Ontario needs road pricing, not more revenues
By Andrew Coyne, Postmedia News April 3, 2013 7:06 PM
http://www.canada.com/Ontario+needs+road+pricing+more+revenues/8191448/story.html#ixzz2PRpYihSx
Could road tolls be part of Ontario’s future? Remarkably, an idea long derided as outlandish, political suicide at best, is shaping up to be one of the central issues in the next provincial election. Yet such are the ways of politics that both sides have managed to get it wrong.
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The point of a toll, like any price, is to charge people the full cost of their use of resources. The point of a subsidy is to hide the true costs from them: in this case, to induce more people to use transit than would do if they had to pay the full price.
But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Don’t we want to encourage more people to use transit? No, we don’t. What we are trying to do, remember, is to reduce congestion. Paying people to ride the bus or the train, most of whom would have done so anyway, is a costly and roundabout way to go about it, with horrendous side-effects.
It’s unnecessary, for starters. Start charging drivers the full cost to use the roads, and you will automatically tip the balance in favour of transit for many of them (and, as a bonus, speed up the trip: Not only do drivers pay now to use the “free” roads, in the form of time stuck in traffic, so do bus passengers).
What is more, subsidizing transit contributes to another problem more typically blamed on private cars: sprawl. If people had to pay the full cost to use the roads, they would be less likely to live miles out of town, more likely to want to live near where they worked, with all of the associated benefits of density. But just as subsidizing the roads artificially encourages the commuter lifestyle, so does subsidizing transit. The Metrolinx scheme would help to create the very problem it seeks to “solve.”
Indeed, subsidizing transit isn’t even a very good way to get people to use transit. The biggest reason most people don’t take the bus isn’t the price. It’s the deep unpleasantness of the experience. If we were really serious about encouraging transit use, we wouldn’t entrust it to clanking great statist monopolies like (God save us) the Toronto Transit Commission. We’d turn it over to entrepreneurs whose livelihoods depended on finding ways to make it more comfortable and convenient.
Or if the province is determined to underwrite the Metrolinx adventure, it can find the revenues within its existing budget: on this I am with Wynne’s critics. She is brave and right to raise the subject of tolls, and they are wrong to oppose it. But she is wrong to allow a perfectly good idea to be painted as a revenue grab. The province doesn’t need more revenues. It needs road pricing.
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