Scott Stinson: We can fix traffic congestion with a little political courage
LOL!
By: Scott Stinson
It is traffic season in Toronto.
In truth it’s always traffic season in Toronto, but the combination of summer roadwork, some major infrastructure projects and the construction of a new light-rail system that will perhaps be ready in time to greet our future alien overlords have made the normal problems particularly acute. When you put a destination in Waze it shows you a bunch of angry red lines and then gives you directions to the lake so you can throw yourself in.
The traffic is bad, I’m saying.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Unfortunately, it is about as likely to happen as I am to spontaneously gain the power of flight. (Which would at least solve my traffic problems.)
Tolls. The solution is tolls. Fixed-price tolls, variable-rate tolls, congestion charges, anything that would put a price on roads.
Jennifer Keesmaat, a former city planner, had a thread recently on I Can’t Believe He Called it X, that made the case for emulating the congestion charge introduced more than a decade ago in central London. There was a drop in traffic, plus other side benefits. Jolly good!
This is neither a secret nor an isolated case. Study after study has found tolls meet the goal of reducing traffic, and it’s an idea that gets support both from the left, because it’s good for the environment, and from the right, because it is market-based. There’s even a real-life case of tolls performing the desired job right in Toronto, in the form of Highway 407 that runs across the top of the city.
Now, Highway 407 is not what you would call beloved. It was sold to private investors in an all-time shortsighted move, the tolls can be punishingly high, and that second problem cannot be addressed because of the first. But it’s also an express toll road that does what it says right there on the tin. It is rarely properly congested, and it is always markedly faster than using regular roads or, gasp, trying Highway 401. Drivers have the choice of paying extra to go fast or they can avoid the tolls, use the 401 and get there sometime next Tuesday.
People generally do not like paying more for something they used to get for free — hello, news industry! — and so it’s true that humans tend to grouse about prospective road tolls. As such, politicians have been loath to implement them. While Ontario Premier Doug Ford would sooner strut around in an “I Love Taxes” t-shirt than support road pricing, other parties have hardly championed them. No less an idealist than Kathleen Wynne, in her days as Liberal premier, swore up and down that new “revenue tools” were required to solve gridlock. Advisory panels were formed, some form of tolls were advocated, but major changes were politically unpalatable. Wynne would only go so far as taking a few wee slices of existing High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes and allowing single drivers to purchase permits to use them. Thus, the High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lane was born.
No less an idealist than Andrea Horvath, then the provincial NDP leader, promptly crapped on them as “Lexus lanes,” ignoring the fact that by allowing certain drivers to pay to use HOT lanes, congestion would also be eased for those in the other lanes. Instead of pushing for more tolls to ease gridlock and encourage the use of public transit, Horvath threatened to vote down Wynne’s minority-government budget over the Lexus lanes, before backing down because that was kind of her thing at the time. The small stretches of west-end Toronto highway that became an HOT pilot program eight years ago remain, hilariously, a pilot program today. Successive governments have continued to sell 1,350 HOT permits, covering three months at a time, because inertia is one of government’s greatest strengths.
Wynne did manage to put tolls on a pair of new east-end highways, the 412 and 418, because they connect to the 407 and are thus out there in Toll Country. But the Ford government killed those tolls a couple of years ago, calling them “unfair,” which is a little like saying it’s unfair to have to pay more for the fancy high-octane gasoline at the pumps. Paying more for the benefit of using those faster roads was a choice. Emphasis on “was.” Ford has since moved to ban tolls everywhere he can, including the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway, the two stickiest parts of Toronto’s traffic quagmire.
Do I expect this to change anytime soon? I do not. Between scrapping licence-plate fees, dropping road tolls and reducing gas taxes, Ford is all about encouraging people to drive more. It’s a wonder he hasn’t yet subsidized oil changes.
And if Toronto’s left-leaning Mayor Olivia Chow supports the idea of congestion charges or tolls in the fight against gridlock, she has managed to be quiet about it. The Toronto Board of Trade a few months ago created a task force that it said would consider all options to ease the “congestion crisis” that it said was “at a tipping point.”
But these kinds of panels have never been shy about suggesting road pricing as part of the solution. It’s getting politicians to agree to it that has been the hard part.
Scott Stinson is a writer based in the Toronto suburbs and author of the Unobstructed Views newsletter on Substack.
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I would suggest in addition to tolls you also need really good transit. Every person you see sitting on the bus or tram is one less car in traffic. Transit should be built with the idea that it will be the best way to get somewhere instead of a form of transportation for people who can't afford a car.
To add, if I may, to the bike lane haters: I'm a commuter cyclist (and, yes, pedestrian, transit rider, and driver -- any way to get to work) who for years was ambivalent about bike lanes. I believed road users could find ways to share the road safely. I don't think that any more. In the 21 years I've commuted by bike and by car, the roads have become vastly more hazardous, and not only because the roads are more congested. Drivers are distracted (cellphones, mainly), impaired, angry, and just generally more uncivil (the decline in use of turn signals -- one of the most basic forms of driver civility -- is telling) -- kind of like our society as a whole.
I know evidence has taken a back-seat to ideological shouting in the last bunch of years, but meta-studies of collision investigation data show reliably that drivers are usually at fault when cyclists and pedestrians are injured or killed (speeding, distraction, and unsafe turns are the major problems). There is also plenty of data showing that bike lanes do not meaningfully increase congestion -- whose major causes include on-street parking, roadwork, condo / commercial construction projects that close curbside lanes for months or years, poor traffic light signal timing, and ... other cars.
As for (untrue -- many bike lanes are as congested as the car lanes at rush hour) claims that bike lanes sit empty most of the time, have you seen sidewalks? Most stretches of sidewalk see only a few dozen people a day. But why do we have them? Because they are a basic form of safety built into road design by necessity.
Not anti-car. Just ... can we focus on fixing transit, and speeding up road-work that shuts down major arterials for months every year?