Description
Reading responses should be no more than two pages. the reading response should be in a short essay format (including an introduction and a conclusion paragraph). It has to be single-spaced and the title page and/or references do not count against the page limit. Here is what needs to be answered.
a) Identify and discuss the main thesis of the author(s): what they are arguing and what they found. (3 points)
b) Why did the author(s) write this material? (1 points)
c) What competing perspectives might exist to this reading response? Have others found similar results and/or arrived at similar conclusions? In particular, how does this reading compare to other assigned readings? (4 points)
d) Did the reading lead you to have broader questions (e.g. about transportation policy)? (2 points)
THERE ARE 3 READINGS. TWO OF THEM ARE PDS WHICH ARE MENTIONED DOWN BELOW.
Readings:
– British-North America Act – focusing on “Section VI. Distribution of Legislative Powers” and skimming the rest (https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/consti…).
– Denning, William. “Road Finance in Ontario.” October 12, 2023 Draft.
– Doern, G. Bruce, John Coleman, and Barry E. Prentice. “The Transportation in Cities and Feeral Infrastructure Policy Domain.” In Canadian Multimodal Transport Policy and Governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal, 2019 (pp. 260-299).
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8
The Transportation in Cities and Federal
Infrastructure Policy Domain
Copyright © 2019. McGill-Queen’s University Press. All rights reserved.
introduction
This chapter examines the nature and impact of transportation policy
in Canadian cities and the effect of federal infrastructure spending
on municipal transportation. Cities are hugely important for all kinds
of reasons. First, 65 to 70 per cent of Canadians live in them. Second,
cities are the country’s primary engines and locations of economic
activity. And third, they account for virtually all of Canada’s transportation terminals, which means that most people and goods travel
in cities or through them.
That is no accident. Virtually every major city in the world is located
on a trade route, and those are usually at the confluence of two rivers,
where a river flows into a lake or sea, at a natural harbour, where a
railway line crosses a river, or at the uppermost point of navigation on
a river. Cities grow in those locations because geography and the flow
of commerce make it possible, necessary, or convenient for transportation to serve trade there. “Trade” includes people travelling on business,
which has raised the contribution of airports and air travel to urban
growth since the dawn of commercial aviation in the mid-1900s.
Cities come in all kinds of sizes and characteristics, and no two are
identical. For the purposes of this chapter we concentrate on Canada’s
roughly seven to ten largest urban regions because there is a strong
correlation between a city’s population and the degree to which its
transportation systems fall short of meeting the mobility needs of its
residents. In other words, large cities almost always have more severe
transportation problems than small ones. That makes larger cities
useful objects of study about what works and what does not. But the
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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basic phenomena are universal and vary only in degree. As anyone
who has lived for years in an urban area that grew significantly will
surely attest, congestion and travel delays do not suddenly appear
out of nowhere – they emerge when the city is small and get steadily
worse as it expands.
Infrastructure figures prominently in this chapter, especially the
way in which it is influenced by federal policy and federal spending.
As in earlier chapters, we take a broad view of “infrastructure” to
include physical capital assets – like roads, bridges, parking garages,
subway lines, intermodal terminals, and port facilities – and also the
softer, intellectual/analytical side of infrastructure. By that we mean
things like institutional competence in planning and managing city
layouts, zoning, and traffic movement, and in setting policies for
parking, collecting (or waiving) user fees, and dozens of other things
that affect urban mobility. Both the hard and soft kinds of infrastructure are indispensable, but the former is the only aspect of infrastructure that most people see. Yet when city drivers are stuck in a traffic
jam, their plight is usually caused by a failure on the soft side of things
– poorly designed urban layouts, roadway designs that cause turbulence in the traffic flow, road maintenance that closes lanes at rush
hour, unwillingness of governments to discourage over use of a finite
asset (i.e., road capacity), and so on. In short, “soft” failures cause
most cities to get far less performance out of their physical transportation infrastructure than they could and should. But unfortunately,
that side of infrastructure does not get much shrift in transportation
policy, a finding we discussed earlier in chapters 2 and 6.
This chapter looks at the domain through the lens of two policy
and governance histories. The first is about the elusive quest for urban
mobility covering a period from the 1960s to the present. Mobility
is a sought-after goal but one that has, for decades, been sliding
farther away as the rate of production, ownership, and use of passenger cars overtook road capacity resulting in what one author has
called “carmageddon” (Monbiot 2016). The second policy history,
covering a period from the mid-1990s to the present, deals with the
financing of transportation infrastructure in cities by federal funding
programs and the degree to which they actually contribute to real
mobility benefits instead of merely satisfying the urge to practice
retail distributive politics.
The analysis builds on our discussion in chapter 1 of the dynamics
of congestion in cities as well as the emergence and nature of federal
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Canadian Multimodal Transport Policy and Governance
infrastructure policy in urban policy and governance. Some of the
latter reaches back to the early 1980s and even before, when federal
urban policy was intentionally fostered by the creation in the Pierre
Trudeau era of the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (Cameron
1974) and by policies on housing and infrastructure that appeared
around the same time. There were impacts on municipal transportation infrastructure arising from changes to airport policy and governance, too, and even tourism, as we discussed in chapter 7. And
in chapter 10 we will explore the impact of disruptive technologyenabled transport, for example, from ride-hailing services like Uber
on the municipal taxi industry and the advent of probably even
more far-reaching innovations like driverless cars. When technologies like these succeed in the marketplace, they have the potential
to overturn traditional policy ideas and agendas in the development,
use, and financing of municipal infrastructure depending on how
cities and also provincial governments respond to or adapt governing institutions and how quickly and effectively, given democratic
needs and views.
One of the most salient points we raised in chapter 6, on rail freight
transportation, is the twin concepts of system optimization and
primary goal analysis – in other words, the effect of a primary goal
in determining the direction in which the optimization will go – and
how both are affected detrimentally by policy inertia. The same two
concepts apply to municipalities and mobility as well, hence their
value in offering a complementary focus on complex multimodal
transport policy analysis. In fact, their application is of greater significance here than it was in chapter 6 because the policy and governance environment in cities is even more complex than it is on
railways. That shows up in this chapter’s first policy history. It focuses
on why mobility is increasingly elusive and why it resists policy and
governance efforts to enhance it. It also partly explains why a simple
focus on the reduction of congestion doesn’t take anyone very far in
the direction of improved mobility: because the reduction of congestion mainly represents an indicator of progress and not an actual
solution. Policy inertia is the main feature in our second policy and
governance history, too, but seen through a different lens – the
dynamics of federal infrastructure funding directed to cities, both
transportation and nontransportation alike, and how well it does or
doesn’t work.
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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The domain story in this chapter has connections to a much broader
field of study, i.e., the politics and governance of Canadian cities and
urban places and spheres including the above mentioned analytical
approaches to city planning and land development policy. It is a large
and growing field, as mentioned in chapter 1, but transportation
seldom gets systematic attention in the core academic literature on
the politics and government of cities. That is mainly because so many
other policy fields intersect there (Bradford and Bramwell 2014;
Graham and Andrew 2014; Filion et al. 2015; Broadbent 2002;
Andrew 2001) and they take up most of the headlines. But urban
transportation does get some coverage in the literature, for example,
in general terms (Fowler and Layton 2001) and in terms of infrastructure (Andrew and Morrison 2001), federal infrastructure funding
(Champagne 2014), and innovation in urban economics (Bradford
and Bramwell 2014).
The intersection mentioned above makes it impossible to draw a
clean line between transportation policy and urban policy. Leonardo
da Vinci may have been right in saying “everything connects to everything else,” but that aphorism is cold comfort because dealing properly
with the urban policy aspects of transportation would double or triple
the length of this book. In this chapter we choose to deal with urban
transportation as it is – as a result of the way in which urban planning
and land development policy have encouraged the growth of transportation demand – not as it might be if new paradigms for urban
planning reduced the demand for mobility in the first place (which
would not be a bad thing). Readers interested in the latter would do
well to consult such thoughtful works as Litman 2017; Cervero,
Guerra, and Al 2017; Giuliano and Hanson 2017; and Rodrique,
Comptois, and Slack 2016.
In chapter 1 of this book we mentioned the effect on urban transportation of the structure of city governments, starting with Winnipeg
and Halifax, to see how, if at all, structure affects transportation
holistically as distinct from the way it affects components like roads,
parking, sidewalks, cycle paths, and planning projects. Of course,
differences in the sizes of cities and their growth patterns are important. We discuss large cities like Greater Toronto, Vancouver, and
Montreal in this chapter as well as in chapter 10 where somewhat
smaller municipalities like Edmonton, Calgary, and Ottawa enter the
story in order to broaden the range of cities under discussion.
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Copyright © 2019. McGill-Queen’s University Press. All rights reserved.
t h e elusive q uest f or ur b an mo b ility
( 1 9 6 0 s to present )
The essence of transportation is mobility. From a citizen’s standpoint
that means travelling with few (and ideally no) delays to his or her
movement. From a business’s standpoint that means moving its own
goods in the least amount of time and with the greatest predictability.
But from a policy standpoint, mobility means dealing with the collectivity of movements not just individual ones. There are crucial
differences between the two. Optimization theory, as mentioned in
chapter 6, holds that maximizing the mobility of people or goods
individually actually reduces mobility for everyone as a whole. That
is because “the end result of many local optima is certainly not the
optimum of the total system” (Goldratt 1990, 121).
The big issue is traffic congestion, but, perhaps counterintuitively,
avoiding congestion is not the same thing as achieving mobility.
Congestion sets in when too many individuals access the transportation network at the same time. It is probably the single most serious
constraint on urban mobility. Most city dwellers get trapped in it
every day.
Congestion is likely to appear whenever separately driven objects
are confined to a pathway, like cars on a road, trains on a railway
line, ships in a canal, or aircraft in a flight path.
The notional graph below (adapted from Coleman 2015b, 48) gives
a general idea. The dots represent hypothetical data points, and their
scattering represents variability in what is being “measured.” The two
most important things to retain from the graph are (a) the curve’s
inverted “U” shape, beyond whose peak the flow of traffic starts going
downhill and ultimately collapses, and (b) two “sweet spots” whose
respective locations depend on the choice of primary goal – i.e., undelayed travel or maximum throughput. Those two goals are often used
interchangeably in public discourse, but that promotes soggy thinking
because they represent fundamentally different things. The users of
an artery want undelayed travel. But its owners and financiers usually
want maximum throughput.
The portion of the graph to the right of the peak is an operating
zone where nobody gets any benefit at all. Every driver gets delayed
in traffic, and the artery delivers little (and sometimes even no)
throughput. Yet that is where things always end up whenever there
is an overabundance of vehicles and nothing to constrain their use of
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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High risk zone
for collapse of
traffic speed
and throughput
20
Collapse of
speed and
throughput
Throughput rate (vehicles / time)
18
16
Sweet spot for
undelayed travel
14
12
Sweet spot for maximum
throughput
10
8
6
4
2
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Traffic density
Copyright © 2019. McGill-Queen’s University Press. All rights reserved.
Figure 8.1 Notional throughput vs density on a traffic artery
the artery. Once the traffic density reaches the high-risk zone, mobility
enters a fragile state because even the tiniest of perturbations can
bring traffic to a standstill.
Managing congestion in real life is hard to do because, mathematically speaking, the phenomenon is highly nonlinear and highly stochastic. Traffic engineers work with those concepts all the time, but
it seems doubtful that many city politicians keep them top-of-mind
when (and if) they weigh the effect on traffic flow of the decisions
they need to make. As a result, a lot of things that trigger traffic congestion – four-way stop signs, unsynchronized traffic lights, lane
closures, “traffic calming” measures, and so on – get introduced by
elected officials without fully appreciating the side effects on mobility.
Unfortunately the side effects are seldom positive.
Once a city’s core is designed and built, the downtown streets are
generally fixed in width and therefore in carrying capacity, but as the
city grows, the volume of traffic between the suburbs and the core
goes up. So with each passing year, the roads leading into and out of
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Canadian Multimodal Transport Policy and Governance
the core get busier and more congested. One solution would be widening the downtown streets every so often, to keep pace with the
growing demand for capacity, but that would mean demolishing most
of the buildings every few years to make room for additional lanes.
Our premise in this first policy and governance history is that
municipal transportation – in other words, the mobility of people and
goods in cities – is caught in a seven-way trap that has been growing
for decades and from which, despite recent signs of movement on the
political front, most large cities in Canada seem unlikely to escape.
That is what makes the quest to improve mobility so elusive.
The first trap is NI MB Y ism, a catchy acronym coined in the 1980s
to capture some of the politics of location and place (not in my backyard) and certain aspects of the “free rider problem” that was first
characterized by economists (Fast 2014). If the breadth of applicability
is anything to go by, the “backyard” metaphor is a good one. It relates
to all kinds of urban transport policy and politics, like airports
(Dourado 2016), and is tangled up with any number of other policy
fields that are a part of urban and federal–municipal policy, which
makes it hard to disentangle from transportation in almost any kind
of agenda setting. Worse, as published analyses of N I M BYism show,
most citizens both support it and oppose it at the same time, depending on the nature of their personal interests (Innovative Research
Group 2013; Keenan 2016a, 2016b, 2016c; Devine-Wright 2009).
That makes it exasperatingly complex. Even the word “backyard”
reflects the problem by connoting a fixed place without even acknowledging the existence or importance of personal mobility.
The second trap is related to the governance structure of many
municipalities (Bradford and Bramwell 2014; Graham and Andrew
2014; Filion et al. 2015). City planning often works in ways that
make growth-fuelled congestion worse (Fowler and Layton 2001)
Especially in cases of the forced amalgamation of cities with their
surrounding municipalities – a phenomenon in Ontario, Quebec,
Nova Scotia, and Manitoba but not in Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan,
New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador – the structure of
city councils often gives disproportionate political weight to residents
in the suburban and rural wards, as well as to land developers whose
homebuilding on the city’s periphery encourages people to live outside
the core. That adds traffic to the road network used by those living
outside the car-based core to commute to town and, because of lower
property values, those in suburban and rural wards pay lower taxes,
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Cities and Federal Infrastructure
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which, in turn, are insufficient to expand the capacity of the transportation network in proportion to the increased demand the new
residents are placing on it (Stoney 2016). The only ostensible solution
is a wholesale revamping of municipal governance, zoning, and taxation regimes. This is highly unlikely because each of those things is
politically and democratically complex in the extreme.
The third trap is what we consider to be a widespread failure by
governments to really understand the phenomenon of congestion.
That is unfortunate because such an understanding is crucial for
proper goal setting and for designing policy instruments needed to
achieve whatever primary goal the city has decided upon. Yet we have
seen no evidence in the literature (or elsewhere) of elected officials or
policy advocates recognizing the “peaking” effect of traffic throughput
or the existence of different sweet spots whose respective attractiveness depends on the primary goal actually being pursued.
As a result, even so thoughtful and refreshingly bold a report as
“We Can’t Get There from Here” (Ragan et al. 2015), which advocates
widespread road pricing in Canada, argues that the primary goal (to
use our terminology) should be to reduce congestion per se. It says
that “the primary purpose of congestion pricing is to reduce traffic
congestion” (ibid., 8) and that the “effectiveness” of a policy choice
is synonymous with “reducing congestion” (ibid., 25, table 3).
But reduced congestion is not a “goal”; it is only a proxy for the
goal of undelayed travel or maximum throughput of the artery. And
congestion does not cause the problem; it is only a manifestation of
the causes – i.e., the physics of vehicle performance, the characteristics
of the roadway, the psychology of driver behaviour, and the dynamics
of a complex system when exposed to perturbations. As a result,
public discourse is, and probably always has been, sufficiently fuzzy
when it comes to congestion that the selection of policy instruments
to deal with it in Canadian cities is susceptible to misdirection. That
is often what happens. The fact that many large cities are multiple
city–municipal governments, rather than single organizations, does
not help. The results do not augur well for the use of transportation
infrastructure. To restate the issue, reducing congestion is nothing
more than a means to an end. But what end? Undelayed travel …
even at the expense of reduced throughput?
The fourth trap is the historic unwillingness of governments in
general, and elected officials in particular, to put a price on the use of
roads. That idea is almost unanimously advocated by economists on
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Canadian Multimodal Transport Policy and Governance
the premise that people over-consume things that are underpriced and
because the money raised would help recapitalize the infrastructure.
For example, Flemming et al. (2013) argue for – and in six roundtables
held across the country found general support for – road pricing
(which, oddly, they refer to as “rationing”). But politicians have
avoided or rejected the concept of tolling with almost equal unanimity
on the premise that electors may turf them out if they try it.
Elected officials who ignored that premise in the past often paid a
price at the ballot box. Flemming (2015, 9) describes the results: “The
history of tolling roads and bridges in Canada is neither a pretty
picture nor [one] that gives one much confidence that using tolls and
road pricing are serious mechanisms to solve the … problem.” The
provincial election in British Columbia in May 2017 seems to demonstrate the point. One of the sharper divisions among the three main
political parties was over tolling of two major bridges in the Vancouver
area. The NDP rejected tolls altogether, but the Liberals took a halfway
position. Some observers, such as Meggs 2017 and Bailey 2017,
considered this to be a battleground issue that cost the incumbent
Liberals the election. That might not come as a surprise, in light of a
three-fifths majority in a BC plebiscite two years earlier having rejected
a 0.5 percentage point increase in sales tax to help fund a major
transportation improvement program for Metro Vancouver.
Various bridges in Canada have been tolled over the decades. But
the only tolled roads or highways of which we are aware are Highway
407 in Toronto, the Cobequid Pass in Nova Scotia, the Coquihalla
Highway in BC, and the Canso Causeway in Nova Scotia (Flemming
2015). All were tolled from the outset, but none except Highway 407
has retained (or will retain) its toll beyond the date of paying off the
debt that financed the original construction.
Those routes are provincial or federal. None is municipal. Other
attempts at tolling have failed for political reasons. New Brunswick
planned a toll on a new highway between Moncton and Fredericton
in 2001 but cancelled it because of public outcry (ibid.). The City of
Ottawa explored tolling part of an arterial highway in 2013 but the
provincial minister of transport vetoed it (Willing 2016; Reevely 2016).
Economists are absolutely right about the effectiveness of putting
a price on the use of transportation infrastructure. But the unwillingness of elected officials to do it, traps Canadian cities in a tragedy-ofthe-commons situation in which users are constantly accessing public
roads beyond the maximum carrying capacity of those very roads.
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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That disadvantages everybody, and it benefits nobody – except maybe
politicians wanting to maintain their prospects of reelection.
And so, unless congestion is bad enough and infrastructure users
aggrieved enough to compel daring remedies, as road pricing has been
done with zone-based fees in London, Stockholm, Milan, Singapore,
Norway, and on an experimental basis in New York City (Ragan et
al., 13), not many municipal leaders, and essentially none in Canada,
have yet been willing to bite that bullet.
But this is a fast moving story. The mayors of Toronto and Ottawa,
both of whom stridently rejected the idea of road tolling, began championing tolls (Willing 2016; Reevely 2016; Coyne 2016). And the
growing chorus from advocates like Flemming, Ragan, and others,
may yet see this idea come into practice. From a policy standpoint
that would be positive.
The fifth trap is related to the fourth. Even cities with the political
leadership and courage to introduce user fees lack the authority to
do so without provincial consent. That means there are always two
potential vetoes facing every opportunity, not just one. The only
exceptions are Vancouver and Toronto. No other Canadian city has
delegated authority to apply road-user charges (Ragan et al., 8). In
other words, the probability of a case for tolls succeeding is roughly
the square of the probability of success if only one level of government
has to approve it – for example, ¼ x ¼ = 1/16.
The sixth trap is the hoarding by provincial governments of various
taxing powers and denying them to cities. Apart from property taxes,
municipalities have no effective way of raising revenues for sustained
investment in infrastructure, so they depend largely on transfers from
higher levels of government – but those tend to come in spurts – and
on capital loans that have to be repaid (Champagne 2014; Andrew
2001). It probably reflects provincial wariness of cities externalizing
(to other jurisdictions) the cost of their policy decisions, but it is not
a promising way to enhance urban mobility on a sustained basis.
The seventh trap is the intermixing by governments of multiple
motives for introducing user fees. Historically, tolls were used to raise
money for repaying loans that financed the original construction. But
two other motives have risen to prominence in recent years. The first
is to generate revenue for the repair of existing and failing infrastructure because increasingly cash strapped cities cannot afford to otherwise maintain that infrastructure (Bradford and Bramwell 2014). The
second motive is to discourage people from over accessing the
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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infrastructure. But, tolls will increase mobility only if the fees are set
high enough to cause at least some of the drivers’ financial discomfort.
If the discomfort is moderate and drivers choose alternate routes, tolls
will have helped suppress traffic volumes to around the sweet spot
for maximum throughput. And if the fees, and therefore the discomfort, are set higher still, they will help suppress traffic volumes further,
to around the sweet spot for undelayed travel.
The mayors of Toronto and Ottawa are acting on the first motive
– levying tolls in order to raise money. No elected official of whom
we are aware is advocating tolls for the purpose of reaching a sweet
spot for mobility. Presumably that is either because they don’t grasp
the key concepts shown in figure 8.1 or, more likely, don’t want to
impose the amount of financial discomfort needed to actually discourage road usage. (The concession company managing Highway 407
is effectively pricing to reach a sweet spot for undelayed travel. Traffic
on that artery nearly always moves freely.)
Unfortunately the two newer motives – generating revenue and
discouraging overuse – tend to conflict with each other. A toll set high
enough to raise revenues but low enough to at least try to avoid
angering motorists almost certainly will not be enough to suppress
traffic volumes to reach any sweet spot. As Coyne (2016) puts it, that
approach would be terrible politics because “the worst way to sell
road pricing is as another way for governments to pick your pocket,
rather than cut their [own] costs. [Toronto Mayor John] Tory’s plan
may simply wind up discrediting the whole idea of road tolls.” Then
everyone would be further behind than they are now. Coyne’s point
is reinforced by Flemming (2015, 9), who says that surveys show a
slim majority of Canadians support the idea in principle “but only if
tangible benefits can be proved to emanate from tolling” [emphasis
in original]. With no traffic sweet spot on offer from a municipal
government, it’s hard to imagine road users swooning over the benefit
they will receive from having their tolls used to maintain distant
infrastructure that the city formerly neglected.
There may be reason for optimism in greater Vancouver. Mayors
there began exploring a more extensive plan in the works called “comprehensive mobility pricing.” That may reflect the fact that in 2016,
according to TomTom, a GPS navigation firm, Vancouver was the most
congested city in Canada and fourth in North America, surpassing
even New York. Meanwhile Ottawa, on at least a dozen of its main
arteries, is introducing “complete streets” that feature wider sidewalks,
Doern, G. B., Coleman, J., & Prentice, B. E. (2019). Canadian multimodal transport policy and governance. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
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Cities and Federal Infrastructure
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semiprotected bicycle lanes, cycling stoplights, sculpted intersections,
yield signs, stop signs, new driving patterns, “zig-zaggy white lines of
uncertain meaning,” and so on (Egan 2016). It will be amazing if that
doesn’t make citywide congestion substantially worse.
Unless congestion is debilitating enough to compel progress, about
the only hope for greater mobility and for escaping the seven-way
trap seems to be (a) greater amounts of courage from municipal leaders, (b) a significant transfer of tax points to municipalities, (c) infrastructure banks, (d) the rigorous setting and pursuing, by federal
infrastructure funding programs, of goals for mobility sweet spots,
and (e) driverless cars. We deal with infrastructure programs in the
second policy history in this chapter and with the issue of driverless
cars in chapter 10.
In summary, the use of, and the need for, financial incentives to
improve urban mobility has been driven by the steady growth of
automobile traffic that started in the years following World War II,
aided by municipal governance structures that encourage commuting
from the suburbs. Tolling has been used occasionally over the years,
albeit mainly for bridges rather than roads, but, anyway, the associated fees were nearly always tied to paying off the original loans and
then were removed. There has been little if any uptake by most
Canadian municipalities of setting tolls high enough to discourage
the overuse of transportation infrastructure or even the use of nonfinancial alternatives like ramp metering or variable-rate parking.
Recent noises by Toronto and Ottawa mayors about applying tolls
to selected roads are aimed at raising revenues not at discouraging
overuse, and that is unlikely to produce a sweet spot of any kind.
All this represents policy inertia and the de facto acceptance of a
continuing decline in urban mobility. Unless something bolder is tried,
and succeeds, the credibility of user charges seems likely to be undermined. That would make the prospects of enhancing urban mobility
even dimmer in future than they have been in the past.
f ollo w t h e money :
t h e dodgy evolution o f f ederal f inancing
o f ur b an transport
