A Bit More Detail

By flip-flopping on tolls Premier Kathleen Wynne has robbed Toronto of badly needed revenue, prolonged gridlock and undercut the city’s independence and decision-making ability, says the city manager.

Peter Wallace’s withering assessment of Wynne’s surprise decision to block tolls is in a three-page letter to Mayor John Tory and the 44 councillors sent Tuesday and obtained by the Star.

While bemoaning Toronto’s lost fiscal opportunity and flatly rejecting Wynne’s argument she has replaced the lost revenue, he urges council to keep pushing the province for road pricing.

Tolling the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway, approved by council in December after Wynne said she would not block tolls, would have helped bridge the big gulf between the city’s limited means and considerable ambitions, Wallace wrote.

Tolls were to “provide stable, significant revenue sources to invest in transit and transportation polices and, importantly, to shift the burden from property tax and transit riders towards user fees for roads.”

The Premier is right to say, in her decision not to approve road tolls, that Toronto residents need better transit options. But under the Liberals’ watch, sound transit-planning practices have been more talk than walk. Every development decision is a transit decision. The recent siting of two new hospitals in St. Catharines and Windsor in suburban locations is straight out of 1950s planning around the automobile.

More importantly, Toronto’s own goals are still murky on the question of the future of the car in the city. Too frequently, we lack vision, and we lack political leadership. The Mayor’s random revenue-generating ideas encourage narrow, limited thinking. We are implicitly encouraged to think small, to accept compromises that are not real compromises. We should resist this.

I don’t include the mayor among progressive city-builders. The Tory road toll proposal was not a city-building idea, nor a good plan. Its only achievable goal was to raise money, most or all of which would have gone towards roads, not transit. As a revenue tool, it was unfair, and as a city-building plan, it was auto-centric. It was trying to make money off the status quo instead of building towards something better.

Road tolls on the DVP and Gardiner would not have improved mobility in the city, nor would they have brought about significant mode change—namely, getting people out of cars.

So let’s take the opportunity to shed ourselves of a weak plan and imagine what could be done with the Toronto-owned highways to build a better city, one that isn’t oriented around the automobile. We should talk about rethinking how they are used, or even getting rid of all of them.

Our three inner-city freeways were the brainchild of the Metro Toronto government in the 1950s. There were even more expressways planned that were never built. They are the epitome of auto-centric city-building that cuts the city in pieces and envisions it as a place to get through, rather than a place in which we live.

How long do progressives and urban dwellers more generally have to wait before Ontario’s NDP stops compensating (atoning?) for former premier Bob Rae’s decision, circa the early 1990s, to slap tolls on Highway 407?

The question arose again late last week when Andrea Horwath’s populists stood shoulder to ideological shoulder with Patrick Brown’s Progressive Conservatives to support a symbolic motion calling on Kathleen Wynne’s government to reject the City of Toronto’s forthcoming request to put tolls on the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway.

I understand that opposition parties need to be, well, oppositional. But as happened in the last provincial election in 2014, Horwath revealed she’s got a tin ear when it comes to not just funding urban infrastructure but deploying green policies meant to change driver behaviour, reduce emissions, and spur transit use.

Instead of tabling a motion calling on the provincial government to, say, properly fund the operating costs of transit, toll all the 400-series highways or urge the Wynne Liberals to give the City of Toronto other revenue tools, such as sales tax, Team Horwath threw in their lot with a rurally-based party that has little interest in transit and scant purchase with urban voters.

Why? Shouldn’t progressive voters in big cities like Toronto be able to back an electoral option to the Liberals? Of course. Yet last week’s stunt — which, let’s face it, is what that motion amounted to — stands as a fairly crisp signal that the NDP isn’t interested in Toronto. I understand why the Tories don’t much care about the city, but the NDP’s indifference is much more difficult to grasp.

Road tolls are unfair. Several people have raised the good point that more wealthy citizens drive—but if we manage to tax the wealthy more than the poor with a road toll, it’s by luck or by accident, not by design. Lots of low-income people drive, too.

Correlations aside, road tolls tax usage, not wealth. If we’re taxing an essential service necessary for well-being, which everyone should be able to access regardless of wealth, and if indeed that essential service—mobility—is key to the acquisition and maintenance of wealth, then it should not be taxed based on usage.

A tax or fee on an essential service that is not based on ability to pay is regressive. Period. Mobility is essential in a city. Revenue for the operating and capital costs of transportation infrastructure should come from taxes on wealth.

Keep saying “$2” instead of “$1,000” and you hide the impact of this tax grab. Call it a user fee if you want, I don’t care. For those who have no choice, it doesn’t matter what it’s called.

Those who need to drop off children at daycare or school, get groceries on the way home, or work non-negotiable hours often have no choice but to drive.

A $2 toll is the same as adding a 40-cent gas tax—per litre—for someone who fills their tank each week. Imagine the province telling us they’re raising the price of gas from $1.10 to $1.50/litre. Would city council respond, “Well, rich people drive more”?

The first thing to note about proposed tolls on the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway is that they’ll benefit everyone—drivers and non-drivers.

Drivers should notice the highways are less congested and their trips faster, as some motorists opt for other means of transportation. Transit riders should notice service improvements as toll-generated dollars help the City invest in capital projects such as the downtown relief line.

Details still need to be confirmed, but the thrust of the mayor’s plan is clear. Drivers would pay a flat—not distance-based—fee of two to three dollars. That would generate about $200 million annually for transit and road improvements.

The policy requires provincial permission (not a major hurdle) and Council approval. Early vote counts suggest about 30 councillors support the plan. Given the mayor’s popularity, it would be shocking if the new measure was shot down.

The toll is likely to be backed by many on the left who desperately want expanded transit and by conservatives who like the fact it would be paid by non-Torontonians currently making no contribution to the city’s road network. (According to chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat, cited in the Star, about 40 per cent of DVP and Gardiner users don’t live in Toronto.) Assuming the proposal is approved in early 2017, revenue could start flowing in by 2019.

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.

There’s an old Catholic saying: Christ called us to the Kingdom. We answered with … the Church!

Not every public project turns out quite the way that it is planned. It’s hard to understand—at a distance of half a century—just how optimistic and even joyous a cocoon of rhetoric encased the Don Valley Parkway at its birth. Telling that story illustrates how one day’s Utopia can devolve into another’s Waste Land. That telling can reveal how the thinking behind that devolution is with us still.

“[V]alleys like the Humber and Don are not spoiled by arterial highways but beautified.” Well according to former Metropolitan Toronto Chair Frederick G. Gardiner anyway. Robert Caro writes in his Pulitzer–prize winning biography of Gardiner’s American role model, Robert Moses, that his subject “wanted the parkways to be broader and more beautiful than any roads the world had ever seen, landscaped as private parks are landscaped so that they would be themselves parks, ‘ribbon parks,’ so that even as people drove to parks, they would be driving through parks.” This attitude was typical of the mid-20th century, as people were increasingly driving to get to work, but also for pleasure. Taking a road trip became a vacation. Driving without a destination was an introspective journey and symbolized freedom and hope. These days, driving crammed on to busy, crumbling roads in Toronto, it’s hard to imagine that back in the 1940s, people spoke glowingly of the beauty of parkways and wanted roads through natural areas—including the Don Valley.

Although Moses’s pro-parkway views are well known, the DVP came about through the result of a popular referendum. Call it a New Year’s Day hangover, call it being misinformed: the fact remains that on January 1, 1946, Toronto voters handily approved the Don Valley Traffic Artery. However bizarre the rhetoric of the time may seem to us today Parkway as beautification? Parkway as park?—that’s what Toronto voters so enthusiastically embraced. We can see now that the DVP marks the post-war automotive age’s high-water mark in Toronto, an era that would falter with the 1971 cancellation of the Spadina Expressway.The cultural and urban planning gurus of the earlier era that brought us the DVP proclaimed the virtues of automotive parkways and limited-access transportation corridors.

One of Toronto’s busiest commuter arteries has reopened in both directions after being shut down overnight by some of the severest flooding ever seen on the roadway.

The Don Valley Parkway was closed at around 5 a.m., shortly before the beginning of the morning rush hour, which brings tens of thousands of drivers into Toronto from points east.

The southbound lanes were back to normal by around 9:30 a.m., and the northbound lanes reopened about half an hour later.

All lanes between the Gardiner Expressway and the Bayview/Bloor exit were closed after the Don River overflowed its banks, leaving behind water up to a metre deep, and motorists scrambling for alternate routes.

The waters are now subsiding and a cleanup of the debris left behind is under way, police said.

In all, Toronto and the area north received up to 60 millimetres of rain before the downpour eased at around 6 a.m.