IF WE REALLYARE HEADING into a recession, one thing all levels of government ought to be looking at seriously is the state of our transportation infrastructure.

As any of our local commuters will tell you, the infrastructure is in bad shape, particularly in the Greater Toronto Area, where Highway 407 is the only road of any real significance that has been built in the last decade and freeways like 410 and 427 have been lengthened and widened at such a snail's pace that they remain the scenes of daily gridlocks.

Nationally, we still have only the one "national" route in the Trans-Canada Highway, and in Ontario that roadway remains a pathetically inadequate two lanes save for the Ottawa area and short stretches around Sudbury and Thunder Bay that have the four-lane design found in most of Western Canada.

In fact, that road in Northern Ontario can be seen as symptomatic of our transportation infrastructure generally, amounting to a glaring gap that desperately needs attention.

Similar gaps exist in other areas, most notably in rail transportation, where both freight and passenger service today are vestigial remnants of what Canada had 50 years ago when it was a mainly rural country with half today's population of roughly 33 million. In those days, Southern Ontario was criss-crossed by branch lines and locally the CPR was running four passenger trains daily between Toronto and Owen Sound and mixed freight/passenger trains on branch lines between Orangeville and Elora, Teeswater and Walkerton.

Today, for the most part, Canada has only two types of rail passenger service, VIA Rail with hardly any service being offered outside the Windsor-Quebec City corridor, and local commuter services in the Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver "commutersheds."

Of the latter, by far the biggest is the GO Transit rail service, with lines along the Lake Ontario shoreline between Hamilton and Oshawa and radiating out of Toronto to Milton, Georgetown, Barrie, Richmond Hill and Stouffville.

GO Transit itself provides a perfect demonstration of the "gap" problem, offering only two types of service for all the varying circumstances found in the Toronto Commutershed and no plans we know of to fill the yawning gap between the two.

On the one hand, there are the beautiful double-decker commuter trains with up to 12 coaches each capable of accommodating roughly 200 passengers (including standing room).

On the other, there are about 300 buses offering various forms of service but primarily feeding the GO train stations and the Toronto Transit Commission's subway lines.

Although plans have been announced to extend GO train service to Guelph, Bolton and Uxbridge, there currently is no GO service in existence or planned on the rail lines to Orangeville, Alliston or Peterborough, all of which have substantial numbers of residents who work in the Toronto area and now must commute by car.

Interestingly, nearly seven years has passed since the federal transport minister of the day, David Collinette, announced that VIA Rail was preparing to implement a commuter strategy to increase or restore service to such outer-urban communities. Among the plans were commuter trains from Kitchener-Waterloo, Barrie and Peterborough and a deal with GO Transit involving each carrying the other's passengers.

Of course, nothing whatsoever has come of those plans, which may well have been little more than a ministerial pipe dream.

One reason for the inaction may well be the amazing lack of flexibility and imagination demonstrated by both VIA and GO, neither of which has made any attempt to bridge the gap between providing full-service trains capable of carrying large numbers of passengers and no service at all.

Yet there was a day when Canada's two major railways, the CPR and CNR, both recognized the need for small-scale passenger service and met it by purchasing rail diesel cars dubbed Dayliners by CP and Railiners by CN.

Capable of being operated either singly or in multiple units, 398 of the self-propelled passenger cars were built by the Budd Company of Philadelphia, and a few remain in service on VIA runs out of Sudbury and Victoria. A firm in Moncton, N.B., has been refurbishing 24 of the cars, and one (lacking an engine) currently sits outside the new Orangeville train station.

It would be refreshing, indeed, to see either VIA or GO purchase a few of the refurbished 'Budd cars', which apparently can be had for about $200,000 apiece, and put them in service experimentally for commuter runs into Toronto from Kitchener, Orangeville, Alliston and Peterborough.

The expense involved should be compared with the more than $20 million GO spent upgrading the former CNR line between Bradford and Barrie so it could handle the double-decker commuter trains in the restored service out of Barrie.

Bearing in mind that GO expects to be carrying only about 300 passengers daily out of its new Barrie South station, it strikes us that those passengers could have been carried much more economically (and at similar speeds) on a couple of four-unit Budd car trains.

And in the longer term, it surely should be possible to have Bombardier build new self-propelled diesel cars at its Thunder Bay plant for use by both VIA Rail and GO Transit.