Coming to the end of the line on driver resistance

No one likes tolls and taxes, but paying for roads can’t be avoided.

Thestar.com
Sept. 24, 2015
By Christopher Hume

In hindsight, the $60 vehicle registration fee looks like a bargain. By the time the city and province are done implementing their road tolls, highway charges, HOT lanes and so on, driving will be a whole lot more expensive.

It might have helped if drivers had accepted former mayor David Miller’s much-despised fee back in 2008. It could have served as evidence of the motoring public’s maturity. But, egged on by Miller’s dim-witted successor, Rob Ford, they stamped their collective foot and went ballistic instead.

It was simply too much for the city’s much put-upon drivers. The very thought that they should have to pay above and beyond the usual taxes to maintain our roads was, well, unfair. Those streets and highways belong to us, after all; why should we have to pay for them?

The short answer, of course, is that no one is going to. Already, our refusal to cover even the costs of basic upkeep has got us into a fine mess on the Gardiner Expressway. Work has been delayed so long at this point, the raised highway is literally crumbling. Procrastination is no longer an option.

Still, no one has a clue what to do. The mayor’s various schemes will put enormous financial pressure on taxpayers, who will end up paying many times the cost of tearing down a portion of the Gardiner’s east end. When the dust settles, the price tag will be just short of $3.8 billion. By contrast, the cost of tearing it down would be $470 million.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the Pan American Games, Premier Kathleen Wynne has figured out that High Occupancy Vehicle lanes make sense. She wants to bring them back, but this time with a fee for those driving without the required number of passengers.

For the city, the most attractive option would be some sort of levy on the Don Valley Parkway as well as the Gardiner. Details such as technology and tolling versus pricing are a long way off. In the meantime, council is clearly doing everything possible to delay the thing it fears most - making a decision.

City staff, on the other hand, has been obliging. After an initial report released in 2014 recommending removal of the east end of the Gardiner, civic servants reversed themselves and are now trying to help their bosses justify keeping it up.

Even though their Gardiner arguments don’t have a leg to stand on, retention is not a hard sell in this city. Indeed, as Tory has already discovered, those same taxpayers who shout and scream about councillors’ office expenses are quite happy to see billions spent propping up an elevated folly or building a buried one.

Regardless, the point is that we don’t have the billions needed to continue as we have for the past 50 or 60 years. That means some adjustment on our part. In the meantime, there will be anger, confusion and resentment. Some Toronto councillors, for example, are already suggesting tolls should apply only to 905ers, not those from the 416.

That would be a mistake; tolls are a user fee, something most Torontonians - certainly, transit riders - are used to.

But before such details are addressed, Torontonians will have to make a big emotional adjustment as they move into the next phase of Toronto’s urban evolution. Either we learn to accept the inevitable or join in a futile fight against the future.

Even the Americans, who see a socialist plot behind every tax dollar, have made peace with road tolls. We will, too, with or without our leaders.