ONE THING Canadians who travel abroad soon discover is that we have a lot to learn from Europeans when it comes to transportation generally, and public transit in particular.

At a time when Canada has almost no rail passenger service outside the Montreal-Windsor corridor and pathetically slow service even within it, railways in Europe offer high-speed service just about everywhere, with many of the rail lines being fully electrified.

Granted, developing a first-class transportation network in Canada has been, and always will be, a big challenge because of our demographics, with nearly all our 30-million-plus residents spread out more than 5,000 kilometres between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the vast majority of us living within a few hours' drive of the U.S. border.

Although transportation has been a political hot potato ever since completion of a transcontinental railway was made a condition of British Columbia's entry into Confederation, precious little has been done toward bringing either our road or rail networks up to 21st Century standards.

We see it as nothing short of scandalous that 60 years after Parliament passed the Trans-Canada Highway Act in 1949, the TCH remains the only "national" highway, and that except for a few short stretches near Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie it's still just an ordinary, two-lane road between Arnprior and the Manitoba border, a distance of more than 2,000 kilometres.

Sadly, at a time when all the national political parties are subscribing to a need for economic stimulus and improvements to infrastructure, none has a platform that includes a promise to work with the provinces on development of a national highway grid complementing the U.S. Interstate system, the stimulus scheme that President Dwight D. Eisenhower promoted as a massive public works project during a mid-1950s recession.

Whatever else might be said, it's surely obvious that in an era of continental free trade, Canadian farmers and manufacturers alike suffer from having a grossly inadequate a system of highways, lacking even a single coast-tocoast freeway.

Even the current project of "twinning" the TCH is showing progress only east and west of Ontario, with four lanes now available through most of Quebec and the Maritimes as well as across all three Prairie Provinces, save for a short stretch in western Manitoba and the middle of Calgary. (Outside of Ontario's, the major challenge remaining is in B.C., where widening the TCH to four lanes through the two mountain passes between Revelstoke and the Alberta border poses a gargantuan task.)

But inadequate as our road transportation network surely is, it's clearly superior to our existing forms of public transit.

Even in Toronto, the only Canadian city that has retained a streetcar system, public transit is second-class by comparison with that offered in European cities of similar size.

Part of the problem is obviously a lack of adequate funding by all levels of government. Although everyone gives lip service to the idea of getting commuters out of their cars, the best option most of them have been given is an occasional bus that may or may not connect with a commuter train and likely won't deliver them close to their places of employment.

Currently, commuters in the Greater Toronto Area are being served, more or less, by a multiplicity of local transit services that all must get most of their revenue from fares that are so high they prevent patronage from ever reaching the point where the service being offered would be frequent, let alone speedy.

In fact, the only entity that currently offers both relatively cheap fares and speedy service is GO Transit. (As an example, anyone commuting between Orangeville and downtown Toronto has the option of GO service that will get them to Union Station in roughly 90 minutes. A bus that leaves Orangeville shortly before 6:30 a.m. each weekday and connects with an express GO train at Brampton sees its passengers arrive at the Union shortly before 8 a.m., and the return fare at a little over $18 is less than two hours' underground parking in downtown Toronto.)

But one thing both provincially owned GO and federally owned Via Rail have in common is huge gaps in the levels of service they provide. With Via, the gap is between fairly frequent service between Toronto and Montreal and none at all between Toronto and places like Orangeville, Goderich, Collingwood, Sudbury and Peterborough that still have rail lines. With GO, it's between the huge, doubledeck trains and the only other mode, ordinary intercity buses.

Ironically, both Via and GO could fill these gaps by introducing self-propelled rail cars similar to the Dayliners that used to move at up to 70 m.p.h. between Toronto and Owen Sound.

For some unexplained reason, neither GO nor Via has ever explained its disinterest in modern versions of the Dayliner which Canada's own Bombardier is selling abroad. Pity.