 census.

While 22.2 per cent of workers in Canada use sustainable transportation for their commute, 22.4 per cent of Calgarians chose alternatives to the car in 2006. “We’re moving in the right direction,” says Noel Keough, a professor in the U of C’s faculty of environmental design.

However, Calgary is still far behind cities like Montreal (28.8 per cent), Toronto (28) and Vancouver (24.5). Keough says Calgary needs to “aspire to much more” than even these numbers. “You look at places in Europe, and 30 per cent of people are taking their bikes to work,” says Keough, who’s also a senior researcher for Sustainable Calgary. Only 1.3 per cent of Calgarians rode their bicycles to work in 2006, down from 1.5 in 2001. The percentage who chose to walk dropped to 5.4 from 5.9 per cent.

“We still very much have a car-oriented city,” says Keough. “You can get anywhere you want in a car. You can’t get anywhere you want on transit by a long shot.” Nevertheless, transit use went up and car usage went down for Calgary commuters, according to the data. In 2006, 76.6 per cent of Calgary workers used a car to get to work, compared with 80 per cent 10 years prior. The numbers fell similarly in most other Canadian cities.

The percentage of Calgary workers using public transit, meanwhile, went up from 12.6 in 1996 to 15.6 in 2006 — the largest jump in the country. Keough says the city needs to accelerate this positive trend by investing less in roads and more in transit.

The numbers also show that young Calgarians use sustainable transportation more than older ones — a trend seen across the country. Over 34 per cent of Calgarians aged 15 to 24 used sustainable transportation to get to work, compared with 24.7 per cent of people aged 25 to 34 and 19 per cent of Calgarians aged 35 to 44.

The Statistics Canada data also shows that the median commuting distance for Calgarians increased by half a kilometre between 2001 and 2006 to 8.2 kilometres.