Toll roads make sense: Editorial
Politicians hate road tolls almost as much as commuters do. Unlike, say, taxes deducted from your pay-cheque, road tolls are associated with infrastructure that is big and visible. Either you have to pay money out of your wallet at a toll booth or you get billed through your transponder as you pass an overhead checkpoint, and you pay a bill at the end of the month. Either way, the cost is a constant presence in your life, reminding you how much you are paying the government (or a private company under government mandate) for your commuting choice.
Which is exactly the reason we like toll booths. Taxpayers should experience, to the fullest extent possible, the connection between their activities and the cut taken by the tax-man. A vigilant taxpayer is a conservative's best friend. This is one of the reasons we support user fees, more generally -- including those that could be levied by the health-care system to discourage frivolous use of emergency rooms.
The issue of road tolls is currently in the spotlight because of Mississauga, Ont., Mayor Hazel McCallion, who last week opined that new revenue sources may be necessary to fund the massive expansion of public transit options planned for the Greater Toronto Area. "I think we have to face the music, and that is that people are not going to be happy with tolling roads, but it's one way to pay for the needs in the [GTA]," she said on Thursday. "The property tax cannot handle it." But the issue also is one that other growing Canadian cities are facing. And they, too, should consider the use of road tolls.
Traffic congestion is a major problem in Canadian cities. (A March Board of Trade report, for instance, put Toronto dead last for commuters in a comparison of 19 urban centres around the globe, with an average commute time of 80 minutes.) One of the reasons for this is that usage on most highways is essentially free: Having paid for the roads with our taxes, we can use them as much as we like without incurring any extra marginal cost (except gas). That's why so many suburbanites drive to work, even though public transportation, or telecommuting, might be equally feasible.
One of the reasons toll roads make sense is that they can be used to impute the real cost of highway usage -- construction and maintenance, most notably; but also pollution, and the creation of traffic jams that take time and money from everybody else -- into the everyday microeconomic commuting decisions of commuters. In this sense, the use of toll roads cannot be easily dismissed as a form of big-government intrusion into people's lives. Highways are going to be paid for by taxpayers one way or another. The only question is whether taxpayers get the choice of whether to buy in or not. Toll roads give them that freedom.
Moreover, it cannot be denied that our over-reliance on the automobile -- as well as the far-flung, low-density suburbs and exurbs that depend on it -- has challenged the fabric of traditional society in ways that social conservatives, in particular, should find alarming. People who spend significant parts of their evenings alone, on highways, stuck in tiny metal boxes have less time for friends, family and neighbourhood engagement. Their children spend more time in day-care and they have less time to prepare shared meals at dinner-time, the cornerstone of family life. Discouraging the migration of city-dwellers to the distant periphery of cities by taxing people's commute should not be regarded as the primary function of toll roads -- for many, it smacks too much of social engineering. But it is not an effect that we should ignore either.
From a conservative's point of view, the greatest legitimate knock against toll roads is that politicians will simply pocket the revenue from them, but then refuse to lower income or property taxes by any offsetting amount, resulting in an overall increase in government spending. And so voters -- wherever they live or work -- should insist that any legislation enabling the creation of new toll roads also contains provisions that limit existing taxes. Rationalizing the way we pay for roads and other forms of transit is a worthy goal, but it should not be done at the cost of creating a more bloated public sector.