[URBAN NOTE] "John Tory’s road toll epiphany"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc looks at John Tory's rationale for making the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway toll roads. He deserves some credit, but he hasn't confronted deeper structural issues with revenue collection.

There’s no question that Mayor John Tory deserves credit for hitching his political wagon to road tolls — on the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway — at a time when populist fires are raging all over.

The case for such user fees is amply documented, and there are precedents everywhere, not least on the freeways of our tax averse neighbours to the south. Tolls are good for the environment and they can serve to underwrite other social goods, like transit lines designed to ameliorate congestion.

You know the arguments.

Tory, moreover, wasn’t shy about laying out his own political calculations: lots of 905 drivers use these City of Toronto-owned highways and don’t pay a penny for their upkeep or reconstruction. Economists hate externalities, but externalities are most useful if the people hurt by such decisions won’t be voting for you no matter how they feel about road pricing. Commuters can shout all they want at talk radio, but they can’t vent at the ballot box.

Indeed, the thinking behind Tory’s (latest) conversion on the toll road to Damascus brings to mind the reasoning behind David Miller’s advocacy of the land transfer tax, the last great cash cow approved by Toronto city council. In any given year, the constituency most affected is tiny, and unlikely to sway an election.