TransLink, in case you haven’t heard, is facing what can best be described as a cash crunch.
Metro Vancouver’s regional transportation authority needs more money to expand capacity and maintain the road and transit network that’s already in place.
The problem is, taxpayers aren’t eager to fork out more of their hard-earned loonies to pay for infrastructure that is considered decent at the best of times, and inadequate at the worst.
So if much-needed upgrades, such as SkyTrain expansion to UBC and the new Evergreen Line, are going to happen, TransLink is going to have to be more creative in how it raises cash, while getting more folks out of their cars.
To the agency’s credit, it is already moving in that direction. One of the options being proposed is road tolling. The user-pay approach could, for example, charge drivers for crossing major bridges.
Granted, tolling is politically contentious – and is often despised by drivers. With the exception of the new Golden Ears crossing, commuters have enjoyed free use of bridges and highways for decades.
But tolling is being touted as a solution for congestion in major cities in North America, and is already embraced in countries around the world. Former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who spoke in Vancouver recently at the Metro Cities Conference, described his city’s once-controversial congestion charge as ultimately successful – boosting transit usage and easing traffic gridlock.
A few hours south of here, Matt Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center, is making a strong case for regional tolling for the Seattle metropolitan area. Rosenberg says cities like Seattle and Vancouver need to get serious about road tolling not only to deal with short-term needs, but also for long-term planning.
“We can't keep doing transportation mega-projects on a disjointed, one-off basis,” he wrote for the Seattle-based publication Crosscut earlier this fall. “…40 years of sizzling growth in vehicle miles travelled has left too many sections of highways, arterial roads, and bridges overburdened, in disrepair, and obsolete in the face of seismic and other hazards.”
He’s right. Simply accepting the status quo is no longer viable, given the growing environmental and economic cost of congestion, and Metro Vancouver’s growing population.
Sure, drivers will dismiss road-tolling measures as pure evil. But as a car enthusiast myself, I would amend that description: They are a necessary evil.
