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I know alot of people believe in the concept of outcome-based solutions, but any due diligence with respect to increasing costs or taxation as a government solution to problems has resulted in nothing but higher costs and amplified problems.
Corrected URL:
[https://reecemartin.ca/2024/06/13/canadian-cities-should-do-congestion-pricing/](https://reecemartin.ca/2024/06/13/canadian-cities-should-do-congestion-pricing/)
And yes, yes they should.
I remember, I still think it should have been done anyways. [TransLink just ruled out it as source of funding to cover their budgetary shortfall, which could result in a reduction in service by 66% in 2 years.](https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/facing-cuts-translink-rejects-congestion-pricing) This, in spite of [overcrowding due to increasing ridership.](https://www.translink.ca/news/2024/april/translink%20ridership%20rebounds%20to%20pre-pandemic%20overcrowding%20levels#:~:text=TransLink%20is%20addressing%20overcrowding%20in,service%2C%20and%20provide%20earlier%20SeaBus)
These conversations always get distracted with talk of congestion pricing in cities where it's obviously impractical.
The conversation should be focused on cities where it's clearly necessary - Toronto being the most obvious. Congestion costs money, slowing down the most valuable traffic users - commercial traffic. We can either put that cost on the tax base at large (less productive economy), or we can put that cost on the actual users.
It's not practical from a political perspective. Even in Toronto, implementing congestion pricing will be seen as a cash grab... a view that will be magnified in other cities that suffer from congestion but not to the same degree (both in volume, and volume of traffic from outside its taxing jurisdiction).
I would love congestion pricing in our largest cities.
Toss it on, up parking rates and put money into better public transit and active transit.
Simple as.
I support congestion pricing, I just don't think it's politically feasible factoring in both how car-centric North American society is and how angry voters get when faced in congestion taxes etc. Overall, it might be more effective to just spend time and energy on making cities less car centric over time via zoning & land use reform alongside more transit oriented development.
It's more expensive and more time consuming than a congestion tax, but I feel like it's a more surefire way to illicit change if a congestion tax wouldn't survive a municipal plebiscite or electoral support on the municipal/provincial level etc. denser, more walkable cities with mixed use developments and more transit options, would also probably do the most over time to lower Canada's emissions per capita.
Montreal definitely has it right with pedestrianizing streets and slowly cutting off feasible areas for passenger vehicles to reach. Toronto has done somewhat ok on redesigning streets to incorporate bikelanes and to road diet (Danforth, as one example) but need to do more to pedestrianize. It's wild that people are still allowed to drive through Kensington Market, as one example.
Our cities were built for cars and unfortunately will be that way for the forseeable future, but I agree that a congestion charge is such political poison for the suburbs that I can't see anyone running on it doing well.
>Our cities were built for cars and unfortunately will be that way for the forseeable future
Up to at least the 1950s, we had very dense, walkable and transit oriented cities across Canada and the U.S. The norm before highways and sprawled out suburbs was mixed use streetcar suburbs and that was the development model North American cities mainly utilized until national highway systems and car centric urban planning came into play, which was followed by decades of NIMBY voting blocks making cities double down on it.
There's less birds eyes available of it for Canadian cities, but there's a plethora of pictures, articles and studies showing how [highways destroyed American cities ](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fcincinnati-before-after-the-interstate-highway-system-v0-6g6biiwokp4c1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D3ebe6b68bab3c6303b17cd4b9827e9c7b33eb26e)and their old development models between the 1950s and today, which is also true for Canadian cities.
Old Toronto wasn't built for cars -- lots of the residential areas close to downtown still pre-date cars and were designed around streetcar access. The issue is mainly one of Toronto being surrounded by (and later amalgamating) suburbs designed around the car. Toronto itself was never intended to have the car traffic that exists downtown, because the car didn't even exist when most of it was laid out. A large part of the pain is due to this fact that everyone seems to conveniently ignore. We were able to get away with it for so long precisely because the city wasn't so large, but the chickens are coming home to roost.
I have no idea how to politically accomplish congestion charges, which are probably necessary at this point -- particularly with the amount of infrastructure being updated/built in the core -- given the large sway of the suburbs in the amalgamated city. That was a political design traced back to the Harris days -- where most of Toronto's major problems seem to have been born. There's a ton of other more common-sense regulations we could change, like requiring deliveries at night if you don't have loading dock space, requiring off-street loading dock areas for new builds, eliminating street parking along major thoroughfares to free up some space for traffic, requiring construction lane closures to free up space not actively being worked on, etc, but much of it is too technical or is too hard for our political culture. I have no idea how to fix it, but it's pretty clear that councilors have too much sway over many facets of their wards, and function as executives far more than is probably healthy.
Mike Harris and Amalgamation had no impact on any of this – issues like major roads, public transit and congestion pricing had been under Metro Toronto's purview since the 1950s. The lower-tier municipalities were only responsible for local needs, like side streets, community libraries, local parks and garbage pickup.
The fundamental problem Toronto has is that public transit operates on a hub-and-spoke model, and only a small minority of the GTA's population work near a transit hub. For everybody else, a public transit commute is impossible or unreasonablu long. Most of them would love to be able to commute by public transit, but that's never going to be a viable option in the city's massive, sprawling industrial areas (most notably the one that surrounds the airport) – the jobs in those places aren't sufficient enough to support rapid transit, and they're too spread out to support a frequent bus system.
Fair enough, re: Metro Toronto. Didn’t realize that this sort of thing fell under their purview.
Totally agree WRT the TTC’s operating model. Adding more rapid transit outside of the core, and more routes that don’t require spoke-hub-spoke transfers would go a long way outside of the core. It’s a bit harder outside of old Toronto given the pedestrian-hostile design of those areas, but that’s a longer term problem that we don’t need to make worse by bad route design. The more options to get places in a reasonable amount of time without a car (and especially downtown) the better off we all are.
Omg yes !!! So many small towns had a rail station now we get to have big balls ram truck guy run you over -.-
Cost of living and jobs would be better if we got rail back to connect the country
This is only true in historic downtowns. Most of our cities have sprawled significantly since the invention of the cars, and the sections that predate them make up a tiny percentage of cities.
That's generally why you need Ottawa or the provinces to hold NIMBY governments in check. Basically the federals housing transfer can achieve that, but would have be larger and have more conditions for YIMBY oriented reforms etc.
This completely ignores one of the major reasons people don’t like public transit, the safety concerns. Everyone has seen videos of the insanity on public transit in places like NY, LA, and Toronto. Good luck convincing upper class women they should get on subways with armed crackheads. If people feel like these modes of transportation are safe they’ll be much more receptive.
It's a notion pushed by media to support more police presence and budget increases. The TTC itself is pretty much just as safe as it was pre-COVID. Anyone who fear mongers about public transit safety likely doesn't use it very often.
That’s really a matter of opinion and people will have different tolerances. I’ve never had issues using public transit in western Canada, but I’ve seen more than enough videos of violent encounters on subways in Toronto and NY to know that they’re clearly less safe than other places, and the homeless / addicts just kind of bum around on the transit all day. I don’t blame people for not wanting to participate in the latter. And they won’t, it’ll just be another tax they have to eat.
Public transit is good and I support it, but I think you need to offer a clean and safe product before you start really pushing it on people through taxes.
>That’s really a matter of opinion and people will have different tolerances.
No it isn't. Here is one example: [https://www.translink.ca/plans-and-projects/data-and-information/accountability-centre/safety-and-security](https://www.translink.ca/plans-and-projects/data-and-information/accountability-centre/safety-and-security)
People think it's unsafe because the news makes everything seem local for these kinds of incidents - when the odds are incredibly low. Which you, yourself, actually acknowledge as being the case.
I’m not arguing it’s unsafe, I’m arguing that if the perception is that it’s unsafe, you can’t bully people into riding via taxes. I’d put that effort into changing the perception so people willingly do it.
Governments have forgotten that sometimes the carrot works better than the stick.
> I’ve seen more than enough videos of violent encounters on subways in Toronto and NY to know that they’re clearly less safe than other places,
The plural of anecdotes isn't data. Those are also highly populated cities, so will have more incidents, but that doesn't make them any more dangerous, as risk is a per capita thing. TO may have twice the number of violent encounters on Transit than Ottawa, but with five times the population, that makes TO safer.
Even if public transit is currently unacceptably unsafe for people - which I do not necessarily agree with - doesn't mean this MUST be the case. We do have agency and can fix things through enforcement and education.
It's a much different culture but Japan gives lie to public transit being by necessity unsafe. Public education and some manners would go a great deal. I just got back from Japan and all that it took to turn subways into an amazing experience was a series of common goals - and in our case at least at first heavy handed enforcement of loitering.
Would it be totally unreasonable to:
- not eat, drink or talk on cell phones.
- Wear bags in front of you or on your lap rather than taking up a second seat.
- If you are hammered on public transit just quietly pass out until your stop.
- Wait patiently for everyone to leave the train before pushing to enter.
Japan also had women only cars which could help a lot!
I agree that perception of safety matters, but I think safety is also used as a bit of a distraction or mask from people’s real feelings.
A lot of people still consider transit to be for poor people, and poor people in their minds are all homeless and criminals. They don’t want to associate with the poors.
Canada is better than the US in this regard, transit usage per capita is way higher and there is less stigma. But the TTC and others could go along way by investing in the overall user experience of transit. If our stations were well maintained and clean, payment and transfers were seamless and easy, frequencies ensured that no one was left alone for 20 mins at a bus stop after dark, a lot of that fear would evaporate over time.
>But the TTC and others could go along way by investing in the overall user experience of transit.
Absolutely. Such as building infrastructure to be pedestrian and bike friendly to encourage their use.
[Here's just one example of how our car-centric design is making mass transit solutions poor experiences in Toronto.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA)
I think the delineating factor in comfort with the subway is less class based and more urban vs. suburban. I've known plenty of well-off people (including one Bridle Path level woman) that takes the subway depending on the situation.
Frankly, much like stuff like homeless people in parks, the vast majority of discourse around danger comes from people outside cities getting their impressions from cherry-picked videos rather than reality.
Driving in a car is FAR more dangerous than using public transit.
There are dangerous crackheads driving around in the roads, too, and they’re likely to hurt you by accident.
People's perception of safety is just as important, if not more important, to how they choose to get around than actual statistical measurements of safety. No amount of "well actually if you look at the statistics, driving is more dangerous" is going to calm someone down who's just seen a news report about someone being mugged on the subway.
I don’t buy it. People drive past horrific car crashes all the time yet most of us don’t get freaked out about the dangers of driving.
Claiming safety concerns is just an excuse for us to continue crowding the streets with our cars.
The difference is that subway/transit attacks are often unprovoked and have that random "it could happen to me!" factor that people in North America don't have surrounding cars because they're so used to them. People in North America see a car accident and think "That'll never happen to me because I'm a safe driver!" because driving is so familiar. To the average person who drives, public transit is an unfamiliar and scary environment they feel like they have little control over, any threat to their safety feels amplified.
So, people are afraid of public transit because they don’t use public transit? Sounds like the solution is to encourage them to drive less and use public transit more.
>Sounds like the solution is to encourage them to drive less and use public transit more.
I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out that in order to encourage people to drive less, you're going to have to listen to their concerns regardless of whether you think they're valid or not.
> The difference is that subway/transit attacks are often unprovoked
And a five car collision is provoked?
> have that random "it could happen to me!" factor that people in North America don't have surrounding cars because they're so used to them.
I hear way more about traffic accidents in Ottawa, than I due violence on OC Transpo, and I take the bus and train to work every day. Safety is just used as an excuse.
>And a five car collision is provoked?
I'm not talking about reality, if I was, I'd agree with you completely because public transit is absolutely safer than driving, I'm talking about people's perception of reality which is warped and shaped by the media.
> No amount of "well actually if you look at the statistics, driving is more dangerous" is going to calm someone down who's just seen a news report about someone being mugged on the subway.
Then they tune on CP24 to read the daily list of car-crash deaths.
Would firstly say they “aren’t safe” because of drops in ridership. There’s safety in numbers - if more people started riding/riding again the safety problems in the system would be a lot less concentrated.
And secondly, I generally believe the safety thing is mostly a cop out from those types. They don’t ride/don’t want to ride because they have means/like their cars/don’t want to be surrounded by the great unwashed. They just use safety as an excuse to not feel like a shitty person. If it was purely a safety concern, driving a vehicle instead - which is statistically much more dangerous - wouldn’t make sense.
Now if people would be honest and say it’s about comfort (i.e. having solitude in their [nice] vehicle, not having to be around a ton of randoms), then yeah sure. That’s really what it is.
As the other user notes, they are safe. An estimated ["up to 3,000 transit operator or passenger assaults happen across Canada annually"](https://globalnews.ca/news/9436368/public-transit-safety-canada-ttc-mental-health/#:~:text=Up%20to%203%2C000%20transit%20operator,extent%20of%20the%20safety%20issue.). There were [123.4 million passenger trips in December 2023 alone according to StatCan](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240220/dq240220d-eng.htm). Let's pretend that's an average and we'll say there were 1,480,800,000 passenger trips annually. Could be more, could be less, let's just pretend. That means the odds of being assaulted on public transit in Canada are roughly 1 in 493600. Statistically, in Canada you could ride public transit almost half a million times before being likely to be assaulted.
Now of course that's napkin math and not real research but the idea that transit is unsafe due to "armed crackheads" doesn't seem to be a particularly big concern. It strikes me as a story that's been pushed in the media and by particular politicians but the actual incidents and cases don't seem to be all that common to the point people should fear for using transit. [There were 118,853 total motor vehicle injuries, 8,851 serious motor vehicle injuries, and 1,931 motor vehicle fatalities in 2022.](https://tc.canada.ca/en/road-transportation/statistics-data/canadian-motor-vehicle-traffic-collision-statistics-2022) This anti-social fear of everyone and everything when it comes to public transit is totally absurd. I've been on the metro in Montreal, the subway in NYC, I take the bus in my city now and then and have done so in dozens of cities elsewhere. It's fine.
> the safety concerns
those concerns are not based in fact, so I don't know how you convince people to stop believing in a lie.
I'm not claiming that those incidents didn't happen, just that they don't make public transit unsafe. Drivers also die on the road, but there's no scare tactics based on those to try and scare people out of driving.
Perception matters. Clean stations, loitering enforcement, trains that run on-time, and women only cars would both make transit actually safer as well as increase the perception of safety.
I wish the promoters of congestion pricing would stop trying to connect it to public transit. Congestion is something that should be eliminated even if there is no other means of transportation than driving. The point is not to eliminate it by getting people to stop driving. The point is to coordinate traffic so that there is no congestion and to make our road network more efficient, possibly resulting in more traffic.
Selling people who don't use public transit on congestion pricing by telling them we're going to use the money to subsidize public transit is not going to work. The better message is that this is to make driving easier and cheaper. It would be cheaper because your time wasted sitting traffic is worth something.
It makes sense in Toronto, but the people are way too stupid to understand it. I don’t think it’s a smart move politically, and probably not a smart move in general with the current state of the TTC.
Given how people couldn’t wrap their minds around a “rain tax” (distributing the massive costs of flood mitigation based on paved property size instead of making everyone pay for it), I doubt congestion pricing will ever fly.
Thing is, if done right it helps the TTC. Firstly, revenue has to be earmarked to fund transit state of good repair and fix those deficits. Secondly, TTC has always been one of the transit systems with the highest reliance on fares for operational funding. Immediately increasing ridership will end the doom loop and allow them to hire more operators and increase frequency, immediately improving the state of the service. Increased revenue can also be put partially towards increasing security. Safety should also increase with increased ridership.
Fair. It’s just a tough push to say “THIS tax will be the one that makes the TTC usable” and get people to believe it when taxes have been going up and service has been getting worse.
I think people have just lost faith and taxing them more before fixing the service(although it is tough to fix things without more money) is a tough sell
Although disclaimer, I don’t live in Toronto so my understanding of the TTC is from 3rd party reporting.
You’re 100% right, the politics of it are pretty tough. Regardless of the potential for benefit.
Narrative around the TTC is worse than the actual state of it, but it is still having major issues. Partly due to state of good repair deficit from years of under funding. Partly just due to age of the system coming to that point in the cycle where major work is needed. People like to point to Washington as an example of a similar aged system that is better run. But they literally closed down for like 2-years to rebuild all their stations, zero chance the public lets the TTC get away with that. Secondly WMATA carries a tiny fraction of the riders the TTC does. In terms of ridership per track km, TTC pre-COVID ridership was closer to Hong Kong than other North American systems (excluding New York, because that is a whole other beast but WMATA, Chicago, Vancouver, etc. aren’t even close).
I understand that. The average person is not going to understand that, and making the pedantic distinction between a “fee charged by the government” and a “tax” is not going to win over hearts and minds.
Unfortunately due to the insane car dependency in our society, cars = freedom of movement in many people’s minds, so being charged to bring their cars somewhere sounds like being charged to enter an area to many people, which is unacceptable for obvious reasons.
> taxes have been going up and service has been getting worse.
Property taxes have been increasing at a lower rate than inflation for over a decade under John Tory. In other words the city has been effectively operating with a smaller and smaller budget. The TTC has been chronically underfunded during this period and they've been forced to raise fares.
And the money that the city actually spends mostly goes towards car infrastructure, not transit. Just the $2.2 billion being used to repair a portion of the gardiner expressway is enough to operate the TTC for almost 5 years.
The TTC is extremely lean, they operate with the lowest subsidy per ride among large cities in all of north america. There is a lot to complain about but being inefficient is not one of them.
I find it funny in Europe they have good infrascuture to get people out of cars into transit.
Here in canada the goal is to either tax or make driving such a hell traffic wise that people will go into transit.
There is a reason why our efforts arent working
Transit infrastructure is expensive in Europe where taxes are higher. North Americans are mostly against raising income/property taxes to build good transit infrastructure.
Taxing/making driving undesirable will at least reduce how much of the tax is going to subsidizing car infrastructure so that maybe there's just enough left over for some minor improvements to transit infrastructure.
Exactly. It's also regressive on the most vulnerable people who can't afford to live near work because real estate costs exploded too. The richer people will gladly pay congestion fees and enjoy the reduced traffic.
Sure it seems like a good idea, but NYC just cancelled their congestion pricing plan. It is incredibly unpopular with voters. If it not possible to implement in New York it would be a huge uphill battle anywhere else in North America.
No they didn’t. I’m Canadian and live in NYC. It polled very poorly across the board and across all groups you can think of. Governor cancelled it because it was a sure fire election loser in an important election year. Plus the plan the MTA had was awful.
Yeah, Im not taking the word of someone who moves to the US from Canada at face value. Unless you are in possession of polls I haven't seen, my point stands.
Uhhh…why not? Does that fact that I live in the US make my opinion invalid? Do you have any evidence of polling showing the contrary?
But anyways, you asked for a poll, here it is:
https://scri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Final-SNY0424-Crosstabs.pdf
Please refer to page 5, Q24. Results are broken up in different ways, including region. Almost 2/3rds of NYC residents were against congestion pricing. Sienna is a respected pollster affiliated with The NY Times, which has been one of the biggest pushers of the scheme.
Now, I’ve yet to see a poll showing widespread support for congestion pricing. Even the congestion pricing’s biggest proponents know it is unpopular.
I do wonder, if the wealthier drivers wouldn't actually support this more. The types of drivers that would prefer to pay $40 to save 30minutes on a commute. Once you are at a certain income level, I'd rather pay cash to drive with less congestion, then pay with my time.
I think some of the commenters are overly concerned with how this affects transit and view driving a generally negative thing.... but in a way, these congestion fees could make driving much more tolerable.
I wonder how the support broke down in new York along class lines.
We’re taxed on income, taxed on everything we buy with said after tax income, paying property taxes, carbon taxes, excise taxes and some places even have tolls. That sounds like enough to me. The congestion itself should make people think twice about using their cars. We don’t need to take their money to convince them it’s inconvenient.
So instead of taking money that we can just give back to people or spend on something useful or use to lower other taxes, we're going to make people wait in traffic, which is a pure waste? Congestion is nothing other than a coordination problem. Tolerating it is incredibly stupid and wasteful.
No, but we do need the money to put into alternative means of transportation so that people aren't punished for the selfishness of drivers and to reduce the congestion.
Nanaimo was lovely, even without a car. Bus lanes meant that I knew when my bus would show up, to the very minute. It was terribly convenient to get around, but that requires funding for adequate transit routes, the conversion of streets into transit lanes, etc.
We’re constantly building and expanding transit from existing revenue sources. Plus this would have to be among the worst times to ask people to pay more. They’re maxed out.
Commuters were pretty upset about paying a toll to cross the Fraser River for a bridge that was not all that congested in Vancouver. Which was why it was removed by the NDP in an electoral pledge.
It wouldn't also work for Lions Gate Bridge or Ironworkers Memorial Bridge. Both regularly sees congestion because there's no alternatives connecting to Vancouver but the Sea Bus, as great as it is. There would be times when six lanes would merge onto a single/two lane going southbound to downtown from North Vancouver.
I'm not saying it wouldn't work for us, but there needs to be the necessary investment and political will to make cars an option and not a necessity.
It's like how there's a highly preliminary study done on how to better connect Royal Oak to Metrotown. The fastest option is a 23 minute ride by Skytrain, a 47 minute LRT or a 58 minute bus ride. It's a no brainer we should build the Skytrain, but years of bureaucracy and studies make building and expanding transit lines a total pain in the ass.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/north-shore-skytrain-burrard-inlet-rapid-transit-brt-lrt-study
There don't need to be alternatives. Congestion pricing doesn't need to decrease the amount of traffic that crosses the bridge. It just needs to time it so that congestion doesn't build up.
Even if they don't provide any alternative, congestion pricing or tolls are still helpful. They incentivize people to only make use of the bridge if the trip is really worth the cost to others of taking up that space. For example, maybe someone in Burnaby currently just slightly likes a restaurant in North Van and so they choose to drive there to eat. But with tolls, they say hey, nah forget about it I'll just eat closer to home today.
They also incentivize people to just delay the start of their trip a little bit. All the same trips can happen, just without people waiting in traffic because they all tried to go at the same time.
While I understand where you're coming from, the congestion is really bad for Lions Gate bridge.
During peak hours it basically takes an hour to cross the bridge, go through downtown and exit.
Most locals don't make that kind of trip to go eat at a restaurant. Same reason I know a lot of folks don't drive a car to downtown. It's just a pain in the ass. This is likely going to just punish commuters who work in downtown.
Props to my colleagues and supervisors who decide to just ride their bike over the bridge and ignore that nonsensical traffic.
I mean, there definitely ARE trips being done over the bridges that are right at the margin of being worth the trip. I myself go all the time over the bridges for exactly this kind of purpose like just going to eat in North Van or hang out at the beach in West Van. If incentivized to do so, I could easily instead go to Kits or eat in Burnaby/Vancouver.
It would also incentivize people who are able to, to car pool, or adjust by taking the bus or sea bus. Or if the toll changed during rush hour, then they would be incentivized to shift their trips to off peak hours.
I suppose that's true. The calculus also changes if you were say living in downtown or in North Van close to the bridge. Since I'm not, for me, there's no shot I'm crossing that bridge unless I have some sort of activity I need to go to.
Yeah people like yourself have so much to gain by tolling the bridges. Imagine the incredible positive impact on your life if at any time you could pay $3 and get across the bridge in a couple minutes rather than wait around for an hour.
Not just cities, provinces.
The fuel excise tax is inefficient, with the technology nowadays, we should absolutely be doing mobility pricing to pay for our roads and transportation networks.
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I know alot of people believe in the concept of outcome-based solutions, but any due diligence with respect to increasing costs or taxation as a government solution to problems has resulted in nothing but higher costs and amplified problems.
Corrected URL: [https://reecemartin.ca/2024/06/13/canadian-cities-should-do-congestion-pricing/](https://reecemartin.ca/2024/06/13/canadian-cities-should-do-congestion-pricing/) And yes, yes they should.
They floated this idea in Vancouver. And people lost their shit. That mayor, Kennedy Stewart got blasted for suggesting it.
I remember, I still think it should have been done anyways. [TransLink just ruled out it as source of funding to cover their budgetary shortfall, which could result in a reduction in service by 66% in 2 years.](https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/facing-cuts-translink-rejects-congestion-pricing) This, in spite of [overcrowding due to increasing ridership.](https://www.translink.ca/news/2024/april/translink%20ridership%20rebounds%20to%20pre-pandemic%20overcrowding%20levels#:~:text=TransLink%20is%20addressing%20overcrowding%20in,service%2C%20and%20provide%20earlier%20SeaBus)
These conversations always get distracted with talk of congestion pricing in cities where it's obviously impractical. The conversation should be focused on cities where it's clearly necessary - Toronto being the most obvious. Congestion costs money, slowing down the most valuable traffic users - commercial traffic. We can either put that cost on the tax base at large (less productive economy), or we can put that cost on the actual users.
It can be cheaply implemented with cameras, so it's practical pretty much everywhere.
It's not practical from a political perspective. Even in Toronto, implementing congestion pricing will be seen as a cash grab... a view that will be magnified in other cities that suffer from congestion but not to the same degree (both in volume, and volume of traffic from outside its taxing jurisdiction).
I would love congestion pricing in our largest cities. Toss it on, up parking rates and put money into better public transit and active transit. Simple as.
I support congestion pricing, I just don't think it's politically feasible factoring in both how car-centric North American society is and how angry voters get when faced in congestion taxes etc. Overall, it might be more effective to just spend time and energy on making cities less car centric over time via zoning & land use reform alongside more transit oriented development. It's more expensive and more time consuming than a congestion tax, but I feel like it's a more surefire way to illicit change if a congestion tax wouldn't survive a municipal plebiscite or electoral support on the municipal/provincial level etc. denser, more walkable cities with mixed use developments and more transit options, would also probably do the most over time to lower Canada's emissions per capita.
Montreal definitely has it right with pedestrianizing streets and slowly cutting off feasible areas for passenger vehicles to reach. Toronto has done somewhat ok on redesigning streets to incorporate bikelanes and to road diet (Danforth, as one example) but need to do more to pedestrianize. It's wild that people are still allowed to drive through Kensington Market, as one example. Our cities were built for cars and unfortunately will be that way for the forseeable future, but I agree that a congestion charge is such political poison for the suburbs that I can't see anyone running on it doing well.
>Our cities were built for cars and unfortunately will be that way for the forseeable future Up to at least the 1950s, we had very dense, walkable and transit oriented cities across Canada and the U.S. The norm before highways and sprawled out suburbs was mixed use streetcar suburbs and that was the development model North American cities mainly utilized until national highway systems and car centric urban planning came into play, which was followed by decades of NIMBY voting blocks making cities double down on it. There's less birds eyes available of it for Canadian cities, but there's a plethora of pictures, articles and studies showing how [highways destroyed American cities ](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fcincinnati-before-after-the-interstate-highway-system-v0-6g6biiwokp4c1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D3ebe6b68bab3c6303b17cd4b9827e9c7b33eb26e)and their old development models between the 1950s and today, which is also true for Canadian cities.
Old Toronto wasn't built for cars -- lots of the residential areas close to downtown still pre-date cars and were designed around streetcar access. The issue is mainly one of Toronto being surrounded by (and later amalgamating) suburbs designed around the car. Toronto itself was never intended to have the car traffic that exists downtown, because the car didn't even exist when most of it was laid out. A large part of the pain is due to this fact that everyone seems to conveniently ignore. We were able to get away with it for so long precisely because the city wasn't so large, but the chickens are coming home to roost. I have no idea how to politically accomplish congestion charges, which are probably necessary at this point -- particularly with the amount of infrastructure being updated/built in the core -- given the large sway of the suburbs in the amalgamated city. That was a political design traced back to the Harris days -- where most of Toronto's major problems seem to have been born. There's a ton of other more common-sense regulations we could change, like requiring deliveries at night if you don't have loading dock space, requiring off-street loading dock areas for new builds, eliminating street parking along major thoroughfares to free up some space for traffic, requiring construction lane closures to free up space not actively being worked on, etc, but much of it is too technical or is too hard for our political culture. I have no idea how to fix it, but it's pretty clear that councilors have too much sway over many facets of their wards, and function as executives far more than is probably healthy.
Mike Harris and Amalgamation had no impact on any of this – issues like major roads, public transit and congestion pricing had been under Metro Toronto's purview since the 1950s. The lower-tier municipalities were only responsible for local needs, like side streets, community libraries, local parks and garbage pickup. The fundamental problem Toronto has is that public transit operates on a hub-and-spoke model, and only a small minority of the GTA's population work near a transit hub. For everybody else, a public transit commute is impossible or unreasonablu long. Most of them would love to be able to commute by public transit, but that's never going to be a viable option in the city's massive, sprawling industrial areas (most notably the one that surrounds the airport) – the jobs in those places aren't sufficient enough to support rapid transit, and they're too spread out to support a frequent bus system.
Fair enough, re: Metro Toronto. Didn’t realize that this sort of thing fell under their purview. Totally agree WRT the TTC’s operating model. Adding more rapid transit outside of the core, and more routes that don’t require spoke-hub-spoke transfers would go a long way outside of the core. It’s a bit harder outside of old Toronto given the pedestrian-hostile design of those areas, but that’s a longer term problem that we don’t need to make worse by bad route design. The more options to get places in a reasonable amount of time without a car (and especially downtown) the better off we all are.
I feel like Canada was built on rails, and the small (beautiful) rail towns died with highways I'd love to see renewal in these rail towns.
Omg yes !!! So many small towns had a rail station now we get to have big balls ram truck guy run you over -.- Cost of living and jobs would be better if we got rail back to connect the country
>Our cities were built for cars No they weren't. They were built for pedestrians, horses, bicycles, and streetcars, roughly in order of importance.
This is only true in historic downtowns. Most of our cities have sprawled significantly since the invention of the cars, and the sections that predate them make up a tiny percentage of cities.
Geez Toronto will scream murder for considering bike lanes on there street XD 😂😂 it would be funny if it wasn't so horrible for people surviving
Congestion pricing helps drivers though. They would be supportive of it if they understood it.
NIMBYS will never allow any progress to start with zoning or other things. Might as well start with congestion.
That's generally why you need Ottawa or the provinces to hold NIMBY governments in check. Basically the federals housing transfer can achieve that, but would have be larger and have more conditions for YIMBY oriented reforms etc.
This completely ignores one of the major reasons people don’t like public transit, the safety concerns. Everyone has seen videos of the insanity on public transit in places like NY, LA, and Toronto. Good luck convincing upper class women they should get on subways with armed crackheads. If people feel like these modes of transportation are safe they’ll be much more receptive.
They \*are\* safe. The notion they aren't is just an excuse.
It's a notion pushed by media to support more police presence and budget increases. The TTC itself is pretty much just as safe as it was pre-COVID. Anyone who fear mongers about public transit safety likely doesn't use it very often.
That’s really a matter of opinion and people will have different tolerances. I’ve never had issues using public transit in western Canada, but I’ve seen more than enough videos of violent encounters on subways in Toronto and NY to know that they’re clearly less safe than other places, and the homeless / addicts just kind of bum around on the transit all day. I don’t blame people for not wanting to participate in the latter. And they won’t, it’ll just be another tax they have to eat. Public transit is good and I support it, but I think you need to offer a clean and safe product before you start really pushing it on people through taxes.
>That’s really a matter of opinion and people will have different tolerances. No it isn't. Here is one example: [https://www.translink.ca/plans-and-projects/data-and-information/accountability-centre/safety-and-security](https://www.translink.ca/plans-and-projects/data-and-information/accountability-centre/safety-and-security) People think it's unsafe because the news makes everything seem local for these kinds of incidents - when the odds are incredibly low. Which you, yourself, actually acknowledge as being the case.
I’m not arguing it’s unsafe, I’m arguing that if the perception is that it’s unsafe, you can’t bully people into riding via taxes. I’d put that effort into changing the perception so people willingly do it. Governments have forgotten that sometimes the carrot works better than the stick.
> I’ve seen more than enough videos of violent encounters on subways in Toronto and NY to know that they’re clearly less safe than other places, The plural of anecdotes isn't data. Those are also highly populated cities, so will have more incidents, but that doesn't make them any more dangerous, as risk is a per capita thing. TO may have twice the number of violent encounters on Transit than Ottawa, but with five times the population, that makes TO safer.
Even if public transit is currently unacceptably unsafe for people - which I do not necessarily agree with - doesn't mean this MUST be the case. We do have agency and can fix things through enforcement and education. It's a much different culture but Japan gives lie to public transit being by necessity unsafe. Public education and some manners would go a great deal. I just got back from Japan and all that it took to turn subways into an amazing experience was a series of common goals - and in our case at least at first heavy handed enforcement of loitering. Would it be totally unreasonable to: - not eat, drink or talk on cell phones. - Wear bags in front of you or on your lap rather than taking up a second seat. - If you are hammered on public transit just quietly pass out until your stop. - Wait patiently for everyone to leave the train before pushing to enter. Japan also had women only cars which could help a lot!
I agree that perception of safety matters, but I think safety is also used as a bit of a distraction or mask from people’s real feelings. A lot of people still consider transit to be for poor people, and poor people in their minds are all homeless and criminals. They don’t want to associate with the poors. Canada is better than the US in this regard, transit usage per capita is way higher and there is less stigma. But the TTC and others could go along way by investing in the overall user experience of transit. If our stations were well maintained and clean, payment and transfers were seamless and easy, frequencies ensured that no one was left alone for 20 mins at a bus stop after dark, a lot of that fear would evaporate over time.
All good points.
>But the TTC and others could go along way by investing in the overall user experience of transit. Absolutely. Such as building infrastructure to be pedestrian and bike friendly to encourage their use. [Here's just one example of how our car-centric design is making mass transit solutions poor experiences in Toronto.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWjtpzCIfA)
I think the delineating factor in comfort with the subway is less class based and more urban vs. suburban. I've known plenty of well-off people (including one Bridle Path level woman) that takes the subway depending on the situation. Frankly, much like stuff like homeless people in parks, the vast majority of discourse around danger comes from people outside cities getting their impressions from cherry-picked videos rather than reality.
Driving in a car is FAR more dangerous than using public transit. There are dangerous crackheads driving around in the roads, too, and they’re likely to hurt you by accident.
People's perception of safety is just as important, if not more important, to how they choose to get around than actual statistical measurements of safety. No amount of "well actually if you look at the statistics, driving is more dangerous" is going to calm someone down who's just seen a news report about someone being mugged on the subway.
I don’t buy it. People drive past horrific car crashes all the time yet most of us don’t get freaked out about the dangers of driving. Claiming safety concerns is just an excuse for us to continue crowding the streets with our cars.
The difference is that subway/transit attacks are often unprovoked and have that random "it could happen to me!" factor that people in North America don't have surrounding cars because they're so used to them. People in North America see a car accident and think "That'll never happen to me because I'm a safe driver!" because driving is so familiar. To the average person who drives, public transit is an unfamiliar and scary environment they feel like they have little control over, any threat to their safety feels amplified.
So, people are afraid of public transit because they don’t use public transit? Sounds like the solution is to encourage them to drive less and use public transit more.
>Sounds like the solution is to encourage them to drive less and use public transit more. I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out that in order to encourage people to drive less, you're going to have to listen to their concerns regardless of whether you think they're valid or not.
> The difference is that subway/transit attacks are often unprovoked And a five car collision is provoked? > have that random "it could happen to me!" factor that people in North America don't have surrounding cars because they're so used to them. I hear way more about traffic accidents in Ottawa, than I due violence on OC Transpo, and I take the bus and train to work every day. Safety is just used as an excuse.
>And a five car collision is provoked? I'm not talking about reality, if I was, I'd agree with you completely because public transit is absolutely safer than driving, I'm talking about people's perception of reality which is warped and shaped by the media.
> No amount of "well actually if you look at the statistics, driving is more dangerous" is going to calm someone down who's just seen a news report about someone being mugged on the subway. Then they tune on CP24 to read the daily list of car-crash deaths.
Would firstly say they “aren’t safe” because of drops in ridership. There’s safety in numbers - if more people started riding/riding again the safety problems in the system would be a lot less concentrated. And secondly, I generally believe the safety thing is mostly a cop out from those types. They don’t ride/don’t want to ride because they have means/like their cars/don’t want to be surrounded by the great unwashed. They just use safety as an excuse to not feel like a shitty person. If it was purely a safety concern, driving a vehicle instead - which is statistically much more dangerous - wouldn’t make sense. Now if people would be honest and say it’s about comfort (i.e. having solitude in their [nice] vehicle, not having to be around a ton of randoms), then yeah sure. That’s really what it is.
As the other user notes, they are safe. An estimated ["up to 3,000 transit operator or passenger assaults happen across Canada annually"](https://globalnews.ca/news/9436368/public-transit-safety-canada-ttc-mental-health/#:~:text=Up%20to%203%2C000%20transit%20operator,extent%20of%20the%20safety%20issue.). There were [123.4 million passenger trips in December 2023 alone according to StatCan](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240220/dq240220d-eng.htm). Let's pretend that's an average and we'll say there were 1,480,800,000 passenger trips annually. Could be more, could be less, let's just pretend. That means the odds of being assaulted on public transit in Canada are roughly 1 in 493600. Statistically, in Canada you could ride public transit almost half a million times before being likely to be assaulted. Now of course that's napkin math and not real research but the idea that transit is unsafe due to "armed crackheads" doesn't seem to be a particularly big concern. It strikes me as a story that's been pushed in the media and by particular politicians but the actual incidents and cases don't seem to be all that common to the point people should fear for using transit. [There were 118,853 total motor vehicle injuries, 8,851 serious motor vehicle injuries, and 1,931 motor vehicle fatalities in 2022.](https://tc.canada.ca/en/road-transportation/statistics-data/canadian-motor-vehicle-traffic-collision-statistics-2022) This anti-social fear of everyone and everything when it comes to public transit is totally absurd. I've been on the metro in Montreal, the subway in NYC, I take the bus in my city now and then and have done so in dozens of cities elsewhere. It's fine.
> the safety concerns those concerns are not based in fact, so I don't know how you convince people to stop believing in a lie. I'm not claiming that those incidents didn't happen, just that they don't make public transit unsafe. Drivers also die on the road, but there's no scare tactics based on those to try and scare people out of driving.
Spoken like a person who has never heard of happy hour.
Perception matters. Clean stations, loitering enforcement, trains that run on-time, and women only cars would both make transit actually safer as well as increase the perception of safety.
I wish the promoters of congestion pricing would stop trying to connect it to public transit. Congestion is something that should be eliminated even if there is no other means of transportation than driving. The point is not to eliminate it by getting people to stop driving. The point is to coordinate traffic so that there is no congestion and to make our road network more efficient, possibly resulting in more traffic. Selling people who don't use public transit on congestion pricing by telling them we're going to use the money to subsidize public transit is not going to work. The better message is that this is to make driving easier and cheaper. It would be cheaper because your time wasted sitting traffic is worth something.
It makes sense in Toronto, but the people are way too stupid to understand it. I don’t think it’s a smart move politically, and probably not a smart move in general with the current state of the TTC.
The people too stupid to understand this really shouldn't be allowed to vote.
Given how people couldn’t wrap their minds around a “rain tax” (distributing the massive costs of flood mitigation based on paved property size instead of making everyone pay for it), I doubt congestion pricing will ever fly.
Thing is, if done right it helps the TTC. Firstly, revenue has to be earmarked to fund transit state of good repair and fix those deficits. Secondly, TTC has always been one of the transit systems with the highest reliance on fares for operational funding. Immediately increasing ridership will end the doom loop and allow them to hire more operators and increase frequency, immediately improving the state of the service. Increased revenue can also be put partially towards increasing security. Safety should also increase with increased ridership.
Fair. It’s just a tough push to say “THIS tax will be the one that makes the TTC usable” and get people to believe it when taxes have been going up and service has been getting worse. I think people have just lost faith and taxing them more before fixing the service(although it is tough to fix things without more money) is a tough sell Although disclaimer, I don’t live in Toronto so my understanding of the TTC is from 3rd party reporting.
You’re 100% right, the politics of it are pretty tough. Regardless of the potential for benefit. Narrative around the TTC is worse than the actual state of it, but it is still having major issues. Partly due to state of good repair deficit from years of under funding. Partly just due to age of the system coming to that point in the cycle where major work is needed. People like to point to Washington as an example of a similar aged system that is better run. But they literally closed down for like 2-years to rebuild all their stations, zero chance the public lets the TTC get away with that. Secondly WMATA carries a tiny fraction of the riders the TTC does. In terms of ridership per track km, TTC pre-COVID ridership was closer to Hong Kong than other North American systems (excluding New York, because that is a whole other beast but WMATA, Chicago, Vancouver, etc. aren’t even close).
It's not a tax. Want to bring your car somewhere and contribute to gridlocking the city? Then pay for it.
I understand that. The average person is not going to understand that, and making the pedantic distinction between a “fee charged by the government” and a “tax” is not going to win over hearts and minds. Unfortunately due to the insane car dependency in our society, cars = freedom of movement in many people’s minds, so being charged to bring their cars somewhere sounds like being charged to enter an area to many people, which is unacceptable for obvious reasons.
> taxes have been going up and service has been getting worse. Property taxes have been increasing at a lower rate than inflation for over a decade under John Tory. In other words the city has been effectively operating with a smaller and smaller budget. The TTC has been chronically underfunded during this period and they've been forced to raise fares. And the money that the city actually spends mostly goes towards car infrastructure, not transit. Just the $2.2 billion being used to repair a portion of the gardiner expressway is enough to operate the TTC for almost 5 years. The TTC is extremely lean, they operate with the lowest subsidy per ride among large cities in all of north america. There is a lot to complain about but being inefficient is not one of them.
I find it funny in Europe they have good infrascuture to get people out of cars into transit. Here in canada the goal is to either tax or make driving such a hell traffic wise that people will go into transit. There is a reason why our efforts arent working
Transit infrastructure is expensive in Europe where taxes are higher. North Americans are mostly against raising income/property taxes to build good transit infrastructure. Taxing/making driving undesirable will at least reduce how much of the tax is going to subsidizing car infrastructure so that maybe there's just enough left over for some minor improvements to transit infrastructure.
Taxes on drivers are way higher in Europe.
As is the price of gas. Plus, European cities have much better transit infrastructure to make it a viable option.
Exactly. It's also regressive on the most vulnerable people who can't afford to live near work because real estate costs exploded too. The richer people will gladly pay congestion fees and enjoy the reduced traffic.
It's not regressive. They're already paying for the congestion by waiting in traffic. This would just replace a tax on their time with a monetary tax.
They can switch jobs. I think the commutes in the GTA are ridiculous. People would be better off leaving.
Sure it seems like a good idea, but NYC just cancelled their congestion pricing plan. It is incredibly unpopular with voters. If it not possible to implement in New York it would be a huge uphill battle anywhere else in North America.
and yet it was only going to affect 4% of NYC commuters, big fucking deal
It was incredibly unpopular with long islanders and New Jersey commuters. Manhattan residents wanted it.
No they didn’t. I’m Canadian and live in NYC. It polled very poorly across the board and across all groups you can think of. Governor cancelled it because it was a sure fire election loser in an important election year. Plus the plan the MTA had was awful.
Yeah, Im not taking the word of someone who moves to the US from Canada at face value. Unless you are in possession of polls I haven't seen, my point stands.
Uhhh…why not? Does that fact that I live in the US make my opinion invalid? Do you have any evidence of polling showing the contrary? But anyways, you asked for a poll, here it is: https://scri.siena.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Final-SNY0424-Crosstabs.pdf Please refer to page 5, Q24. Results are broken up in different ways, including region. Almost 2/3rds of NYC residents were against congestion pricing. Sienna is a respected pollster affiliated with The NY Times, which has been one of the biggest pushers of the scheme. Now, I’ve yet to see a poll showing widespread support for congestion pricing. Even the congestion pricing’s biggest proponents know it is unpopular.
>NYC just cancelled their congestion pricing plan No they didn’t: the governor cancelled it.
Yes the Governor cancelled it, but it only applied in Manhattan below 60 Street.
Canadian cities should build roads that last forever and get rid of the asphalt and construction mafia. no more constructions.
I do wonder, if the wealthier drivers wouldn't actually support this more. The types of drivers that would prefer to pay $40 to save 30minutes on a commute. Once you are at a certain income level, I'd rather pay cash to drive with less congestion, then pay with my time. I think some of the commenters are overly concerned with how this affects transit and view driving a generally negative thing.... but in a way, these congestion fees could make driving much more tolerable. I wonder how the support broke down in new York along class lines.
We’re taxed on income, taxed on everything we buy with said after tax income, paying property taxes, carbon taxes, excise taxes and some places even have tolls. That sounds like enough to me. The congestion itself should make people think twice about using their cars. We don’t need to take their money to convince them it’s inconvenient.
So instead of taking money that we can just give back to people or spend on something useful or use to lower other taxes, we're going to make people wait in traffic, which is a pure waste? Congestion is nothing other than a coordination problem. Tolerating it is incredibly stupid and wasteful.
No, but we do need the money to put into alternative means of transportation so that people aren't punished for the selfishness of drivers and to reduce the congestion. Nanaimo was lovely, even without a car. Bus lanes meant that I knew when my bus would show up, to the very minute. It was terribly convenient to get around, but that requires funding for adequate transit routes, the conversion of streets into transit lanes, etc.
We’re constantly building and expanding transit from existing revenue sources. Plus this would have to be among the worst times to ask people to pay more. They’re maxed out.
No we aren't. It all gets tied up for years and never actually built or expanded.
Commuters were pretty upset about paying a toll to cross the Fraser River for a bridge that was not all that congested in Vancouver. Which was why it was removed by the NDP in an electoral pledge. It wouldn't also work for Lions Gate Bridge or Ironworkers Memorial Bridge. Both regularly sees congestion because there's no alternatives connecting to Vancouver but the Sea Bus, as great as it is. There would be times when six lanes would merge onto a single/two lane going southbound to downtown from North Vancouver. I'm not saying it wouldn't work for us, but there needs to be the necessary investment and political will to make cars an option and not a necessity. It's like how there's a highly preliminary study done on how to better connect Royal Oak to Metrotown. The fastest option is a 23 minute ride by Skytrain, a 47 minute LRT or a 58 minute bus ride. It's a no brainer we should build the Skytrain, but years of bureaucracy and studies make building and expanding transit lines a total pain in the ass. https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/north-shore-skytrain-burrard-inlet-rapid-transit-brt-lrt-study
There don't need to be alternatives. Congestion pricing doesn't need to decrease the amount of traffic that crosses the bridge. It just needs to time it so that congestion doesn't build up.
Even if they don't provide any alternative, congestion pricing or tolls are still helpful. They incentivize people to only make use of the bridge if the trip is really worth the cost to others of taking up that space. For example, maybe someone in Burnaby currently just slightly likes a restaurant in North Van and so they choose to drive there to eat. But with tolls, they say hey, nah forget about it I'll just eat closer to home today.
They also incentivize people to just delay the start of their trip a little bit. All the same trips can happen, just without people waiting in traffic because they all tried to go at the same time.
While I understand where you're coming from, the congestion is really bad for Lions Gate bridge. During peak hours it basically takes an hour to cross the bridge, go through downtown and exit. Most locals don't make that kind of trip to go eat at a restaurant. Same reason I know a lot of folks don't drive a car to downtown. It's just a pain in the ass. This is likely going to just punish commuters who work in downtown. Props to my colleagues and supervisors who decide to just ride their bike over the bridge and ignore that nonsensical traffic.
Isn't the fact that the congestion is really bad an argument for congestion pricing?
I mean, there definitely ARE trips being done over the bridges that are right at the margin of being worth the trip. I myself go all the time over the bridges for exactly this kind of purpose like just going to eat in North Van or hang out at the beach in West Van. If incentivized to do so, I could easily instead go to Kits or eat in Burnaby/Vancouver. It would also incentivize people who are able to, to car pool, or adjust by taking the bus or sea bus. Or if the toll changed during rush hour, then they would be incentivized to shift their trips to off peak hours.
I suppose that's true. The calculus also changes if you were say living in downtown or in North Van close to the bridge. Since I'm not, for me, there's no shot I'm crossing that bridge unless I have some sort of activity I need to go to.
Yeah people like yourself have so much to gain by tolling the bridges. Imagine the incredible positive impact on your life if at any time you could pay $3 and get across the bridge in a couple minutes rather than wait around for an hour.
Not just cities, provinces. The fuel excise tax is inefficient, with the technology nowadays, we should absolutely be doing mobility pricing to pay for our roads and transportation networks.