This past week – as the debate was raging over whether Metro mayors should vote for a 2 cent hike to the gas tax and a tiny (avg. $23/yr), temporary property tax increase in order to fund several badly-needed and long-awaited transit improvements for the region (they did, thankfully) – I read with interest some of the reader comments on the topic in the mainstream press. While the following aren’t direct quotes, they roughly represent three of the most common sentiments expressed by those opposed to funding this package of transit solutions – which includes building the Evergreen Line to the Northeast corridor, putting more buses on the streets South of the Fraser and adding a B-Line rapid bus route along King George Highway:
- “Enough is enough! Get your greedy hands out of our pockets, Translink!”
- “If transit users want more buses, they should pay for them themselves!”
- “Great for people in Vancouver, but we don’t have good enough transit South of the Fraser for me to get around without my car!”
It’s understandable that motorists are fed up with paying more taxes and levies – we all are. But it’s also telling what facts they fail to consider when making these claims (and it’s not their fault – the whole system is out of whack, politically, and in terms of how the media presents these issues).
The first point (stop taxing me, damn it!) is a result of what the late urban planning guru Jane Jacobs would have called a lack of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the principle that governments are most effective and provide the highest return on tax dollars when they’re closest to the people they serve.
It’s plain to see that the lion’s share of government services we depend on in our day-to-day lives – garbage, recycling, sewer, water, parks, libraries, museums, street cleaning and maintenance, public transit, arts facilities and festivals, school boards – are provided by municipalities and regional governments. And yet, these governments receive only 8% on average of the total tax dollars citizens spend (including all income, sales, capital gains, and real estate taxes – with roughly 60% going to the federal government and a third to the Province). Thus, what we have is essentially the opposite of subsidiarity, whereby the political power and tax dollars rest in the hands of those furthest removed from the communities where they will ultimately be exercised.
The never-ending saga over the unbuilt Evergreen transit line is a perfect example of the problem with this system. The feds and Province maintain they’ve each kicked in their $400 or $500 million – now they’re just waiting on Translink, which just can’t get its act together (or so they suggest)…and so the line remains unbuilt, more than a decade after if was first put on the drawing board.
Of course Translink doesn’t have the $400 million! The minuscule tax base they have to draw on is already stretched to the limit, and there’s never much appetite amongst the region’s homeowners and businesses to further raise property or gas taxes. But since that’s virtually the only tool available to them – and they believe in what they’re doing, as do I – they have to make this difficult choice, knowing full-well they will be blamed and heckled for it. So it is to its great credit that the Translink Mayors’ Council had the courage to state their case to the public and stick to their guns when they voted to move forward with their plans this past Friday.
As to the argument that transit users should pay for system upgrades themselves – ostensibly because motorists won’t be making as much use of them – this view is patently hypocritical.
For instance, I haven’t owned a car for 7 years. That was a conscious decision – part and parcel to moving to a walkable, densified urban community where a car becomes more of a burden than a convenience (incidentally, my Gastown address gets a perfect 100 on walkscore.com, a neat tool that calculates how easy it would be to live without a car at any given address in North America – check it out).
That’s not to brag. Not everyone can move to Gastown, the Drive, or the West End – nor can everyone avoid having a vehicle. But I say this to put things in perspective. I’m a member of a car sharing program called Car2Go, through which I borrow a car for an hour, once or twice a week (at a rate of 20 cents a minute, including gas and insurance); I also ride the bus from time to time; and most of the goods I consume traveled at some point on our roads. So I am a road-user, to some degree.
And yet, it’s clear that I depend on our roads, highways and bridges far less than the person who commutes everyday in a single occupant vehicle from Abbotsford to Burnaby and back. But when the topic of drivers paying a toll for traversing a bridge or new stretch of highway comes up, invariably they get hopping mad. They forget that every time I take the bus or skytrain, I pay a toll – otherwise known as a “fare.”
For example, if I want to go to Surrey from Vancouver – unless it is for a few short minutes before jumping back on the train to Vancouver, lest my 90 minute fare expires – it costs me $10 to go there and back by skytrain! That is, unless I’m really thinking ahead and save one dollar by buying the $9 all-day pass. If we are trying to incentivize public transit use, we’re certainly not doing so with money; rather we punish transit users with the heftiest tolls around – and there are no “toll-free” skytrains or bus routes to choose from, unlike our road system.
Plainly put, transit riders have been on an expensive “user-pay” model for decades, while road tolling remains a hated and relatively little-used tool. Not only that, I’ve been subsidizing road building through my tax dollars far more than motorists have been subsidizing my transit infrastructure. And because these big-buck highway projects have the backing of the Province and feds, we’re all paying for them – through provincial and federal tax dollars. They aren’t subject to the complaints of local motorists confronted with unwelcome property tax and gas tax hikes because their funding is secured from upon high and, thus, less visible. But make no mistake, I am subsidizing the hell out of blacktop and bridge projects I will use relatively little of.
On that note, four or five years ago, when the BC Liberal Government was holding a few token public meetings regarding its massive Gateway highway program, the issue of which tax dollars should subsidize which transportation infrastructure came up. I recall cycling advocate Richard Campbell confronting a woman on the government panel about the billions being spent on highways while public transit funding languished. The woman told him, “Of course we need to build some public transit too, but we need to balance our investment between roads and transit” (emphasis mine). Mr. Campbell’s retort: “For the past half century we’ve been spending roughly ten times as much on highways and car-based infrastructure as on public transit; so ‘balance’ would mean for the next 50 years spending ten times as much on transit.”
But that’s not what we’re doing. Even today, that “(im)balance” remains roughly the same.
Moreover, transit infrastructure (with the possible exception of cadillac projects like skytrain) is far cheaper to build per mile and employs more people in the process. While the twinning of the Port Mann Bridge and widening of Hwy 1 will likely exceed $4 BILLION, a study by one of the world’s top transportation engineering firms (that designed the Chunnel), showed we could get the old Interurban Line running again between Surrey and Chilliwack – passing through Langley and Abbotsford’s city centres in the process – for something like a mere half billion.
This was the iron artery that linked the Lower Mainland from 1910 to the early 1950s, carrying up to 70,000 people a day back then! Imagine how useful it could be today – offering commuters South of the Fraser a faster, safer, cheaper, more comfortable alternative to get to work, thus freeing up asphalt for those trucks and work vehicles that need to use the highway.
The final point often raised by motorists who don’t get it is that transit’s never worked for them in the past, so why should they support it now? This is a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.
The bulk of the package of transit solutions Translink’s Mayor’s Council (which suffers from a major governance problem and sorely needs more local authority and political independence from Victoria – more on that in a subsequent piece) voted to fund recently were for the Northeast corridor (the Evergreen Line) or Surrey and other communities South of the Fraser, via a new B-Line route down King George Highway and more buses on the streets in general.
To the people who claim transit’s not working in their community, I say, “Exactly!” And to make it start working, we need to invest in transit throughout the region, which is precisely what Translink is trying to do (though they really should be prioritizing that Interurban Line!)
And that was cycling advocate Richard Campbell’s point: we’ll never get people out of their cars unless we make a priority of investing in the tools that will enable them to do so. And we’re never going to do that so long as people have the misconception that spending tens of billions of dollars on autimobile-based infrastructure is a wise use of tax dollars, while spending anything on transit is a useless burden.
