We don’t know the details yet, but it is certain that most or all of the burden will be placed on drivers and/or car and truck owners, which is not only unfair, but absurd.

We all are served by, and depend upon, the transportation infrastructure, roads very much included, regardless of whether we own and/or drive a vehicle.

I would love to drive a cool little hybrid, I would love to be able to use an efficient public transit system, I would love to pay less for fuel, but I drive a truck – because I have to.

From time to time some self-righteous nitwit who has not yet been able to figure out that everything he or she owns or consumes – clothes, food, furniture – yes, even that bicycle – has been brought to them by truck – leaves an admonishing card under the wiper blades of my 20-year old (and obviously working) truck, accusing me of destroying the planet.

I wonder if he sticks them under the wipers of those gas-guzzling ambulances and fire trucks too?

A recent post in the G&M asked “why should I pay taxes to maintain and improve roads and bridges when I live downtown and don’t even own a car?”

Why indeed? And why should I pay taxes to support the education system when I don’t even have any kids?

Screw the working class families that can only afford housing in the ‘burbs, screw the poor in general; let’s just pay for everything with user fees.

This kind of regressive thinking used to be largely limited to the lunatic fringes of the Republican Party, but with governments at all levels increasingly embracing PPP’s and other “business models” for the delivery of public services, it has gained traction to the point where many of us don’t seem to notice this creeping foolishness anymore.

Thought of The Day

“You start the war on cars, you shut down the city downtown with useless bike lanes, you increase the parking fees… and then complain there is not enough money to pay for the city’s indulgences!” – from Idiot’s Almanac for Better Administration

That Grande Dark Roast Starbucks coffee will cost you $5, that restaurant visit (if there is going to be one) will cost you double as before, even the Dollar store will change its name to “Twoonie” or “The Fiver” store!

And who should we thank for the courtesy?
To the likes of Mayor Robertson, his counterparts, his handpicked managers and why not their Visionaries “save the Planet” lunatics.
Easy to save the planet, right, when all you have to do is walk a few blocks down to your six figures job, or cross the street… see, you can afford to be frugal when you don’t care about money and how you’ll get to the place who gifts you with the paycheck for… no work.

Last I remember, before he became Mayor, Gregor was “absent minded” enough to not pay his sky train fare, it looked damn expensive those days, eh? How about now?

IMHO Don’s comment #2 is REQUIRED READING! Exceptionally simple argument!
Try to bring this comment to the attention of the Hollyhock crowd… and good luck with that!

Something needs to change in order to bring back the commonsense in the public life.
I know, but first… we should bring in the “Pedal Tax” the “Helmet Carambole” and “The Unicycle Discount”!

We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

“you shut down the city downtown with useless bike lanes”

Hyperbole is a million times worse than assigning a a small strip of roadway to bicycles.

Quoted, without comment:

Not everyone can be single and live in an apartment in the West End and walk everywhere. And, even for those who can do that, it doesn’t mean your existence is carbon-free.

There are an awful lot of people driving places to get supplies to your local stores and restaurants, deliver what you order off the ‘net to your doors, and work in your local cafes. You should check sometime where those people have to drive in from.

…..

What is more troublesome, though, is the deep contempt that shows through in your comments towards thousands of people who live in this city raising families, taking care of parents, and who don’t have the options you do. Like the servers who work at the same west-side restaurant as my step-daughter, who schlep in from Surrey and Port Coquitlam and have to get back home late at night when transit service sucks.

Frances Bula

“How many business are going to be boarded up along the dumb separated bike lane routes?”

Good question that hasn’t been adequately answered yet, despite the gallons of digital ink spilled on the topic. Usually bad news travels fast, yet bike-lane precipitated business failures remain a boogeyman rather than a verifiable fact, or at least I haven’t seen any mention of these fatally-impacted enterprises in the local media.

Back on topic, I would be disappointed if the gas tax were eliminated as a source or revenue. Sure, it shouldn’t be the only source, but as far as taxes though that tax has an added benefit in encouraging people to use other means to get to their destination, discouraging sprawl and lowering congestion on our roads, meaning we as a society shouldn’t have to expand our roads to the same extent as being done in the Port Mann Bridge replacement. That’s a tax that should stay.

That, and as someone mentioned above, Canada needs a national transit strategy. And that should include more inter-city travel as well. It may seem to people who have spent their lives in Vancouver that rail to the valley is a pipedream, but one trip to Europe should put that to rest easily, and two trains a day to Seattle is a joke, though even that took a fight with customs to achieve.

Yes, higher gas costs do affect the transportation sector, and that will trickle down into the cost of goods, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either – it just means we’re paying for the true cost of what we’re using, rather than having our excessive consumption subsidized in a roundabout sort of way.

As for Glissindo’s usual absurdities, if there’s a conspiracy to block out the suburbs then why the support for the Evergreen Line? Transit is making it much easier to get to downtown without making downtown somewhere people would never want to go to, as most car-dependent cities have done with highways, congestion and acres of surface parking lots.

@Don
How is it unfair to have those who use something the most to pay the most. That is how our society works in general. You want a large coffee, you pay more than for a small coffee. If you want a bigger house, you pay more for a bigger house.

So people pay less in general taxes for the roads and the cost is then added on to the cost of goods. It is not costing people any more, they just pay in a different manner.

What is great about people paying for the amount they use roads, is that people will tend to use roads more efficiently then which decreases costs as we will likely have to build fewer costly roads and bridges. Congestion is also reduced which reduces shipping costs.

Road or congestion pricing will very likely reduce the overall costs of living and doing business in the region.

A little too busy to substantiate claims regarding boarded-up businesses?

I live in the real world and it makes me want proof, to paraphrase the master. 🙂

@ Glissss #4: “Try to bring this comment to the attention of the Hollyhock crowd… and good luck with that!”

According to the Rajneesh Times, Sinopec, the Chinese petroleum conglomerate, made an offer on Hollyhock Farm for its top executives to recover from the stress of fighting the environmentalists and aboriginals over the Northern Gateway take-over-Canadian-energy-sovereignty project.

No word yet if the offer was accepted. But from the silence, it’s obvious money speaks.

Just posting to say that I’m happy Gliss’s tired and melodramatic ramblings are starting to be recognized for what they are – “absurdities,” as I believe Tessa called them.

Bike lanes are not a disaster. Get over it. Complaints over process/consultation notwithstanding, the actual physical reality of the bike lanes is not earth shattering. Nobody except a very few whiners even noticed a change in their routine. Can we please put this one to rest? The sky did not fall. We’re all still here. Just breathe.

Yes, you have to pay for parking in Stanley Park and have had to for what, decades? Get over it. Limited parking supply + near unlimited demand = Pricing. That’s why things cost money. Cereal isn’t free either, why should parking be?

People aren’t driving downtown, but they are still *going* downtown. Get over it. Driving downtown is somewhat inconvenient, but contrary to what you and others would seem to wish on our city, people are still bothering to make the trip. Where does this idea come from, that in a metro region of 2.5 million we should somehow be able to drive straight downtown in our single occupant vehicles, totally conveniently and without traffic, and be whisked away by benevolent free parking angels? I don’t get it.

And having driven AND walked downtown during commuting hours, it’s not that bad and I find actually much LESS congested than it ever was, and certainly less congested than north Burnaby through Hastings and Barnet, Port Moody, and Coquitlam (and don’t get me started on Hwy 1, which is obviously 10 times more congested than downtown).

Furthermore, if you’re not the type that commutes into downtown but rather comes in from the burbs for a movie, show, dinner, game, etc. this is even easier still. Traffic volumes into downtown on all the feeders are laughably small at that time of day and $6-7 evening rate parking is plentiful (I would guess many thousands of stalls and you can avoid the $20 event parking-rate simply by walking 5 blocks or so).

On topic…

I think the gas tax is an important price signal and that it probably has more value as a policy measure than a funding measure (for all the reasons noted re: diminishing revenue from driving habit changes when fuel prices rise, at the same time as transit’s fuel costs rise).

As for concrete funding a national transportation strategy is necessary to focus efforts but there remains much we can do in BC with or without federal involvement. A regional transportation income tax might be appropriate and could adequately raise revenue from all beneficiaries (i.e. not just bridge crossers).

Road pricing is often pointed out as ideal but frankly I find the privacy concerns and startup cost to be totally insurmountable. Not to mention that this still only targets direct road users (drivers) and not those who indirectly benefit from the roads (all).

In the interim I think bridge tolling is actually very appropriate and fair. New bridges get tolled because they are new, beneficial infrastructure. Surrey and Langley weren’t asked to pay for the old Port Mann, but they are benefitting from a larger capacity and that capital investment needs to be repaid. Similarly, existing bridges which are congested would not be tolled because residents have not received service improvements. I would agree that the Sea to Sky not being tolled is tremendously unfair, however.

Property taxation is not totally inappropriate either – it seems to me that the Mayors dislike it more for the optics (municipalities are seen as levying the full tax, despite much of it going to other agencies) than for any reason related to effectiveness.

In the end I would like to see Translink given more authority to extract value from their investments, such as pre-purchasing land near unannounced transit lines so that they can rezone it, improve it, and sell it to developers and capture more of that value. Another approach would be to levy additional property taxes on parcels within 800 m (or whatever) of a new transit line, for some set period, as they benefit by using the line and in property value appreciation. I think these types of new (to BC) strategies are probably the future (i.e. we won’t see them in the next year for the immediate funding crunch, but they need to be a part of the broader conversation as we seek more stable funding in the next 5-10 years).

Sorry, I’m a bit dyslexic with Fs, Rs, and 2s. Should read ‘or did I find…?’

@Richard#14

There are several problems with your argument and the analogies used to support it. The first is trivial, but revelatory: What does this discussion have to do with buying a large cup of coffee and expecting to pay for a small one?

Regarding the real issue, the delivery of essential public services, there is a (sadly, declining) tradition in Canada of providing them to all, fairly, without regard to the ability to pay.

I used the example of public education. Should I pay less because I have no kids? Of course not.

If I don’t use transit, should I pay less of the taxes that support it. No.

We as a culture, as part of an economy, as a society, benefit from educating children, creating and improving a public transit system, universal medical coverage – and hundreds of other things that are supported by our taxes, including roads, bridges, ferries, etc., that we may or may not “use”, in the narrowest sense, as individuals.

Is it reasonable that those individuals who use these essential services in that narrow sense, pay a little more?

Perhaps, but we have already shifted the funding source for a lot of essential services away from taxes and towards user fees. I have serious reservations about continuing this shift. I do not think that transit passengers should be asked to pay the full and prohibitive cost of transporting themselves on SkyTrain. I don’t think parents should bear a significantly greater share of the financial burden of educating children than the childless.

User fees for essential services (as opposed to paying for a bigger coffee or a nicer house) are a regressive form of taxation with a huge impact on the poor and working class and almost none at all on the upper middle class and the wealthy.

If we need more funding for TransLink, I suggest that the owners of million dollar downtown condos or twenty million dollar mansions on Belmont be required to anti up a bit more, rather than laying additional burdens on an already strapped dry-waller from Langley (and smugly tell him to recover the cost by raising his rates) or a minimum wage transit rider who can barely pay the current fare.

Drivers and/or owners of cars and trucks already pay a significantly higher share of the costs of maintaining the transportation infrastructure, including not only roads, but public transit.

I do not have the temerity to suggest that we should roll that back.

But I am saying, that, even if you never drive, never take a cab or a bus, never need a house fire put out, never need to be rushed to hospital, you benefit enormously, essentially, from transportation infrastructure – transit, roads, bridges – and should pay your share.

The planned 12.5% increase in transit fares is egregious – and I suspect counter productive.

Make TransLink open and accountable to taxpayers. If it can make the case that it requires additional funding, the lion’s share of it should come from a progressive tax, not higher user fees for riders or increased punitive fees on drivers.

LOL, Glissy,
you have to forgive those sinners as they don’t know what they are saying!
People of Francis Bula world, Glissando’s prose may seem absurd to you (Tessa, boohoo, CK, Andrew Brown) … because you live in a city called Absurdistan!
Glissy is only providing scenes from our daily life Theater of the Absurd.
I’d put Glissando Remmy in line with Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal, Albert Camus or Edward Albee, any time!
Ta da

@Don

Food is more essential than transportation yet people are expected for the most part to pay their own way.

Same for transit. People do pay fares that cover around 50% of the operating cost. Why on earth do you think that drivers should not at least directly cover part of the expenses of building and maintaining the roads they use. It would even be far to change a “rent” for the public land that the road is on.

Funny how many people that are usually free marketers all of a sudden become socialists when in comes to roads.

It is pretty simple. People who use roads more should pay more. What is wrong with that?

Yes Richard,

Don is -purposely?-messing up public service designed to ensure fundamental human right (right to education, right to health…)…with other just to ensure general interest
(access to phone/internet, electricity, gas,…roads…)

That is typical of the far-right wing, which purposely ignores the difference, to manipulate the things in anyway you want :
you pay our letter postage, so why not pay your kids education? education is free, so why not the ferries ? …

Thought of The Night

“Instead of squandering all your spare money on drink, isn’t it better to buy a ticket for an interesting play? Do you know anything about the avant-garde theatre there’s so much talk about? Have you seen Ionesco’s plays?”
– a self-reference from Eugene Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros” – 1959

Michelle & TerryM,
Easy there! Beckett, Ionesco, Arrabal, Camus or Albee, are Literature Geniuses, I am simply a caricaturist to their oil painting!
But I have to say, that I was shocked a little, as Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” is in my top Three Plays/ Novels List, up there with “The Twelve Chairs” by Ilf & Petrov and “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck.

What’s interesting, is the fact that Ionesco play develops over the course of Three Acts (in Our City Hall the timeline is Three Years), where the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into Rhinoceroses (our City Hall under Penny follows through one Rhinoceros at a time); ultimately the only Human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger (in the play), a flustered everyman figure who is often criticized throughout the play for his drinking and tardiness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYgR1Pb-lk4

Who is going to be the Last Man/Woman Standing inside City Hall?
Everyone’s guess.
Thanks God, they grow those Big Horns on their foreheads. That’s a giveaway all-right!

We live in Vancouver and this keeps us busy.

@Glissando

You may not win many converts, but it’s not for lack of insight.

Price and the individual’s willingness to pay is the mechanism we use to allocate most scarce goods. Pricing keeps us from frivolously overusing.

Some things that aren’t priced are difficult to overuse, like public education and medical care.

Most public utilities, even necessities like hydro, are priced. Some like water aren’t really scarce here, so there’s no need to put a price on it.

The argument for pricing transportation comes from the recognition that it is scarce and that it is easy to overuse, and that this leads to a tragedy of the commons: congestion.

The valid counter that this is unfair to people with less ability to pay, that it is a regressive tax, must be acknowledged. But the point of payment is not the place where we usually try to reallocate from rich to poor, so why should it be like this just for transportation? Regressive fees should be offset by making the income tax more progressive.

Don,

Having a discourse where you roughly say “Education= Transportation” to make your point is far-right wing.

It is far-right wing because doing so is denying that access to Education carry much superior value to access Transportation: it is the central funding pillar of our democratic society model (a democracy need to have educated citizen to work well)…and it is what you keep denying in this thread.

You also deny a fundamental rule of economy:
“under-priced goods and services lead to their over-consumption”

Road building after road building, this rule has proven right in the transportation world.

Don is right in one instance, he is effectively too much of a denier to have a reasonable conversation, that said if we can have convinced some people that the World according to Don. is a dangerous fantasy, we will have make some progress.

BTW:

Early 20th century London is not the way to the future but Early 21th century London is and Early 21th century Stockholm…is on a much better track than early 21th Vancouver.

@38

The nosedive just went splat. There is no point in further comment.

Cheers.

“user fees that burden those who can least afford it”

Good talking point, but not substantiated and I find it unlikely that anyone who can afford the price of a daily commute via automobile can’t find a few more dollars a day for their choice.

What a load of hypocrites,Don is exactly right and you people who argue with the facts are fooling yourselves, I’m sure most of you own cars,but you justify it by saying you hardly ever drive,and Im sure you take a holiday every year by jet airplane but you say you bought carbon credits so you can better sleep at night.Everything you eat everything you sit on everything you wear comes to you on a road,so if you want to live in a world without roads prepare to starve to death.Every civilization on the planet has improved with the advent of transportation and to imply that roads are somehow a bad thing for society is absurd.

“What a load of hypocrites…”
gman#44
Absolutely right!

Here is the thing.
What are you willing to trade for your dream? What are you willing to trade for your public transit system that not only whizzes you within walking distance of every new ecodense high rise in the valley but also pushes evil cars off the road?

Would you be willing to give government the right to track your whereabouts 24 hrs per day?
Would you be willing to trade your privacy?

This is what Richard Walton ( head of the Translink Mayor’s council) so casually ‘prefers’ as a means of funding the ever expanding money pit that Translink has become.

Walton, and other mayors, are ‘considering’ making it illegal for you to drive or park on a public road unless you have a GPS tracking device installed ( paid for by you ) that tells big brother where you are, how fast you are or arent driving at all times. You will be charged by the kilometre ( or if parked ) by the hour and by location. A side benefit is that government can track your whereabouts 24 hrs per day. Just what a free society needs huh?
Now they are doing this in the Netherlands this year, and it disgusts me to think how many Canadian lives were lost regaining that country’s freedom only to have its present generation throw it away in such a cavalier fashion.
WE should not be so stupid.