Market Snapshot: Record-high electric vehicle sales in Canada. Release date: 2022-10-26. Electric vehicle (EV) sales are increasing in Canada and across the world.Footnote1A record 86,032 electric vehicles were registered in Canada in 2021, making up 5.3% of total vehicle regions for that year. In comparison, there were 56,165 electric vehicles registrations (2.9% of total registrations) in 2019 and 19,696 (1% of total registrations) in 2017. The first quarter of 2022 saw the highest EV quarterly registrations on record,Footnote2 at 26,018 (7.7% of total registrations for the period). Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) make up roughly 75% of new electric vehicle registrations, with the rest going to plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV). See Table 1 in the article for a description of the different vehicle types.  https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2022/market-snapshot-record-high-electric-vehicle-sales-canada.html      

CANADA- The Road Is Being Paved for EV Charging Stations on Strata Properties 13 July 2023.The Government of B.C. is paving the way for more access to electric vehicle (“EV”) charging stations on strata properties. Recently passed legislation allows strata corporations and owners to more easily install EV charging infrastructure. Effective May 11, 2023, strata corporations no longer need a ¾ vote to approve EV charging decisions – only a majority vote is required. The government has indicated that lower voting thresholds will make it easier for EV infrastructure to be approved and installed as an expense funded by a strata corporation’s contingency reserve fund. To use the majority vote threshold, the expense must be.....Related to installing EV charging infrastructure or managing the electricity it uses.........or Necessary to obtain a report on the installation or operation of EV charging infrastructure or the electricity management—this could include an EV ready report or an electrical planning report. The voting threshold has also been lowered to majority votes in the following situation........If the strata corporation needs to acquire or dispose of personal property in order to install, operate, maintain, or repair the EV charging infrastructure, or to manage the electricity used by EV charging. An example of personal property would be an EV charging station owned by the strata corporation.       https://www.bcfsa.ca/about-us/news/blog/road-being-paved-ev-charging-stations-on-strata-properties#:~:text=Recently%20passed%20legislation%20allows%20strata,a%20majority%20vote%20is%20required.

Sick of flying? It's well known in transportation circles that for distances of around 250 miles - that's the distance from Dallas to Houston, or New York to Boston - high-speed trains are the best option. From city center to city center, they're faster, more reliable and more environmentally friendly than either flying or driving. That's why European and Asian countries are frantically laying high-speed tracks to connect their population centers. We'll probably never see those kinds of trains in the United States. Although there are plenty of routes that have been identified as viable for high-speed rail (see this PDF study) such as Washington-New York-Boston, San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco, Dallas-Houston-Austin and Detroit-Chicago-St. Louis, short-term thinking and incompetence seem to rule the day here in the U.S. Building high-speed train routes requires a long-term, multi-decade commitment which our current private industry funding structure, with its focus on short-term results, can't provide. And it looks like our government, while offering massive subsidies to keep private airlines afloat, is incompetent to build an alternative: see California's over-budget railway project between Bakersfield and Merced as an example. In theory, that's a high-speed train between Los Angeles and San Francisco; in practice, it's a money hole in the middle of the state. So let's travel and see how it's done right. These 10 train routes have the fastest maximum speeds in the world. They all go somewhere you'd want to go. They're almost all faster than flying, if you count traveling to and from airports and going through security. We'll count down from ten to one.    https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/822478-trains-vs-planes-the-world-s-10-fastest-rail-pairs

RAIL-CO2 EMISSIONS, DECARBONISATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION Lawrence, Martha, and Richard Bullock. 2022. The Role of Rail in Decarbonizing Transport in Developing Countries. Mobility and Transport Connectivity Series. © World Bank 36 IEA (2022), Rail, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/rail,  Rail will play a crucial role in realising a decarbonised future by 2050. Rail is energy efficient and low carbon by design due to the low adhesion between train and track, when compared to other motorised modes of transport. In order to be on track for achieving the Paris Agreement objectives, IEA projections require a more than 40% increase in the railways’ share of mobility by 2030, namely through a shift from aviation and road transport.This shift, along with the continued efforts from rail to decarbonise operations, would potentially save a cumulative 460Mt of CO2 emissions by 2050, as estimated by the IEA World Energy Outlook. 37 net zero emissions (NZE) scenario for 2050, IEA Rail’s global energy mix is currently equally split between electricity and diesel, though electricity is projected to account for 65% of the share by 2030. Currently, two thirds of the total energy consumption for freight comes from diesel, but this must also be reduced to 40% by 2030. Over the last 20 years, rail has continually improved its performance to support action on SDG13, reducing its carbon intensity (indicator 13.2.2 the “Total greenhouse gas emissions per year”). UIC members have publicly declared their intention to decarbonise and contribute to the SDGs by signing the UIC Railway Climate Declaration. In 2022, two new members, Sydney Trains and the Korean National Railways, joined and also declared their commitment to supporting the Paris Agreement objectives by decarbonising operations by 2050 and delivering on the SDGs.                https://uic.org/IMG/pdf/global-rail-sustainability-report-2022.p

Public transportation gets people where they’re going while emitting far fewer climate-warming greenhouse gases than private cars. The reason is simple efficiency: while cars usually carry just one or two people at a time, a bus can carry 50 or more, and a train in a large city may carry thousands. Since transportation creates more than a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, shifting people from cars to public transit can do a lot to lower our impact on the climate. But people will only choose public transportation when it is their most convenient option for getting around. Thinking about how we use street space.....Public transportation works best where lots of people live and work. A train or subway line is a big investment, and only makes economic sense if it attracts plenty of riders. Buses need less infrastructure and can pencil out in smaller towns and less-dense neighborhoods, but still need a steady flow of users to run cost-effectively. Unsurprisingly, this means public transportation is most popular in and around cities. But it also means choices about land use have a big effect on public transit. To grow ridership, cities and towns need to allow, and encourage, abundant housing and businesses near train and bus stops, a practice called “transit-oriented development.” With the right design choices, good public transit is self-reinforcing. A train line that runs quickly and frequently between an area’s main business and population centers will attract plenty of riders, and give people and firms even more reason to locate close to stations. This creates a virtuous feedback loop, where well-trafficked stations bring in more ridership, more businesses, and higher property values,3 which lead to more tax revenues, which can be used to run trains even more frequently or add new lines reaching more neighborhoods. A variety of transit options can all support each other by creating a “synergy,” with the busiest routes served by trains, further routes served by buses or bike shares, and commuter rail or high-speed rail between cities extending the system even further. Public transportation around the world........ In wealthy countries with a history of transit-oriented development—like Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and Germany—public transit use is high, and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation are relatively low. In the U.S., which has invested more in highways, public transit use has fallen dramatically since the 1960s,5 and transportation emits more greenhouse gases than any other sector of the economy. But in much of the developing world, public transit use is high mainly because most residents can’t afford cars. Fast-growing countries from Kenya to Colombia to the Philippines have a chance to build on a culture of public transit to keep emissions from transportation low even as their people grow wealthier. In China, the swift economic growth of the past 40 years has been paired with investments in the world’s largest rail and high-speed rail networks, keeping large numbers of riders in the public transit system even as more and more of them can afford their own cars......read on              https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation