Transport Policy for a Darker Age
Upward still, and onward
Tomorrow, Ontario will call an election.
For the benefit of my international audience: Westminster parliaments like Ontario can call elections before their mandated five-year term expires. Newly-inaugurated US President Trump is threatening a 25% tariff on Canadian goods, which would hurt the whole country but Ontario particularly. In the face of this danger, the government of Ontario will announce a sudden election to provide the winner with a mandate to respond appropriately.1
Transportation isn't salient to this election. Even so, any election anywhere provides an opportunity to think about what good policy would look like. In recent years, I've had the privilege of advising several provincial and municipal leaders on what to include in their transportation platforms. All those conversations, by necessity, were founded on the question of what would win votes.
Today, I will take a different approach. Instead of offering politically palatable solutions, I'm going to do the opposite, and challenge some deeply-held assumptions about planning, building, and managing transportation in Ontario.
I think this exercise will be helpful for all my readers, both those who live in Ontario and the majority who do not, but who suffer nonetheless from the problems I’m going to discuss.
I have two suggestions for transportation policy. Each directly challenges conventional wisdom about transport management, and also happens to be things that Ontario could do. While I have written before about impossible ideas, these are entirely possible, and indeed each is a best practice in other jurisdictions. I put them forward here precisely because they are things we could implement, but only if we’re willing to put in the work.
That makes them material to our present moment. For decades, Ontario, and many other places, has been able to coast, thanks to past investments and a relatively stable global environment. The investments are decaying, and the environment is worsening rapidly. Our conventional wisdom is fitted to a world that is rapidly drawing to a close. We need to change how we think, and how we think about transportation policy is a good place to start.
Less Process, Better Outcomes
Across the Anglosphere, government has, since around 1970 or so, been founded on the belief that that complex approval processes and extensive consultations protect the public interest and the environment. In practice they have done the opposite: they have protected the status quo, and the rent-seekers it benefits, rather than the public good.
This story applies to many fields, but let’s stick to transit projects in this case. What does it take, not to build a transit project, but to be permitted to build a transit project in Ontario? See here for all the gory detail, but at the highest level, a project must first be developed, and pre-consultation must begin. When that is complete, the project must develop an environmental project report, which must be widely circulated for public consultation. After all public feedback is taken on board, it goes out for agency and interested-party review, all of whom may request further studies or modifications. The guidelines feature a table that helpfully enumerates these parties; by my count, there are 23 categories encompassing 88 stakeholders (with some duplicates). After this, presuming approval is granted by the Minister of Transportation, municipal approvals are needed, including zoning amendments, site-plan approvals, and official plan amendments. If any party disagrees with the decision, they may attempt appeal to a judicial tribunal.
The punch line is that what I have just described is a special, expedited process exclusively used for transit projects. Other projects must go through a more-fulsome process that takes even longer.
Recall that the private sector doesn’t propose transit projects; only the public sector does that. So this baroque set of requirements is something that government does to itself.
This regime is a systemic barrier to progress. In my view, to judge by its effects, the point of this system is not to make projects better. Instead, it is to obscure decisions already taken with a gauze of community input; to insulate projects from legal review; and, where grudgingly necessary, to take on changes that will make everything more expensive. By trying to acknowledge every possible interest through process, we’ve created a system that ensures little is built at all, and that exceedingly slowly.
The very fact that past governments saw fit to streamline this process for transit projects is evidence the regime isn’t working. For more such evidence, consider that five years ago, the current government passed a special law, the Building Transit Faster Act, to further expedite planning constraints on specific transit projects it wanted to pursue.
I say that if it was done before, it can be done again. In that vein, I offer the following proposals.
Firstly, let’s waive environmental assessment requirements for transit projects entirely. That would be a useful corrective to two generations of stasis. Transit infrastructure is prima facie an environmental good, because it enables dense development and reduces car dependency. The notion that we need years of study to determine whether a train line or bus corridor will benefit the environment is absurd. We’re observing process requirements designed to protect the environment that actively impede environmental progress.
But if a full waiver seems too radical, I would be satisfied with a lesser proposal: confine all environmental-assessment activity to six months, thus waiving pre-consultation, and limit agencies or interested parties to providing feedback rather than requesting modifications. Continue to conduct judicial review by a separate tribunal—today the Ontario Land Tribunal, or some new body—the decisions of which are not eligible for appeal or independent review. To this, introduce a strict statute of limitations on challenge, severely restrict standing, and insist on speedy resolution. In other words, let’s model ourselves after Germany, a country that, so far as I can tell, does not have significantly worse environmental outcomes than any of its peer nations.
Secondly, as a complementary measure, let’s remove height limits near major transit stations. By that, I mean that, by provincial law, if the principal entrance to a building, in an area zoned for residential or mixed-residential use, is 400 metres or less from an entrance to a major transit station, then all municipally-set height limits are waived, as are any requirements for setbacks, shade protection, and similar matters. As I have argued before, If we're making massive public investments in transit infrastructure, we should maximize its utility, and reduce the need for further subsidy of transit operators, by allowing more people to live within walking distance of it.
It might go without saying, but let’s waive parking minimums for such buildings as well. Let the market decide how much parking new developments need.
These proposals are strong, but we live in times when strong measures are required. We face both a housing crisis and inadequate transit, and the solution to both is to build. The first step towards building more is to get out of our own way.
Once we’ve built it, though, we must use it efficiently.
Markets for Roads
Last year I wrote several controversial pieces, but the two that attracted the most ire were Public Transit Should Not Be Free and An End to Subsidy. The thesis of both was that if transit users are not forced to bear the cost of the service, in whole or in part, the result is warped incentives that lead to bad outcomes.
The most common rejoinder I got was “what about roads, huh? Shouldn’t people pay to use roads? Why are you punishing transit and giving drivers a free pass?”
It surprised me, because I didn’t think I was giving them a pass. To quote myself:
More could be said. In an ideal world, for instance, transit would be free of subsidy, but so too would urban roads. By choosing not to implement congestion charges, we implicitly subsidize trips by car. The costs of road use are high: not only to government, which must maintain these assets, but also to every road user, whose trip imposes congestion that delays every other user. Imposing a cost-recovery model on roads via a congestion charge would align user incentives better, put transit and auto trips on the same field, and lead to improved outcomes in urban transportation.
One prominent critic, whom I admire deeply, suggested I was offering a “capitalist take” on transit. Well, if this be a capitalist take, then make the most of it: yes, we should have a market in road use, and charge appropriately. Or put another way, Driving Should Not Be Free.
It seems democratic and fair to let people drive their cars on roads as they please, just as to some it seems democratic and fair to permit anyone to ride transit without paying for a ticket. But the consequences are much the same in each case: increased maintenance costs and overcrowding. In the case of roads, that overcrowding manifests as congestion, which makes all trips cost much more in terms of time, and for which there is no way to opt out.
The solution is clear. Just as we need to start using market mechanisms to manage public transit, as I have argued elsewhere, we need to start using them to manage other transport resources as well. There are several ways that we can do this.
Firstly, implement a congestion charge for downtown Toronto. London does it, Oslo does it, now Manhattan does it.2 I have not yet had leisure to write up the results of the Manhattan congestion charge, just introduced a few weeks ago at time of writing, but—as expected— it has introduced significant reductions on congestion, vast increases to transit use, and improvements to Manhattanites’ quality of life. I expect a similar result everywhere such a charge is introduced. Again, as with transit, governments are free to use some of the revenue to subsidize less-well-off drivers, just as we do certain groups who use transit (veterans, the elderly, those suffering from severe financial hardship), but the principle should remain intact: using the roads isn’t free.3
Congestion charges are one way to do this.4 Another is a vehicle-kilometer travelled (VKT) charge. For decades, we have helped to offset the cost of building and maintaining the road network with a tax on gasoline. That is increasingly less effective as a revenue tool, as electric cars become more common. A VKT charge is an effective replacement: for each private vehicle registered in Ontario, the owner pays an annual fee based on how many kilometres the vehicle traveled that year. This could be a flat charge, or a progressive one, much as income tax is graduated. The low-tech way to do this would be annual photographic captures of odometer readings, but the higher-tech way would be for connected vehicles to report their usage themselves.
Whichever way we go, there is no doubt we will get here eventually: as per the Glasgow Declaration, after 2035 gasoline-powered cars will no longer be available in Ontario, meaning revenue from the gas tax will be nil sometime around 2050, as the final gas-powered cars retire. Since that’s the direction we’re going, we should get started now.
The core principle animating these proposals is simple: we should build infrastructure to support all modes of transportation, but price them appropriately. Price signals can resolve conflicts and allocate scarce resources far more effectively than any alternative. When we pretend that transportation exists outside of market forces, we don't eliminate those forces, we merely distort their effects. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
It’s Time to Get Serious
The policies I've outlined here aren't impossible, but merely difficult.
They're difficult politically, because they challenge many people’s strong beliefs about how transportation should work. Left-wingers like environmental assessment, and especially like fine-grained process, and are accustomed to thinking that whatever the process yields, is right. Meanwhile right-wingers see charges and taxes as cash-grabs that intrude upon liberty.
And these policies are also difficult institutionally, because they require us to remake organizations and processes that have become comfortable with the status quo. And the status quo is seductive: changing it invites risk and the possibility of being blamed.
But that's precisely why we need to take these suggestions seriously. For too long, too many of us in the West have been lying in a hammock, coasting on past investments and operating in an environment stable enough that we could get away with it. Certainly that was Ontario’s approach, but the province isn’t alone. We got used to the idea that there would always be enough houses, roads, and rail; enough jobs; enough open markets; and widespread peace. Given all that, why go to the trouble of building, especially when building things is inconvenient? So, largely, we stopped.
That era is ending. Ontario is heading into an election driven by the need to respond to changing global conditions, but those changes affect everyone. Climate change; housing unaffordability; the sharp decline in open markets, free trade, and industrial competitiveness; the world is not what it was, and I doubt it will change back soon. Transportation policy weaves into all these challenges in fundamental ways.
We cannot escape the congestion choking our economic competitiveness while refusing to use pricing to manage demand. And we cannot meet our climate commitments while making it procedurally nigh-impossible to build efficient transit and transit-oriented housing. We need to change. Indeed, we might even say that new occasions teach new duties, and Time makes ancient good uncouth.
But while these duties may be new to us, they aren’t new per se. The things that I'm proposing aren't untested. They’ve all been successfully implemented somewhere in the world. They are merely difficult.
They merely require us to rise to the occasion of our times.
Naturally it’s more complicated than that, but I’ll sequester the detail here, for those who care. Fascination with American practice (an ongoing problem in Canada) led a previous government to pass a law restricting some of the prerogative of the party in power to choose election dates; the law fixes in advance the date of the next election to June 2026. Even so, it’s fundamental to the constitution that that elections can always come sooner than that if the Crown dissolves the legislature, as is the case here. Further, it’s not a secret that the Ontario government of the day is less concerned about obtaining a fresh mandate, and more concerned with the fact that, due to national politics and past scandals for which details continue to emerge, it is much more likely to win re-election in early 2025 than next year.
This particular instance of Manhattan’s congestion charge was proposed as part of the 2019 New York State Budget, but spent five years in environmental review before implementation; five years of environmental review, for a program rather than a project, and one that aims to reduce car use. Now and forever that will remain the exemplar of environmental review beyond reason.
A friend recently suggested that a good way to get suburban buy-in for this would be that for each car, the first four (say) trips into the city in any calendar year would be waived. This would ensure the burden falls on constant users, but occasional users who come into the city a few times a year for entertainment or a court date or what-have-you are largely excused from it. This might help to neutralize some political opposition to the charge’s introduction. I think that is a tactic worth exploring.
This footnote is for the Ontario residents only: yet another way to do this is to abandon any thought of buying back Highway 407. The best thing about the 407 is the fact that is tolled, allowing the free flow of vehicles. Spending billions of dollars to buy it back and then remove the tolls would mean: spending a gigantic sum of money; transferring it foreign investors such that there would be no economic spin-off effect in Ontario; and doing so in order to make travel times worse.