And that’s ’cause, let’s be honest, I really agree with them:
More comprehensive road pricing strategy needed
The B.C. government’s introduction of a $1.50-a trip toll – half the originally proposed amount – along with incentives for signing up early to a Port Mann Bridge tolling account are a step in the right direction, but don’t go nearly far enough, says a former Vancouver city councillor and urban planning expert.
Gordon Price, director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University, argues for a more comprehensive road pricing strategy — opposed in a current provincial policy requiring at least one free crossing for every route, with tolls only on new infrastructure — to reduce car commuting and fund TransLink expansion. For now, however, Price cites several reasons to keep, and even increase, the minimal bridge toll: “Got to have it …. One, TransLink needs money if we want the kind of transportation system that actually works for the region. We’re in quite a tragic situation at the moment. You’ve got to move forward on transportation funding.”
He says unequal taxing of certain drivers in the form of bridge tolls is just one reason to eventually do away with the plan in favour of more comprehensive, high-tech solutions.
“What’s the point of just tolling bridges. Take me, I live and work downtown. Why should I be exempt?” he said. “I get all the benefits of a regional transportation system. But if it were just a matter of tolling on bridges, I’d be toll-free.”
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Pete McMartin’s latest: The new Port Mann Bridge should never have been built
… on the north side of the bridge we have those inner-city communities and residents who continue to see the suburbs as something pernicious and, worse, something lesser than them, despite the fact that Vancouver’s population will be overtaken by Surrey’s in the next couple of decades, and despite the fact that the suburbs are more vibrant job creators than Vancouver now. The suburbs are not what they used to be. The inner city is not what it used to be.
Yet despite that growth and change in character of the suburbs, the lion’s share of mass and rapid transit serves the inner-city, and will continue to do so. And while that continues, suburbanites will see no reason to get out of their cars.
And as long as urbanites feel they shouldn’t help ease the burden of paying for the Port Mann, and see Metro Vancouver as Us against Them, then suburbanites have every right to wonder why their tax dollars are going to help pay for transit to which they have no access.
There is no easy answer to this. We’re all complicit in our transit problems to some degree.
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Awesome modesty, because you have so much to be modest about ;>}
I don’t like the free alternative, it is a stupid policy. Lets pay for the new infrastructure regardless if there is a free route or not.
Pitt Bridge – Lets toll it
Sea To Sky Bridge – Lets toll it
Port Mann – Lets toll it
Upgraded Highway 1 in the Kicking Horse?
Maybe even the 4 laning of 97 and 1
Kelowna Bridge?
Who knows, maybe it would reduce traffic by getting some people to switch to transit and cycling? We will see who really needs/wants to drive then. Maybe even reduce the rate of urban sprawl.