OPINION: Why We Need Road Tolls
Posted April 27, 2010 11:08 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Courtesy TheMarkNews.com
Toronto is staring at a transportation crisis. The issues of funding, congestion, and emissions are not going away on their own. It’s time to make the city’s transport systems work for everyone.
Urban tolling is a matter for discussion in hundreds of jurisdictions around the world. There have been many deployments, each with their own reason and design and their own success or failure profiles. While there are none that Toronto should mimic, there are many lessons to glean.
For the kind of tolling we usually think of–that of a limited access highway–the current best practice worldwide is the one we proudly pioneered with Highway 407 where either cameras or transponders are used to identify and charge drivers.
We could easily use the same method on the DVP and the QEW, an old idea recently resurrected by mayoral candidate Sarah Thomson.
Unfortunately, tolling only these two highways is a flawed approach.
When London and Stockholm set up tolling schemes that permitted no alternate access routes for cars or trucks, they saw 20 per cent drops in traffic counts. London had to raise the price of the toll from £5 to £8 to make up for the lost revenue.
Given free, nearby alternatives to both the DVP and QEW, tolled traffic would likely drop far more than 20 per cent.
The traffic diverted onto adjacent roadways would create new bottlenecks, new hazards for pedestrians and cyclists, and shuffle emissions into neighborhoods. And with fewer drivers using the tolled highways, the program would not fulfill its revenue target in 10 years.
But Ms Thomson does Toronto a service by forcing this conversation to the fore. The fact is, we need to start tolling not just highways, but all roads.
As we electrify our personal vehicles, the fuel tax, which currently funds only 70 per cent of our highways and virtually none of our urban streets, will continue to fail us. If you drive an internal combustion vehicle, for how long will you be willing to subsidize my e-car?
The solution lies in new technology.
Satellite-based road use metering can now operate anywhere without 407-style roadside gantries. It requires only a modest number of mobile enforcement spot-checks.
This technology is as private as your personal navigation device, permitting payment without location data leaving your control–or your vehicle. It is more private than the 407 transponder, and can even be anonymous if prepaid.
Smart road use meters, technology in the works for the next-generation of vehicle dashboards, would manage demand-based use fees that depend on time and place. They would provide for our road networks what “time of use” charging does for our electric grid.
And to make the shift from property and fuel taxes to pay-for-use charges even more attractive, the meters would manage parking payment by the minute, remove the need for parking tickets, and even find a spot for you. They would also handle pay-as-you-drive insurance, providing fairer premiums to those who drive less, and offer a voluntary switch from fuel taxes to variable, pay-as-you-go fees, saving money for the motorist who can avoid peak-hour travel in a single-occupant vehicle.
Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, calls this using Finance 2.0 to build Infrastructure 2.0.
But most importantly, it is self-enforcing when it is voluntary since the advantages are designed to outweigh the rewards of cheating.
Regional governments would not need to build tolling infrastructure beyond a geographic database of time-dependent prices for roads and parking. Nothing would need to be mandated. Disinterested drivers could simply ignore it.
Tolling in the style of the 407 is like elevator music nobody likes. Using voluntary smart meters loaded with incentives is like using an iPod to escape the Muzak.
Doesn’t it make sense to rescue Toronto’s surface transportation system with rewarding technology rather than forcing an unpopular system on drivers?
The Mark News is Canada’s online forum for opinion and analysis.
