Road Statistics

Question

A student here is looking for data on the % paved roads, automobile density and mean miles driven annually for:
Quebec City, 1989
City of Edmonton, 1989

Two years ago, Joel Rivard described how to use DMTI data in ArcView to get the road lengths for Ontario; what the student wants is paved roads, and for the above cities. I suspect she'd be happy with even just the overall road length.

Any ideas? I realize getting data for these exact years is likely to be problematic, to say the least, so whatever can be obtained would be appreciated.

Answer

I contacted our Geography Division to see if they had the information your student needs and they confirmed that they do not. They did however provide the following suggestions:

"Contact the respective province and their Ministry of Transportation, they should have the percentage of paved roads and arc lengths. We do not collect such attribute information.

GeoBase has a national road network file available for free download (see Natural Resources Canada NRCan website for the link)." I found the following information and link to Geobase on the NRCan website:
http://www.cits.rncan.gc.ca/cit/servlet/CIT/site_id=1&page_id=1-008-001.html