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New Transit Funding Sources

We will see. I anticipate when the TTC lease is up in 2020 that Yorkdale will not renew their lease with them. Those spots are too valuable. They are forever going to be in the business of trying to provide more parking.
 
sixrings said:
We will see. I anticipate when the TTC lease is up in 2020 that Yorkdale will not renew their lease with them. Those spots are too valuable. They are forever going to be in the business of trying to provide more parking.
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I agree with the last bit...and yes, they will always look for ways to provide more parking...but they will never be in the business, as you suggested, of discouraging window shoppers.
 
Platform 27 said:
A lot incorrect here, at least compared to the parking levy proposal that was recommended by Metrolinx.

That levy was not going to be applied to residential parking, only to commercial entities and institutions etc.

The property owner would see the charge, not the parker. Chances are, if a place had paid parking they'd just nudge up the rates to compensate. If a place had free parking, property owners could choose to keep parking free, bake the levy into their cost of doing business like any other tax, and pass it on to consumers. Ideally, it would motivate some more places with free parking to switch to paid parking, and also act as a financial drag on additional surface parking.

I went and re-checked all the gory details (still available here). $1.5 billion was calculated out by KPMG as the total revenue assuming $1/space/day. Metrolinx recommended 25 cents/space/day, pulling in $350 million.
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Thanks for finding the gory details. I hit the Star's paywall so I wasn't able to go back and find how they calculated the $1.5 billion in the reference I gave.

IMHO, a parking levy is the best possible way to fund transit because it addresses one of the most pernicious and subtle subsidies that car drivers get.

Having people pay for parking has a huge psychological impact in choosing the mode of travel. Unless you have a metropass, you see a marginal cost (the fare) every time you decide to take transit. Drivers, in contrast, don't immediately see the price of gas or wear and tear on their vehicle when they choose to make a trip by car. Paid parking puts a price to each trip made.

Not all retailers would make their customers charge for parking, however, and would eat the cost and pass it on to consumers in the form of higher prices. This would advantage retailers downtown and in traditional main streets who face fierce competition from outlet malls and power centres in far-flung exurbs, who rely on provincially-maintained highways and cheap land to give them a competetive advantage over higher-rent, centrally-located retailers.

Parking has many negative consequences beyond the ones I cited earlier about reducing density and providing incentives to car use. It aggravates the urban heat-island effect. It increases pressure on waste-water management systems, potentially requiring expensive municipal expenditures to upgrade the sewer system. It creates "craters in the urban fabric". And it reduces walkability by requiring pedestrians to cross oceans of asphalt.

I doubt that building owners will be able to declare the tax unconstitutional on the basis that they were required by zoning to have parking. You are also required to have sprinklers in certain classes of buildings, car seats if you have children under a certain age, and a helmet if you are biking and are younger than a certain age, but in all these cases you still pay HST. If it were declared illegal for whatever reason, a best case resolution would be to throw out zoning-based parking minimums and let developers build parking spots based on market demand instead of based on car-centric regulations.

Economics 101 tells us we should tax things we don't like and subsidize things we do. Taxing parking is possibly the most effective thing that the provincial government could do to fight sprawl and encourage transit oriented development.
 
TOareaFan said:
And one of the flaws was that it was not going to be a flat based $x/spot/day.....it was going to be variable based on things like assessed value of the property....so this was going to be tied up for a very long time (something approximating "forever") as property owners fought it out over who paid what....and in the odd chance that did not take us out to "forever" fight "b" (ie. property owners fighting municipalities/gov't/OMB over the fairness of taxing spots they never wanted but were forced to build because of zoning by-laws) would fill that gap.
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TOareaFan said:
^who said anything about it being "unconstitutional"...that is just silly.
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Sorry, interpreted what you were saying about them fighting the government as being in court.
 
So much for having an adult conversation about raising funds for transit. What happens when we sell all our furniture and we have nothing left to sell. I don't get why we couldn't implement a province wide parking or gas tax to pay for transit infrastructure.
 
salsa said:
Liberals will sell 60% of Hydro One to fund transit infrastructure

http://www.thestar.com/news/queensp...hydro-one-to-fund-transit-infrastructure.html
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Despite all the scandals, I have generally been tolerant of the Liberal government. I've always taken the time to defend their record because it does have a lot of good in it. But this will end all that for me. This decision will outweigh any positive decision the government can make because this will screw over Ontarians forever or until some strong-willed truly socialist government comes along and re-nationalizes electricity distribution and transmission. I want great transit too but I don't want it at this cost. If the government is too scared to raise taxes on regular people, then raise corporate taxes or EVEN better --- target the elephant in the room by eliminating the Catholic school system!

Sorry, I know this is a transit forum. But I'm just really depressed after seeing this decision.
 
Hold on, this sale will only bring about 10 billion. Where are the rest of the 29 billion coming from?
 
Growing up feeling the effects of Harris's common sense revolution, I am already accustomed for provincial disappointment.

Funding wise, would we not be a loooooot better off if we were a province of Toronto/Golden Horseshoe? Other great (dare I say it, 'world class') cities have been able to do great things by having their own regional government and their tax dollars going to themselves. If the rest of Ontario wants to screw itself over repeatedly, that shouldn't involve us.
 
Funding transit in Ontario 101: Panel of experts recommend a variety of revenue tools --> premier convenes a second panel of experts to study the findings of the previous panel of experts --> government will sell off public assets to pay for transit, which was not one of the recommendations by said experts.
 
Evening said:
Despite all the scandals, I have generally been tolerant of the Liberal government. I've always taken the time to defend their record because it does have a lot of good in it. But this will end all that for me. This decision will outweigh any positive decision the government can make because this will screw over Ontarians forever or until some strong-willed truly socialist government comes along and re-nationalizes electricity distribution and transmission. I want great transit too but I don't want it at this cost. If the government is too scared to raise taxes on regular people, then raise corporate taxes or EVEN better --- target the elephant in the room by eliminating the Catholic school system!

Sorry, I know this is a transit forum. But I'm just really depressed after seeing this decision.
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I wholeheartedly agree with you. I have been able to look past most Liberal scandals because, in my opinion, the good outweighed the bad. But this... it just seems reckless and desperate. There is no way that the public will be financially ahead on this in the long-term when private profit becomes part of the equation. If they wanted to at least keep a majority stake in it, which isn't the case, I would be less worried about it.
 
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