The Guru’s of Tax & Spend Are Grooming the Public for Road Pricing
Like a pervert on the Internet grooming children for lewd encounters, the powers that be in METRO Vancouver are grooming the public for “road pricing” for a very rude tax grab.
What is road pricing anyways?
Road pricingAi??and congestion charging are direct charges levied for the use of roads, including road tolls, distance or time based fees, congestion charges and charges designed to discourage use of certain classes of vehicle, fuel sources or more polluting vehicles.
Hard lobbying by the tax and spend crowd at TransLink, METRO Vancouver, and Simon Fraser UniversityAi??are trying to convince local taxpayers that road pricing is inevitable. Very few cities have road pricing or congestion charges and many pundits confuse road pricing with toll roads and bridges. Of course toll roads and bridges are a form of road pricing, in most cases the tolls collected were to fund and maintain a certain stretch of highway or a new bridge like the Golden Ears Bridge.
IfAi??politicians want to impose road pricing on the Vancouver METRO region, they region must provide an adequate transit alternative to the car and sorry for the bus crowd, this does not include buses or B-Line style express buses, otherwise known as BRT.
For the Vancouver METRO region to even consider road pricing, we should have a minimum of 300 km of rail transit, providing direct access to such destinations as downtown Vancouver and Stanley Park, SFU, UBC, BCIT, Whiterock, Tsawwassen Ferry terminal, Langley and Abbotsford (and YXX).
That current transit plans don’t include the majority of these destinations, road pricing will fail and those promoting such a scheme will be discredited and/or have their political careers terminated.
The reason of course why the road pricing debate is surfacing its ugly head is that we build with the very expensive SkyTrain light metro system or just slightly cheaper light metro such as the Canada Line, instead of much cheaper light rail. TransLink and many regional transit planners are stuck in the mud of 1980’s transit planning, where money was plentiful and all transit had to be grade separated to not to interfere with cars.
Today we live in the 21st century where money is hard to get and cities which seriously want to build affordable transit systems, build with LRT which has costs from one half to one tenth of that of light metro. Sadly, our local crop of politicians, planners and academics still believe we live in theAi??free spendingAi??80’s and refuse to accept the fiscal realities of today.
The likes of Gordon PriceAi??can blather on allAi??they want about road pricing, butAi??untilAi??the regionAi??actually provides a viable alternative toAi??extortion every time one drives, road pricing will remain aAi??wet dream for tax and spend bureaucrats and politicians.
Postscript: To see how SkyTrain has acted like a black hole for the taxpayers money, compare the RftV/Leewood TramTrain report for a 138 km. Vancouver to Chilliwack TramTrain (LRT) costing just under $1 billion with the 11.5 km. $1.4 billion Evergreen Line using SkyTrain.
Postscript 2: It seems the so called transit experts on the panel are not transit experts at all, rather engineers and salesmen for road pricing systems. Has anyone of the so called experts have a degree in urban transportation? I doubt it. This smells like the fare-gate fiasco, where shills for the fare-gate manufacturers convinced local politicos that the SkyTrain system needed faregates, despite the fact they will cost more to maintain and operate than fares lost to fare evasion!
Like it or not, regional tolling likely to happen: SFU prof
Local politicians gathering to talk about options today
Shane Bigham Oct 17, 2012
BURNABY (NEWS1130) – Local politicians are gathering today to discuss regional tolling options with a panel of experts from across North America.
Drivers might not be fond of the idea, but the head of Simon Fraser University’s City Program says it’s only a matter of time before it happens.
“It’s going to happen at some point in our future,” insists Gord Price. “Don’t know when, but now is not too soon to start thinking about it and at least getting approval in principle without having to go in and retroactively impose tolls on projects people think that they’ve already paid for.”
He notes tolling only bridges across the region probably wouldn’t work. “That just creates so many regional inequities that it’s going to be very tough to pull off.
“However, a road pricing system using new technologies does make a lot of sense,” he point out.
Mayors, councillors, and experts are gathering this afternoon at the Metro Vancouver offices in Burnaby to “open a dialogue” about road pricing.
Excellent, this will be the undoing of TransLink. What if someone were able to show that putting everyone on transit into cars would lower carbon emissions without doing much of anything to road congestion? Would drivers revolt for TransLink picking on them? Likely they would, and a class action lawsuit would be a very real possibility.
I’m working on a study and am using TransLink data but TransLink is very slow to respond to my FOI requests (and the TransLink Commissioner has to be copied to “encourage” TransLink to respond to basic information). Remember the transit strike in 2001 for four months? Gridlock did not paralyse traffic.
It did improve the air quality dramatically in my neighbourhood and it did lead to less gridlock on many roads because cars were not being cut off by buses operating underneath SkyTrain lines which were supposed to remove buses but actually increased the use of diesel buses hampering road traffic. The study showing TransLink to be an environmental scam should be out by January 2013.
I have seen some positive things come out of road pricing iniatives however, no one likes new user fees. What I really wanted to talk about was refering to your B line services as BRT. This is a issue that has come out of the US and it’s invading Canada too. Any time a politician talks about bringing in some form of improved bus service usually as an alternative to rail transit they now tag it as Bus Rapid Transit and as a person who works in the transportation planning profession it is becoming infuriating. Say what you want about real physically segregated BRT but it has been somewhat sucessful when fully and honestly implemented. I get really pissed off when people call a express bus operating in traffic with a few bits of technology at intersections Rapid Transit. In Europe they refer to these types of things as improved bus service or quality bus but never bus rapid transit. There have been entire research papers put out about what to call real BRT due to the damage being done by people who refer to any improvement in basic bus service as BRT. Although I prefer rail were possible. Good honest BRT can be a great answer when LRT is not appropriate. You will now get anti transit people to push this cheap Light BRT as alternatives to real rapid transit because they have been told that the capacity of LRT and real BRT is equal. Since this basic bus improvement project gets called BRT they equate it’s cheaper price as a superior service to real BRT or LRT. What happens next is the riders figure out that this nowhere near as good as LRT and they get mad at planners. Worse still, if you are in a situation where real BRT is a good alternative the public will equate the project to the improved bus service masking as BRT and scream that they have been cheated or urban planners are going to try and cheat them again. Either way I have to spend weeks explaining to a skeptical public that an express bus is not true BRT more like BRT really light. Anyway thats the end of my rant.
Good Day
Zweisystem replies: I am not against road pricing, but you must have a viable public transit alternative to convince the public that it is a good idea. In Vancouver, we don’t and I see road pricing as a vehicle to fund more very expensive SkyTrain light-metro expansion (the Broadway/UBC subway).
Again I am not against express buses but BRT is not a poor man’s LRT, not even close.
A UK transit expert once told me; “a bus, is a bus, is a bus.” Sadly for many buses just will not be seen as an alternative to the car, but that argument is for another day.
@Haveacow, yes I somewhat agree, BRT might have some applications as a temporary bridging step to LRT or tram lines, but TransLink has been running BRT to UBC since 1996, I believe, for example. When TransLink uses BRT on a trolley bus route so that the usage on the regular trolley and other buses is reduced to the point where we have 75% empty seats on regular buses to UBC, TransLink is simply being dumb or is overcrowding the BRT to make a spectacle of it.
Likely it is to make the false show of how transit by TransLink is working to put bums in seats whille most buses going to UBC are mostly empty due the the BRT service.
There is no proof that getting to UBC in 37 minutes on BRT rather than 40 minutes on a trolley or other bus (if TransLink did not purposely slow the trolley buses down with up to an extra 15 minute recovery time) does anything to increase ridership. It sure creates noise and pollution and drives up transit costs, though.
Does transit in Ottawa run fricken express BRT to the university until 2:20 am? Who the heck does that in the rest of Canada, especially with thundering diesel buses operate 10 metres to 15 metres from homes every two to 12 minutes one way (one minute to six minutes both ways)? TransLink is just run by fricken retards in my mind. Throw the bums out, the sooner the better.
You need the road pricing to afford the transit because all levels of senior government in this country have said that over the next decade funding for transit will decline (due to budget deficits)! So the funding must be produced locally. The funding for basic infrastructure like sewer services and water distributuion and filtering is needed to grow by 100-300% each decade through to the 2040’s or our cities will face a fundamental health crisis that our hospitals will not be able to solve. There is also a growing timebomb on how our various pension systems are going to handle the Babyboomers. The largest private pension plan in North America, the Ontario teachers pension plan said that even with new rules there system will be dry by the early 2030’s not long after the government pension system collapes in 2025.
In Ottawa the Transitway service including one of two universities and one of two large community colleges runs all night at 15 and 30 minute intervals. Carleton University has 20 minute local service till 1:30 am and unfortunately the O-Train, which also serves Carleton shuts down at midnight. The French community college Cite’ Collegielle (not sure about the spelling sorry if I offend a student) has hideous service of single local bus line. To be fair Ottawa has a rule that all new and as many of the existing major community facilities (planner speak for anything that has a lot of people, malls,stadiums, major schools, hospital complexes ) has to be on a light rail line or transitway or it will not be allowed to be there or expand if it was there before the transitway. Most of the time they have stuck to this rule, quite a lot of the contraversy at Lansdowne Park project was because it was “grandfathered” out of this rule and has very few options in dealing with the heavy traffic it will create. The BRT here that is outside our Greenbelt will never be converted to LRT because of the complete lack of any high density. Kanata,Orleans and Barhaven are all large and have significant populations but are generally empty during the day and only Kanata with the high tech firms there, have a large independent job market. So here you may never have enough market to convert to LRT so the BRT systems become more than a stepping stone on the way to LRT. Without density you need combination of a riding culture (like europe) and a willingness to massively subsidize various aspects of the operation (also like europe) by design but ballanced off against the profitable runs you do have (again what the E.U. does by design). This sharing system achieves a balance because profit is not the central motivator as it is here. The concept that transit systems are there as a service independent of profit is hard one for North Americans, especially fiscal conservatives.
My original purpose of the comment was to show how inprecise use of terms can have dire consequences in the real world. Translink’s lack of financial honesty is frustrating but expected because of the shere lack of national and provincial funding system wide in major Canadian Cities. Things like road pricing are the only real option that many cities will have to pay for any improvements because our Constitution does not recognize local government and their agencies (like transit) as a true level of goevernment and thus no equal access to any real stable type of taxation other than property taxes.
The real reason that road pricing is raising its ugly head is that the government has greatly reduced taxes and used gas and carbon taxes, which were earmarked for funding roads, bridges, and transit, for general revenue. Buy doing so, road pricing has become an attack on the poor, as they will find it harder and harder to be mobile and will result in the flight of the middle class and lower to non road pricing areas. The SkyTrain and Canada line light metro’s are also subsidized by over $300 million annually, which is a direct grant from the provincial government money which otherwise could be spent on transit.
The current congestion charge zone in London covers the area within the London Inner Ring Road (which forms the A501, A1202, A1210/A1211, A100, A201, A202, A302, A3204, A4202 and parts of the A5) which includes both the City of London, which is the main financial district, and also the West End, which is London’s primary commercial and entertainment centre. Although primarily a commercial area, there are also 136,000 residents, out of a total Greater London population of around 7,000,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:London_congestion_charge_zone.png
It seems road pricing is another tax by a government who has made it policy to download taxes onto the poor.
This isnt LONDON people. This isnt PARIS people.
And even it were, these great cities, like NEW YORK, built their transit systems WITHOUT resorting to road pricing.
Why can’t Translink? Because, at the heart of it, we don’t actually NEED what Translink is building. That is the truth.
And these cities built what people needed and not what idealogues, hateful of the evil car, dictate.
Road pricing… sounds innocuous enough. Want to see what it really is?
Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_road_pricing
What it means is the government will force you to buy a GPS tracking system for the purpose of reporting your whereabouts and movements 24 hrs per day 7 days per week. It will force you to pay for the transponder and its installation. It will be illegal to drive without a transponder active and will probably be enforced by cancelling your government insurance if you break that law.
From that data on your whereabouts and movements, the government calculate where you have been and where you stopped and will send you a per kilometre bill for using the roads we have been paying for. It will also charge you for NOT driving your car while on a public road ( parking ). This is an outrageous violation of your right to freedom of movement and privacy. It will be implemented for what reason?…To pay for a few buses that most of us do not want or need.
These mayors are afraid to charge you directly for fuel, or property tax because then you would notice what they are doing and rightly boot there rear ends out of office. No.. better to get a computer to do it and have the high tax bill you have to pay be your own fault for actually driving on the roads you have been paying for all these years.
Please, think this over and EMAIL your mayor . Tell your mayor this is NOT ACCEPTABLE. It is an egregious violation of our free society’s civil rights.
If you think this wont happen here, then google GPS NETHERLANDS ROAD TAX and see what the foolish Dutch parliament legalized before it collapsed. It is shameful that so many Canadian lives were lost securing Holland’s freedom only to have a new generation casually toss that freedom away.
@Lee Leeman, excellent comment. I took the liberty of sending it to the Mayors’ Council (mayorscouncil@translink.ca).
Again I must restate, it is the SkyTrain and Canada line light-metro system that is mostly the cause of TransLink’s woes and the driver for road pricing. Regional politicians have not read anything about road pricing and remain ignorant except, of course, the perceived financial windfall. I must remind everyone that the car driver does pay a great amount of taxes for the road and transit system, but Gordon Campbell so reduced the taxes in this province that he had to rob the gas tax/transportation monies and funnel the money into general revenue.
What greatly disappoints me, is that the likes of Gordon Price (who is not a transportation or transit expert) remaining silent. What Bureaucrats and academics will see is a tax windfall to bolster phony programs and planning at both universities and municipal city halls. The one thing road pricing will do, is greatly increase the number of bureaucrats feeding off the system, which in-turn will require even higher taxes and fees for the motorist. Despite all the hype and hoopla about road pricing, it will not greatly improve our current transit mess, rather just exacerbate it with more of the same bad planning.