Light rail versus Highway 413
Both projects are investments and both should be judged on how much return they’ll bring
In theory the Ford government is conservative and the Trudeau government is liberal.
I use a small “c” and a small “l” to indicate their philosophy, presumably, in spending money — the Liberals are for spending and the Conservatives are against it. But recent decisions by these two governments around transportation spending have made the situation look backwards.
If re-elected, the Ford government has committed to building a new Highway 413, at a cost of at least $6 billion — and as many Hamiltonians remember, just over two years ago Ford’s transportation minister, Caroline Mulroney, came to town to cancel our $3.4-billion LRT.
In the end, they conceded to match new federal funding for the LRT, so it’s going ahead.
By contrast, the previous provincial Liberal government axed the 413, and the federal Liberals brought the LRT back to life. So both parties have made their positions on highways and light rail clear.
Both of these projects are investments, and any investment has to be judged on how much it will return in the future.
The most direct way that governments get their money back is in new taxes, so it makes sense to consider the tax benefits of both LRT and 413.
If the tax benefits are positive, then they are profitable investments. If they are negative, then they are subsidizing something.
Light rail in general has a history of generating big tax gains for a city, and the LRT in Hamilton has already started to deliver even before it has been built.
Private developers have already spent over $1 billion building along the planned LRT corridor. The tax uplift from these projects is enormous. For example, just one new building on George Street has delivered a net gain of $600,000 in tax revenue for the city each year. And we can look forward to much more: in Waterloo Region, private developers have already spent $2.7 billion in new buildings along their new LRT route.
By contrast, the 413 is intended to promote the development of new sprawl subdivisions, which results in net tax losses for the cities that host them. The houses are just too spread out to make financial sense — the cost of maintaining sewers and roads over their lifetime exceeds the taxes that the residents pay.
The Strong Towns movement in the U.S. has been making this case for years — in a nutshell, people downtown are subsidizing the people who live in the sprawl. Cities in the U.S. have gone bankrupt over sprawl (like Detroit in 2013). Why would we build more?
Perhaps this is why Markham, Vaughan and Mississauga councils are all opposed to the highway.
When it comes to the environment, the distance between 413 and LRT is obvious. The light rail conserves land because it’s going into a corridor that’s already built on. The 413 liberally wastes land — valuable farmland at that — and even plans to bulldoze parts of the greenbelt that are supposed to be protected.
When it comes to Highway 413, there has long been a simple idea that more highways and more lanes means more speed. But scientific studies find that trip times never go down.
Instead, more people load up the new highway with more cars until traffic is slow again. This pernicious problem is called induced demand, and it’s why an independent expert panel found that Highway 413, at a cost of $6 billion to $10 billion , will reduce trip times by 30-60 seconds.
The Ford government has decided to make 413 an election issue. Given how Ford’s government is willing to waste time, land, and tax dollars on a highway, but tried to kill a profitable, farmland-conserving LRT, it makes one ask: is Ford’s government really conservative?