About
Reverse Zone, weblog on urban planning, sustainability, and technology.
Martin Laplante
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A few favourite links.
- Planetizen
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Recent posts
- Canada and US Driving No Longer Dropping
- This Year Ontario No Longer Needs Coal
- Shaping the Public Realm
- The Days of Sprawl Are Officially Over
- The Telescope is Backward
- Stop The Earth
- Amazon CloudFront New Pricing, Cheap At A Million Dollars
- Canada Spends Billions in Energy INefficiency
- Density as Persons Plus Jobs Per Unit Area
- Now is the Time for New Transit Investments
- UNFCCC Confuses Journalists on Direction of Greenhouse Gases
- Canadian Business Prefers Carbon Tax
- Streets To Home: Down With Continuum of Care!
- Close Roads to Reduce Congestion
- Science and Economics of Climate Change
- Canada and US Driving Continue To Drop
- Alberta Overtakes Ontario in Coal-Fired Generation
- Everyone Not Living In The Suburbs Is Fooling Themselves
- Canada Almost Studies the Possibility of Eventual Road Pricing
- Rogers Messing with DNS
- Will Canada Reach Kyoto Targets With New GHG Inventory Figures?
- The Delicate Balancing Act of Downtowns and the Death of Griffintown
- Internet Identity Keystone Kops
- LA Transit Plan Aims to Save 725 Metric Tons of GHG Annually by 2030
- New York City's Congestion Pricing Plan Dies Yet Again
- New York Discovers Existing Direct Democracy Zoning Rule
- Driving is Going Down in the US
- The Commuting Turnaround in Canada
- Vancouver Churches Get a Licence to Break the Law
- Carbon Capture and Storage For Canada
2008
2007
2006
2005
Complete List of Posts
Top Posts
- Close Roads to Reduce Congestion
- The Delicate Balancing Act of Downtowns and the Death of Griffintown
- Places to Grow - Pictures Tell the Story
- Why We Still Need Separation of Uses
- Dense Condos Do Not Revitalize
- Hot Air - How to Beat Climate Change By Burning More Coal
- What's Best for Renewables, Merton Rule or Feed-In Tariff?
- LEED for Neighborhood Development Pilot Rating System
- Main Arterial Woonerf
- More on Which is Greener, Houses or Apartments?
- Which is Greener, Houses or Apartments?
- Zoning Exceptions and the Failure of Planning
- 18th Century Planning is Still the State of the Art
- Ontario Municipal Board Says City Can't Plan for Mix or Density of Mixed Use
- Brownfield Brutalism - Urban Planning for Sale
- The Causes of Sprawl
- Energy Star Sprawl
- Is High Density the Cure for Transportation?
- Why not Build Medieval Towns Here?
- Vancouver has it right - Ecodensity
- Ontario has it wrong - Places to Grow
- Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and Barry Wellman
- Review of This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America
- New York's Downzoning Uprising
- Community Planning - are citizens powerless?
- Paris riots and urban planning
- Minimize Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Reverse Zoning
- Social Sciences: So Much Left Undone
Canada Almost Studies the Possibility of Eventual Road Pricing
On Saturday, the Globe and Mail reported a Transport Canada announcement that they had contracted a study to look into the possible benefits of using using tolls, congestion charges, parking levies and other "urban transportation pricing mechanisms" to induce more efficient urban transportation. The study was to inform future federal policy and funding decisions relating to infrastructure.
Within hours, the Transport Minister (and former head of an urban transit system) said he had personally cancelled the study. And coincidentally on the next day the Prime Minister called an election.
The department spokesman, before he knew that the minister opposed it, said that the federal government hopes to work with provinces to develop "more comprehensive approaches with respect to traffic." So does cancelling the study then mean that future federal policy and funding decisions should not be informed and that they do not wish to work with provinces on comprehensive approaches?
It's a bit of a puzzle. Road pricing is not a particularly left-wing approach, it has been adopted by both left and right wing governments elsewhere in the world and US conservatives are all for it. The Bush administration has given out all sorts of money not just for studies but for implementation. Free-market advocates tend to think that a market approach where you can do what you like as long as you are willing to pay for it and where public transit has a somewhat businesslike source of funding is better than regulations and collecting from taxpayers whatever transit bureaucrats say they would like to spend.
The reality is probably more political. It's hard to support market mechanisms for transportation demand management and then reject market mechanisms for energy and GHG like the carbon tax. And while the current government is not very popular in cities, it does get a lot of votes in suburbs. A toll to commute by car is not what their supporters want to hear. Not even a study to examine the possibility in order to inform future decisions.
Tags: Transportation Transportation Planning Canada Congestion Pricing