Quote:
Originally Posted by GlassCity
[snip]
By making them pay to drive so that "poor people can bus around faster" Translink's reputation would fall even more.
[snip]
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^ Out of curiosity, where is this quote from? That's right up there with Pamela Sauder's infamous "...creme de la creme of Vancouver..." quote when she spoke before Vancouver City Council about the proposed routing of the Canada Line (then RAV Line) through Kerrisdale along Arbutus.
I didn't find a single Google match on that quote; the closest thing was a Jeremy Clarkson quote about him not understanding bus lanes and being incredulous that poor people should get somewhere faster than motorists stuck in traffic. In that instance he's missing the point: in the absence of transit being a viable, time competitive option, those transit users who can transition to private vehicle use will occupy far more space on the roadway than was allocated to the bus lane and traffic would be worse.
Consider the George Massey Tunnel. Traffic is terrible every day and yet by the Ministry of Transportation's own numbers 26% of the people travelling through the tunnel do so on transit buses. The bus lanes on Hwy 99 and queue jumper rights at the tunnel entrance make transit a time and cost competitive enough option that thousands of travellers opt to not drive. Some are captive transit users who cannot drive due to their age, absence of a drivers licence, or ability to afford the cost of private transportation, but especially for those transit users in the Hwy 99 corridor/South of the Fraser transit catchment area, most transit users are likely choice users who
could afford to drive but are taking transit to save money and potentially time. Many if not most of these transit users on this specific transit corridor would change to private vehicle use in the absence of the time- and cost-competitive transit options and that would make congestion on Hwy 99 and in the tunnel
significantly worse. The transit service is saving road users time and money at peak periods of congestion by preventing additional vehicles from using finite road space.
With regards to your other comment that it's unfair to make people pay for what's always been "free", your quotes are exactly on the mark since roads aren't free by any stretch of the imagination. Nor are the police free, hospitals free, schools, etc. Besides the cost of designing, building, managing, maintaining, and policing roads, there is the societal cost of congestion due to their inefficient use. We can either continue to price road access through taxes and subsidies
and congestion alone, or we can price road access through a fee-for-use on the direct beneficiaries (the road user), lower taxes and fewer subsidies from everyone else, and
less congestion. I choose the latter.
For just about all other public goods that do not have an up front fee-for-use system we use some form of triage. Whether that's the 911 dispatcher weighing the severity of your call against the finite resources of first responders or a nurse in the ER of a hospital weighing your malady against the finite resources of the hospital. We have no such triage system for the road network other than congestion. Modest non-punitive road access fees, ideally linked to congestion and/or time of day, will influence road users' travel decision making. For trips that are elastic, meaning you have discretion over when and if to undertake them, there is a cost incentive to not undertake these trips during periods of high congestion or on routes that are at capacity. Not only does this save the road user money but also time due avoiding congestion
and it helps reduce congestion and delay for those road users that have inelastic trips to conduct. All of this is described by the graph on the previous page and it's also intuitive from the lived experience of anyone who has consciously chosen to avoid a trip during rush how that they can perform later, knowing that both time and money are being saved through the decision. The fact that postponement of the trip to an off-peak period reduces congestion for everyone else is in all likelihood a totally absent factor from the decision-making process.
We also already have a real-world model for travel pricing: transit fares. Translink's peak pricing model and zone-based system deters travel for those with elastic trips during peak periods and aims to maximize the efficiency of the system while accomplishing its core responsibility of providing mobility on demand. The physical space inside a transit vehicle at any given time is finite - just as space on a road at any given time is finite - and when a traveller is using the space in the transit vehicle or on the road, nobody else can use the same space. If an elastic trip is conducted during peak travel times it contributes to system congestion and prevents someone with an inelastic trip from using that space thereby delaying them and costing time. In the absence of any pricing signal, and with baseline funding through taxes and subsidy having no bearing on travel decision making, all that is left to influence travel decision making is congestion.
Everyone directly benefits from the efficient use of a transportation network and the corollary of decreased congestion while only the traveller directly benefits from their use of the transport network. For this reason, flat-rate unlimited-use transit passes cause congestion and work against system transit efficiency and are the practical transit equivalent of "free" road access for drivers. They take away the peak price signal and rely on congestion alone to influence travel decisions. There's a social equity dimension to unlimited use passes for those with incomes that are low enough that affording per-trip pricing would severely constrain their mobility, just as there would be for road pricing, but these are social welfare factors best addressed on an individual basis, just as we do through social safety net programs intended to address the cost of food, shelter, etc., for very low income individuals and households. Designing the entire transportation network to address these issues, with the consequence being transportation network congestion and inefficiency, is problematic to say the least.
We don't make food, clothes, and housing free for everyone, supported solely through taxes and with congestion in the form of endless Soviet-style lineups and wait-lists governing people's ability to obtain the free services and the subsequent scarcity of the finite goods determining what we receive and when. But that's precisely how our roads work.
[Looks like this post is how I spent my lunch hour today]
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