Charge tolls for driving downtown

We need to make driving cost more, to reduce the number of cars in the city, Laurel Thompson says.

Early last month, Mayor Denis Coderre said he was thinking about making car owners pay a toll to go downtown.

Immediately, there was an outcry from offended drivers, and in no time, this “dangerous” but interesting idea got buried under all the reasons why he should not consider asking commuters to pay more to use the city’s streets.

The hostile reaction is unfortunate, because it actually makes sense to increase the cost of driving on the island.

Drivers have alternatives in Montreal, and while these might not always function as smoothly and be as beautiful as we would like, they are still excellent, and we have an obligation to use them if we care about the environment and seek to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions.

Not only that, a toll on automobiles would be consistent with our values. Montreal is not a city of selfish grandstanders who try to get as much as they can get for themselves and their families. We support parks and museums, public child care and bike lanes. This is a city that is livable without a car.

The mayor suggested the toll could be a way to fund public transit. But there are other reasons to justify tolls that have not really been discussed yet.

One of them is that there are too many cars on the island, and our dilapidated roads and crumbling bridges cannot take it any more.

Hundreds of thousands of drivers cross the bridges every day. They complain about our roads and say that repairs are not happening fast enough. But if there were fewer cars, the damage would not be so great and the

We support parks and museums, public child care and bike lanes. This is a city that is livable without a car.

streets would a lot be less congested. Instead of complaining about the orange cones, why don’t automobile commuters switch to public transportation?

Another argument in favour of tolls is that you can have the best transit system in the world, but if there is no incentive for drivers to use it (because driving is still relatively cheap), they may not. I was recently in Denver, which has an excellent light rail system, but the roads and highways are as clogged and noisy as they were before the first line was built in 1994. Why? Because the state legislature has not matched the transit agency’s hard work by putting a sales tax on gasoline, a move that would persuade more drivers to leave their cars at home.

A third reason to put a toll on cars is because right now drivers pay only a small percentage of the costs they impose on society.

Despite the myth that revenue from registration fees and driving permits covers the lion’s share of road costs, Luc Gagnon and Jean-François Lebfevre of GRAME (Groupe de recherche appliquée en macroécologie) did a study last year showing that Quebec drivers directly pay a mere six per cent of the social cost of their cars: licence and registration fees amount only to about $300, in comparison with $4,670 in total social costs.

What are the “social costs”? They include road construction and maintenance, free onstreet parking, police, fire, accidents, air and water pollution, climate change. The rest of the money has to be found elsewhere in the budget, which means that car owners receive a huge subsidy from the rest of us.

We have a car problem in Montreal that has nothing to do with funding public transportation.

More public transportation would surely help, but until we reduce the number of cars on our roads, it is always going to operate at a disadvantage and may need even bigger subsidies. (Subsidizing public transportation makes sense because, unlike driving, it is a community good.)

Coderre’s suggestion was a good one. We need to make driving cost more.