Ontario NDP Leader Proposes Making Hwy 407 a Non-Toll Highway
Why?
This seems an odd promise by NDP politician, especially in the east where the party is more left wing. She is basically arguing for more private vehicles!
One of her justifications is that Highway 401 is bumper-to-bumper while Highway 407 is near empty, so taking away the toll would divert traffic from the 401 to the 407. But why not just make make the congested part of the 401 a toll road, as well? That would encourage more people to take GO Transit in and out of city, and more people to take the TTC within it.
Thinking about GO Transit reminded us of an old post where we went into regional transit. So this seems like a good time to go back to it, not only because GO Transit is an excellent regional transit system for southern Ontario, but also because it should be used as a model for other jurisdictions.
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The GO Transit System and Regional Transit
Both of your Ride On writers grew up either in Toronto itself, or in the Greater Toronto Area. It is for that reason that we are both familiar with the GO Transit system, which is owned the Government of Ontario (thus, the acronym “GO”) and operated by Metrolinx. As seen in the system map below, this is a regional transit system centred at Toronto’s Union Station with train and bus lines running to cities and towns such as Barrie, Richmond Hill, Stouffville, Oshawa, Kitchener/Waterloo, Milton, Hamilton, and Niagara Falls.
The GO Train was even the setting of an awesome TV show called Train 48, co-starring future Kim’s Convenience star, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, and future star of Shelved, Paul Braunstein.
When one of us thinks about Ontario, the only thing he really misses — other than his parents, of course — is the GO Transit system, and we both wish that such as system could exist in Alberta. To be clear, Calgary does have regional transit services, such as On-It Regional Transit that connects Calgary to Cochrane, Okotoks, Banff, Canmore, Lake Louise, and Moraine Lake, but it is not nearly as extensive as the GO Transit service — to rival GO Transit, there would also be lines connecting Calgary to Red Deer, Lethbridge, and Medicine Hat. Although Red Arrow does connect Calgary to Red Deer and Lethbridge, it not with the frequencies offered by GO Transit.
One could argue that Ontario’s population is roughly triple that of Alberta, and even the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) has a much larger population than Alberta as a whole, so the Ontario government has a far greater ability to fund such a regional transit system. In other words, the GTHA has both the demand for GO Transit (in terms of population) as well as supply (via tax and fare revenues), so it is relatively easy for different levels of government to find themselves motivated to cooperate with one another on the development of a regional transit system. Indeed, in his research paper titled “Inter-Municipal Transit Governance: An Investigation of Challenges and Opportunities in the Alberta Capital Region”, Szabo (2013) depicts the cities of Edmonton and Calgary as trying to bring more people into their cities with regional transit, while facing pushback in terms of generating funds, attracting riders, and getting different levels of government to cooperate with one another.
These are certainly fair points to make, but a counterargument is that as a regional transit system grows around its hub, it will create more economic growth for the entire region, thus helping to fund the system. Indeed, after an On-It Summer 2017 Calgary-Banff pilot project, Colleen Shepherd, the Calgary Regional Partnership’s Executive Director was quoted as follows:
[C]onnecting our municipalities through regional transit is essential to attracting new businesses to the Calgary Region that will diversify our economy. The Calgary Region is lagging behind. Go to any vibrant, growing cosmopolitan region in North America or abroad, and you will find a connected regional transit system as the backbone.
We’ve been saying for years that regional transit is a must have if we hope to bring global companies like Amazon to the Calgary Region. Large companies require access to the region’s labour force and are demanding better mobility choices for a young active labour pool who choose not to drive, or who want to live in a community of choice outside the larger city.
Therefore, as argued by Szabo (2013), planners need to have a clear vision with respect to how they see regional transit working for them both currently and in the future. To put it bluntly, politicians need to be convinced that regional transit is in their political best interests, so one set of “selling points” could be the following: a good regional transit system enables voters to live in the suburbs where housing costs are relatively low, while still being able to commute to and from the city without a lot of hassle, and also in an environmentally-friendly way.
Need more reasons to develop good regional transit systems? For one thing, there is the problem of urban sprawl: as a city’s population moves further away from its core, either toward the edges of the city or to the suburbs, a solid regional transit system can go a long way to connecting them to the core of the city while motivating them to avoid the congestion and pollution that come with driving themselves around.
Furthermore, in their article titled “Urban Sustainability and Counter-Sustainability: Spatial Contradictions and Conflicts in Policy and Governance in the Freiburg and Calgary Metropolitan Regions”, published in the academic journal Urban Studies, Miller and Mössner (2020) argue drafters of city sustainability projects often do not consider the suburbs, which leads them to overlook the fact that providing regional transit services increases ridership on local transit systems, which can have beneficial environmental implications. Furthermore, sustainable cities attract businesses and highly-skilled labourers. However, the authors caution that cities and municipalities must carefully consider potential consequences of their regional aspirations because they may unintentionally implement steps that have negative consequences. More specifically, members of each region must consider the consequences of their plans on all other members of the region, not just themselves.
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