Take Cars Off The Roads

Give up the manufacturing wages, taxes on the vehicle sale, taxes on gas consumption, renewal fees for licences, lost wages for parking enforcement, lost wages at MTO, etc., etc. and show how you will supplement this lost revenue and then sign your personal Kyoto pledge card. Line forms on the left......

Navigating T.O.'s traffic jam
By SUE-ANN LEVY

When Coun. Brian Ashton is in London, England this week he'll be exploring the innovative funding mechanisms the Brits adopted to create new transportation infrastructure.

The chairman of the planning and transportation committee is referring to their use of private capital -- pension funds and the like -- to build roads, bridges and transit networks. England, he says, pioneered public-private partnerships.

"Nobody (at Toronto City Hall) is interested in talking about (it) ... it's scary for people," he told me before he left yesterday on his four-day fact finding mission. "In the GTA we're living in an environment of scarce capital resources ... there needs to be a debate about whether we're going to use this new generation of investment."

Ashton is indeed correct. Last week -- as Mayor David Miller did his best to cozy up to Al Gore to promote his climate change agenda -- attention at City Hall was focused on road tolls.

The "P" word -- as in private -- got no ink because it's a dirty word at union-friendly City Hall. Just look at what happened with the bold $150-million private-public partnership deal to revitalize Union Station. It went down the tubes almost a year ago and we haven't heard a peep since.

If Ashton comes back with some innovative funding ideas and proof that they have worked, I'll be happy not to refer to him this one time as the "King of Junkets" -- a moniker bestowed on him by his council colleague Karen Stintz.

For I fear that while Miller drones on ad nauseum about the $450-million in yearly GST and PST money owed to the city from the senior levels of government, Toronto's infrastructure will crumble around him.

When the mayor's executive team rubber-stamps this year's $1.4-billion capital budget -- as they are expected to do Tuesday morning -- they'll barely be able to address the city's most dire needs. That's even as they raise an unprecedented $350-million in new debt this year.

Only $10-million extra, for example, will go towards the $301-million backlog in road and bridge repairs, which is predicted to grow to $422-million by 2011.

Faye Lyons of the CAA South Central Ontario, called the backlog "unacceptable." She suggested Toronto residents will be put "at risk" if the roads are not maintained.

'MAJOR INVESTMENT'

As Stintz put it so succinctly, you can't talk about road tolls unless the proper infrastructure is in place first. She said London made a "major investment" in roads and transit before it introduced its congestion tax scheme.

"We're just not there yet," she said, noting private-public partnerships do need to be considered. "Tolls are part of an overall strategy but they're a last resort."

Ashton adds before even thinking about tolls or congestion taxes, they've got to squeeze "as much capacity out of the existing infrastructure" as possible -- by making better use of one-way streets, further restricting on-street parking during rush hour, better synchronizing stoplights and so on.

"You use that as a last resort," he said of the idea of road tolls, congestion taxes or road pricing, echoing Stintz.

The city's transportation general manager Gary Welsh says his staff will be issuing a discussion paper in May that will cover options for dealing with the city's transportation issues. Road tolls will be one option considered.

Nevertheless Lyons said of the 12,000 CAA members recently surveyed, some 9,000 were strongly opposed to toll roads. I am too -- and that's speaking as someone who walks and takes transit in addition to driving. Without a vastly improved TTC, tolls will not drive people out of their cars.

As Lyons added: "Almost all (of our respondents) say they already pay too much in fuel, taxes and licensing fees and are seeing little in return in terms of investment in infrastructure."