How to Reduce Congestion on Highway 401
So Doug Ford is making a big deal out of his Highway 413 project. The recent brouhaha over bike lanes appears to be a smokescreen; Bill 212 is much more about expediting construction on his pet highway than it is about the war on cyclists. During the last election Ford campaigned hard for Highway 413 claiming that it would reduce commute times by as much as 30 minutes. That is a sneaky claim: the 30 minute number applies only to the longest trips (from Milton to Vaughan). According to opponents, the highway will pave over 400 acres of the Greenbelt and 2000 acres of total (Greenbelt and non) farmlands. In addition, building the highway will encourage sprawl along the route, which will likely affect further farmland.
The bone to mass transit from this project is a "transitway" which will run adjacent to the route. From what I can tell "transitway" means "bus lanes", with no associated funding for the buses.
The reason we are building Highway 413 is because the GTA is clogged with traffic congestion. There are already two 400-series highways servicing the GTA east-west: the 401 and 407. Apparently the 401 is frequently clogged.
The 407 is not clogged (I have read that it operates at 20% capacity?) but people don't like it because it is an expensive toll road. As of this writing, a regular car using the 407 during rush hour would pay 0.3443 dollars per kilometre during rush hour and 0.2256 per kilometre during off-peak hours. The 407 ETR is owned by a private consortium that extracts as much profit as it can. That makes people upset, so they want the Ontario government to buy back highway 407 and use that, or subsidize heavy trucks to use the 407 to reduce congestion on the 401.
If congestion on the 401 is the problem we are trying to fix, then there is an easy solution that I believe is (a) correct and (b) politically infeasible: the 401 should become a toll road. Just as with the 407, this will reduce congestion on the 401, and possibly mean we don't have to spend the billions (or tens of billions of dollars) it will cost to build Highway 413. Outfitting the 401 with toll charges will cost money, but I cannot imagine it will be more expensive than building a brand new 59km highway.
Urbanist zealots talk about how adding highway lanes does not solve congestion. The Not Just Bikes guy posted an entertaining polemic on the topic. The linked video makes a number of points which are relevant to my proposal:
Induced demand is when you add highway capacity, and this spurs greater usage of that highway. Some people decide to live farther away from home because they can commute via the highway. People build sprawly suburbs near the highway which increases people's commutes. Once you have induced demand, it is difficult to roll back.
Latent demand consists of trips people currently don't take using the highway, but which they would take if the highway wasn't so congested all the time. Unlike induced demand, latent demand has some elasticity.
People will continue to drive cars unless viable alternatives to driving exist.
Putting a toll on the 401 would reduce congestion because of latent demand: some people who would otherwise take Highway 401 will be turned off by the additional cost. This of course has consequences, some of which I will explore.
Taking the idea that viable alternatives to driving are crucial to reduce total highway demand, my proposal has an important second part: the proceeds from Highway 401 tolls should be used to fund mass transit.
In particular, I see each toll that is collected split into three parts:
- One part goes towards GO Transit, since that is the regional transit authority. This helps fund viable alternatives to driving for inter-regional trips.
- One part goes towards the transit systems of the municipalities traversed in the trip. This helps fund local transit needed in order for commuters to travel to/from GO Transit stations.
- One part goes towards highway maintenance and upkeep.
How high should the tolls be? My gut says that the cost should be comparable to a GO Transit fare for the same distance. In my ideal world, it would cost more to take a highway 401 trip by car than it would be to take mass transit, when you take into account the cost of gas, wear and tear on the vehicle, insurance, parking, and so on. I know full well that I do not live in an ideal world, so maybe it is not feasible for the toll to be that high.
Another ideal world wishlist item would be to avoid discounts for frequent highway use. Unlike GO Transit discounts which reward frequent commuting by train, I think we would prefer to discourage highway use when possible.
Consequences
Let's say that we turned Highway 401 into a toll road. I expect this would have many consequences. The first is that usage of the 401 would likely go down, because when prices rise consumption (usually) falls. Reduced usage of the 401 is not sufficient to claim that congestion is cured; if usage went down only during non-peak hours, the highway would remain congested during rush hours. If the tolls were based on time-of-day like Highway 407 tolls, then there might be more incentive for rush hour trips to diminish.
What explanations might there be for reduced usage of the 401? I can think of the following possibilities:
- Maybe some people decide to stay home, and are not inconvenienced by this. For example, some people might work from home instead of commuting to an office.
- Maybe some people consolidate trips, using a single trip for multiple purposes instead of taking multiple trips on the highway.
- Maybe some people consolidate trips by carpooling instead of driving individual vehicles.
- Maybe some people continue to travel the 401, but opt to take trips during off-peak hours when the highway is less congested (and maybe tolls are lower).
- Maybe some people use mass transit to make their trips.
- Maybe a few people use active transportation to make their trips (but if they were using a 400-series highway before, I doubt many people would do this).
- Maybe some people continue to travel, but avoid the 401 the same way they avoid the 407 now. Instead they travel on municipal arterial roads.
- Maybe some people stay home, and are greatly inconvenienced by this. For example, a member of the working poor who barely scrapes by commuting from Mississauga to Scarborough will no longer be able to make ends meet, and they will lose their job.
The last two reasons listed are the greatest cause for concern. Having people use arterial (or worse, residential!) roads for their commutes will infuriate both municipalities and their residents. Everybody commutes by car but nobody wants traffic on their streets. The common wisdom is that the GTA is already suffering from gridlock, so displacing Highway 401 traffic from the highway to municipal roads will make that gridlock worse.
The issue of the working poor will be used as political cannon fodder by powerful interests who oppose tolls. They will drag out anecdotes about poor working families who face undue hardship because Highway 401 is so expensive. The political compromise here would be to somehow discount tolls for poor people, the same way we sometimes offer subsidized transit fares for poor people. One problem with this is we often offer subsidies to non-workers (retired and disabled people), not the working poor who would benefit from the subsidies the most. The hard-hearted part of me would prefer not to offer such subsidies to the poor at all, but that is my anti-car thinking at play. If somebody is poor enough to be hurt by tolls on the 401 are they wealthy enough to own a car? How long can that precarious situation last? On the other hand, people do make it work and it does not seem right to make the working poor struggle harder to clear congestion on the 401.
Another consequence of making the 401 a toll road is that certain jobs more-or-less require the use of an automobile. I am thinking of people like landscapers who ride around in service trucks full of tools. There are also cargo trucks. It will get expensive for such people to pay tolls. As with subsidizing poor people, I think it is a perverse incentive to subsidize heavy commercial users of the 401, but there is a better argument to be made for why such commercial users ACTUALLY need to drive to their destinations.
There is some chance that the tolls don't work at all, and highway 401 remains congested. I think that might be okay, provided that the toll money is still used to finance mass transit programs. That way, many other people will have (and hopefully use) the opportunity to take transit and avoid congesting the 401 further.
Pushback
There are those who argue that induced demand is a myth, and that every car trip is a desireable one. In that case I guess the right thing to do is build more and more lanes of traffic until somehow we have solved congestion. In the case of Highway 413 I tend to disbelieve this will be true -- because the new highway is being built north of the GTA, it will attract development around it and induce demand. But I could be wrong about this, and maybe building one more toll-free 400-series highway is the solution to our traffic woes.
People choose to live in the suburbs far from their employment. People want to visit friends and family who live across the GTA from them. The question in my mind is whether it is a good idea to cater to such trips by car, and whether it is reasonable that the people making these trips should be able to do so without additional charges.
There is no question of the 401 ever becoming a toll road. People HATE taxes, which is why we are going to axe the carbon tax. People hate service charges even more. Plus there is a right-wing conspiracy about how "15 minute cities" are intended to keep people confined into their living sectors. Putting tolls on the 401 would push that narrative.
As far as I can tell Doug Ford prioritizes suburban concerns, which is why he hates bike lanes and loves sprawl. He would never entertain toll roads.
There is also the question of future capacity. We need some roads, so even if tolls reduced congestion on the 401 for now maybe the existing 400-series highways will not have enough capacity to service future growth in the region. I can buy that argument, but I also think we have a dearth of mass transit options, and that the ones we have are not very good. How do those get funded? Have we decided that funding mass transit is unnecessary because "everybody has a car"?
One side of this debate believes it is neither desirable nor possible to build enough roads in the GTA to solve traffic congestion. Having grown up in Mississauga, I tend to believe this.
As far as I can tell, the other side believes that sprawl is fine because people want single-family suburban houses, and that if we just build enough toll-free roads everyone will be able to get where they want. I do not want to believe this side but it is probably the correct one. Certainly they have the upper hand politically, especially with the oncoming Conservative federal government.