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At last December's Toronto City Council meeting (the same one where the majority of Council decided to vote against using data), they endorsed implementing tolls on the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway by a vote of 32 to 9. The motion was spearheaded by Mayor John Tory, formerly an outspoken critic of road tolls. The toll money was to be dedicated towards maintaining those two highways, as well as funding transit projects.
Fast forward to last week, and the plan to implement tolls came to a screeching halt faster than the westbound Gardiner at York Street. Kathleen Wynne's Liberal government announced that they would not be supporting tolls on the Gardiner and DVP, and instead would be endorsing a 2¢/L increase in the amount of gas tax revenue that is transferred to municipalities, set to take effect in 2019 and be fully phased in by 2022.
The City was willing to consider an option that it had never seriously considered before, and could have implemented as soon as it saw fit, but the Province decided to go another direction and replaced it with a plan that is largely contingent on the party in power remaining in power after the next election. The rationale, according to Wynne, is that the TTC and GO Transit currently do not have enough excess capacity to adequately handle the ridership increase that would result from the Gardiner and DVP being tolled. The ridership numbers certainly back that up, as do trainfulls of anecdotal evidence from uncomfortably crowded commuters.
But rather than examining this decision from a political perspective, let's look at the alternatives that could improve the tolling plan. Many of the options that will be presented in this article have been proposed at various time in many different circles, including at Toronto City Council. Unfortunately however, what sometimes seems like the most effective combination of revenue tool and behavioural modifier isn't always the most politically viable. Road tolls usually score pretty high on the former, but until very recently scored very low on the latter.
While the main goal of both the Province's and the City's proposals is to raise revenue for infrastructure, and specifically transit, there are some important differences between the two. For starters, one of the big advantages of tolling is that it is a far more effective means of changing driver behaviour than simply raising the amount of an existing consumption tax, the price of which is buried inside of the total bill at the gas pump. The desired behaviour changes are generally a switch in modes, either to transit or active transportation.
During the initial debate on tolls prior to the Council vote, City of Toronto Chief Planner Jennifer Keesmaat tweeted this, which perfectly summarizes the effect that tolling could have.
"I think a toll is ridiculous. I'll have to look at something like car pooling.' - resident on @metromorning. *BINGO* it's working already.
— jennifer keesmaat (@jen_keesmaat) November 24, 2016
However, not all changes in driver behaviour are positive. One of the largest criticisms to the current tolling plan, aside from the idea of tolling itself, is the effect it will have on traffic levels on parallel roadways. Often times, these parallel roadways are either also nearly at capacity, or have not been built to handle that volume of traffic, such as collectors and local streets. This could particularly be an issue if those parallel roads happen to have a transit service on them that runs in mixed traffic. As the math done in the King St Pilot Study article shows, delays due to congestion can have a significant impact on the operational costs of a transit route. Using toll money to offset the increased operational costs of a transit route that requires that increase simply due to the existence of the tolls in the first place creates a feedback loop that benefits nobody.
One way to potentially reduce this is to vary the toll rate depending on time of day, or depending on distance travelled. The rough proposal brought to Council called for a $2 flat rate toll, which does not address either of those factors. For anyone who has taken the privately-owned 407 ETR, the concepts of both toll-by-distance and toll-by-time of day are familiar ones. Rather than charging the same amount to drive on the DVP from Bloor Street to Richmond Street at 3 AM as we do from the 401 to Richmond Street at 8 AM, adjusting the toll rate for distance and time of day would reduce the amount of traffic diverted onto surrounding streets.
Variable pricing depending on distance travelled and time of day is firmly grounded in free market economics, specifically the principle of supply and demand. The supply (the amount of road space on the highway) is fixed, so if demand exceeds supply, the price to use that road space should go up. Conversely, if supply exceeds demand, the price to use that road space should go down, if not be free altogether.
An alternative to tolling specific routes is to toll all vehicles entering a specific area, commonly called a Congestion Charge Zone (CCZ). The most famous CCZ is in Central London, where all vehicles entering the specified zone between 7 AM and 6 PM are charged £11.50 ($18.80 CDN) for the day. While this does remove the issue of negatively impacting parallel roadways, it is far more costly to implement, given that every street along the boundary line must be equipped with the required tolling infrastructure.
Toronto does has a slight geographic advantage as compared to London, however. Lake Ontario to the south is a natural boundary, as is the Don Valley River to the east, with only limited crossing points. The Canadian Pacific Railway's North Toronto Subdivision would be a logical northern boundary, but the western boundary would be by far the most complicated, as no natural or easy man-made delineation line exists, unless the City were to get very bold and extend the zone to High Park or the Humber River. Do we use Spadina Ave? Bathurst St? A point in between? In almost any scenario, local streets would need to be set up with tolling infrastructure, or dead-ended to remove the possibility of a toll-free cut through.
While Metrolinx has outlined a wide variety of potential revenue tools, such as an Employee Payroll Tax, a dedicated percentage of the HST, a Commercial Parking Space fee, and a Vehicle Registration Tax, there appears to be little political appetite for these types of solutions at varying levels of government. As mentioned earlier, even the very notion of tolling roads was considered to be a third rail in politics, something you just didn't touch.
With the political winds for tolling changing for the better, at least at the municipal level for now, the discussion needs to change from "should we?" to "how should we?". There are a variety of options that can still keep the desired revenue and have the same positive impacts on driver behaviour (such as shifting to transit or active transportation), but can reduce the harmful effects that the current tolling plan is likely to have.
You can join the discussion about road tolls in our forum, or in the comments section below.
