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Tolling Points

Tolling Helps Low-Income Users by Funding Transit, Cutting Gridlock: Toronto Star

By: 
Bill Cramer
Category: 
Stories

Tolls “remain a fair and justifiable option” for funding public transit and reducing highway gridlock, a reality that helps counter concerns that road pricing harms low-income users, concluded an editorial last week in the Toronto Star, Canada’s second-largest newspaper and one of its most prestigious.

The commentary is nothing if not timely: The Toronto area has just seen the first phase of an eastward extension of the 407 ETR toll road, and Ontario is planning to test wider use of tolls as part of a regional transportation plan for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

And in making the case for tolling, the Star handily demolishes a Canadian government analysis that painted tolling as a “regressive” revenue tool, since it makes no direct distinction between richer or poorer drivers’ ability to pay.

More Than Meets the Eye
The report to Deputy Finance Minister Paul Rochon, obtained by Canadian Press under access to information, concluded that the imbalance was “especially acute in regions where there are fewer substitute methods of transportation.” But the Star counters that the issue “is more complicated than it might appear at first glance.”

You’ll want to keep the paper’s facts and arguments close at hand, the next time you hear the claim that your neighborhood managed lane is a “Lexus Lane”. (Hint: If you look at the data, it’s actually more like a Honda lane.) The Star notes that:

  • “Lower-income” commuters and “the poor” are often two different demographics. “Truly impoverished Canadians can’t afford to drive a car,” the paper notes. “Many are retired or jobless.” So “motorists who routinely commute on highways aren’t necessarily rich, but it’s safe to say the vast majority aren’t at the bottom of the economic ladder.”
  • The poorest of the poor are more likely to rely on transit. And the Star acknowledges—as many tolling agencies are proving—that “road tolls offer a promising way to fund more of this badly needed urban infrastructure.”
  • Governments could also fund expanded transit through higher taxes (an option that may not play quite as badly in some parts of Canada as it does in most of the United States). “But that would do nothing to cut automobile dependency and reduce gridlock,” issues that the larger Canadian cities have in common with America’s most crowded urban corridors.
  • In Canada, as in the U.S., alternate routes are almost always available for drivers who don’t need the added reliability and predictability of a tolled road or lane.

Right Issue. Wrong Argument.
The Canadian government discussion paper that triggered the Toronto Star editorial is asking the right question. Across the range of ideological perspectives on display at U.S. political conventions this week and next, few would disagree that greater opportunity and access build economic success. And in a 21st Century society, transportation is a key to access.

As the Star points out, the federal analysts’ mistake lies in their failure to consider tolling as one tool in the toolbox of transportation funding options to deliver better mobility, by a mix of modes, to everyone who needs it. “The bottom line is that road pricing doesn’t have to pose a huge problem for the poor. Concern for low-income people shouldn’t be used as an argument against tolling systems that could simultaneously boost public transit and cut gridlock,” the paper states.

Those outcomes work to everyone’s benefit—rich, poor and everyone in between.

For more on practical tolling solutions that work, join us at IBTTA’s 84th Annual Meeting and Exhibition,, September 11-14, 2016 in Denver, Colorado.

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