VANCOUVER—Between rising gas prices — due partly to increasing carbon and fuel taxes — and a growing number of public transit and cycling options, B.C. residents are still buying more cars per capita, according to new data released by Statistics Canada.

Fewer vehicles on the roads mean people will spend less time stuck in gridlock and fewer carbon emissions are being released into the air, but there were about 78,000 more registered vehicles in 2017 compared to 2016 in B.C., according to Statistics Canada. The agency released the data Friday, showing there are now more than 3.7 million vehicles registered in B.C.

National numbers paint a similar picture throughout Canada, said Werner Antweiler, an economist at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.

“It’s a disconcerting picture,” he said in an interview.

“When you look at the overall numbers over the last several years, over a five-year or 10- or 15-year period, the number of vehicles has grown faster than the number of people in the country.”

But the silver lining is that B.C. residents are driving less despite buying more cars, said Antweiler, who has been tracking not only vehicle registration for the past decade but also fuel consumption.

Statistics Canada has not released fuel consumption numbers since 2015, but the available data shows a trend of people driving less in B.C. even though they are buying more cars, he said.

In other words, fuel consumption is decreasing per capita while the number of vehicles per capita continues to increase.

Antweiler suggested people may be changing their driving habits due to high fuel prices and carbon taxes, but they are not necessarily comfortable living without a car altogether.

“We are actually seeing that people are more frugal in terms of their vehicle use, and they are responding even stronger in jurisdictions where we have seen fuel prices increase — so carbon pricing and fuel pricing is working,” he said.

B.C.’s carbon tax is $35 per tonne, which works out to 7.78 cents per litre and will continue to increase annually until it hits $50 per tonne in 2021. Residents in the Metro Vancouver area also pay an additional fuel tax of 25.5 cents per litre of gas.

Some of that money goes toward building more public transit infrastructure, like rapid transit and bus routes.

Metro Vancouver residents are already choosing public transit more often than ever, according to data released by TransLink Friday.

Monthly boardings on the SkyTrain in May 2018 were up by about 9 per cent compared to the same time last year. The transit authority said ridership across all public transit options — SeaBus, West Coast Express, bus, and SkyTrain — were at an all-time high, with the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver being the only caveat.

“New service and capacity is being used as fast as we can get it out there,” said Kevin Desmond, CEO of TransLink.

“This kind of growth isn’t being seen anywhere else in Canada and the United States. Ridership growth like this proves there’s a great deal of latent demand for transit, and we are working to satisfy it.”

It’s a start, but policy-makers need to build public transit infrastructure that is “dense enough for more people to feel comfortable about making the switch” from cars to public transit, said Antweiler.

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Building a subway along Broadway and creating more priority lanes for buses would help, he said.

He added Vancouver has also led Canadian cities in improving the bike-lane network, encouraging more people to cycle instead of drive. By 2015, more than half of trips in Vancouver were taken either by foot, public transit or bike.

Metro Vancouver officials are currently considering charging drivers to use the region’s roads through a model called mobility pricing. Proponents say it would decrease congestion and carbon emissions.

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