Toronto Mayor John Tory’s Don Valley Parkway tolls are well-meaning, but ill-considered
In a 32–9 vote on Tuesday night, Toronto’s city council backed Mayor John Tory’s plan to toll the Gardiner and the DVP on Tuesday night. While a final vote will not be made on the road toll issue until next year (when a full report on the proposal will come before council), there certainly seems to be considerable political support for the idea, which comes as a victory — albeit a small one — for city councillors who support revenue-generation tools.
The devil, as always, is in the details. The proposed toll prices, which largely come from a September 2015 staff report, give some insight into what the toll’s purpose is. For instance, a $1.40 flat fee would cover the cost of maintaining the Gardiner and DVP for the next 30 years, as Jennifer Pagliaro points out in the Star. In order to use DVP/Gardiner tolls to bring in substantial funding for transit in the city, the cost would need to be much higher — likely more in line with a $3.25 flat fee or a 35-cent-per-km price, as suggested in the 2015 staff report.
Road tolls are a divisive topic, especially when presented as tolling a previously toll-free road. The effect is little more than a ‘pay up!’ message. Tory even presented it as such, pointing out that many of those who use the road — ostensibly those coming from Richmond Hill and Markham—don’t pay for road upkeep through regular revenue-generation means. Tolls don’t need to be especially divisive; in many European and American metropolitan centres, they work well and generate not insignificant revenues. This point has been made repeatedly by the City’s Chief Planner, Jen Keesmaat, who has been a vocal supporter of tolls:
In theory, I am in favour of tolls. This city badly needs revenue-generation tools, and it desperately needs to deal with traffic and congestions. Depending on the pricing model that City Council opts for (should tolls be approved in 2017), it could either have the minor effect of covering the cost of maintenance, or it could bring in substantial cash-flow for the city’s transit goals.
The problem, though, is that the “transit” that Keesmaat and Tory speak of — the transit that they present as a viable alternative to driving your car — is at best a vast over-exaggeration of GO Transit’s capabilities, and at worst purely fictional. The tension of road tolls, as currently proposed, is that they are both a good idea and will be a remarkable pain-in-the-ass.
I take the 71 Stouffville GO line fairly often; my partner lives along the line. The Stouffville bus line is supplemented by commute-specific train service in the form of a handful of trains southbound in the morning, each returning northbound at the end of the work day. Busses either way leave at regular, but sparse, times — once every half hour during much of the midday and evening. More often than not, these buses are full. I have taken full buses at night, during the middle of the day, the afternoon, you name it. So Tory and Keesmaat’s implicit suggestion that untolled roads are contributing to a lack of transit use along that corridor doesn’t square with the experience of that bus.
(This is particularly frustrating in part because all-day train service — something that is both a goal of Metrolinx and a part of Tory’s Smarttrack plan — is still a long-way off, and even when a second track is laid along the corridor, it is unlikely that ridership will be sufficient to fill large GO trains.)
It’s very hard to wrap my head around Tory and Keesmaat’s messaging about tolls and transit while watching Tory push for a subway extension to Scarborough. I’m not about to re-litigate that particular debate, as I think the desire to extend a subway to Scarborough is (like tolls) both well-meaning and ill-advised.
At the heart of the issue is that Toronto as it exists post-amalgamation is a city composed of both an urban centre and suburbs. But the reality — one that is plainly obvious to anyone who has paid the double fare north of Steeles — is that all suburbs are not created equally. It allows Tory, then, to make claims that he is bringing transit to one suburb, while telling another suburb that it ought to pay extra to use our infrastructure. As Toronto’s housing prices push young families and young workers to increasingly distant suburbs (often while still working in the downtown core), it becomes clear that certain suburbs, including Markham and Richmond Hill (and especially at their southern ends), exist in a sort of liminal space: they are both part of Toronto and outsiders to it.
This is true, in a technical sense: the City of Toronto ends at Steeles, where York Region begins. But this isn’t an impermeable boundary, as north-of-Steeles TTC routes (double fare notwithstanding) show. Moreover, there are those who are coming to live, work, and play in Toronto but are pushed outside of its technical borders by the truly obscene cost of real estate. And while it’s true that they don’t pay into DVP funds in the same way Torontonians do, the reality is that they are often still oriented towards Toronto as their home, even if largely economic forces compel them to be Markhamites. To these people, erecting tolls along a transit corridor that is, in effect, their mainline to the city, amounts to an invisible barrier that while economically smart looks a whole lot like the drawing of a Toronto/Not Toronto line.
Moreover, exactly whose transit is meant to take the place of cars is another matter. In Scarborough, Tory can make a sort of claim that the city is helping its own by extending a subway out to them, while in Markham, it is Metrolinx that is expected to pick up the slack. Those trying to get downtown from Richmond Hill are, in other words, the province’s problem — one that, it seems, Toronto has been reluctant to pay into. (H/t Steve Munro, who suggests that Toronto may owe Metrolinx half a billion.) Tory gets to play an interesting public messaging tune, in that many of the arguments used in favour of the subway extension can be repurposed for a discussion of road tolls along the DVP — just with a transit system that isn’t municipally-funded.
There is much to be said about politicking for a substantial transportation plan that rests on the ability of someone else’s transit network to pick up all your slack.
There are financial matters at work in all this that warrant a post all their own, but which I won’t tackle here. The financial mechanics of a question like road tolls do matter, and will mean quite a lot to determining the efficacy of the final outcome. But the issue here is broader than finances and funding questions. It’s a question about how this city thinks about suburbs that are very much part of Toronto, but are subjected to the type of politics that plays on the fact that they aren’t within the city limits. In thinking so, this city risks erecting invisible barriers that dictate who, or where, is party to the benefits of urban development and who, or where, gets left to pay the tolls.
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