In a hard-hitting analysis that takes direct aim at the province’s land use and transportation policies, a new report says residents in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area would be better served if the government focused more on public transit and less on mega-highway projects.
The Transit Over Traffic report says Ontario could build 400 kilometres of new public transit with the $80 billion it plans to spend on “gridlocking creating” highway projects such as the Bradford Bypass, Highway 413 and the Highway 401 tunnel.
Those projects will only make commuting worse and should be cancelled, says the report.
Among its many proposals are implementing a discount for trucks using Highway 407 and doubling existing transit service. That increase would require a yearly $3-billion operating subsidy for transit systems in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
But the subsidy could be largely funded by reversing “driver subsidies” such as the elimination of the annual license plate fees.
It also slams the province’s land use policies, “which promote sprawl, “thereby locking Ontarians into increasingly car-dependent and least affordable neighbourhoods.”
The best way to reduce gridlock is to reallocate the highway funding to transit construction which would double transit service and enabled riders to “show up and go” without checking schedules.
Cities where 30 per cent of rush-hour trips are by public transit, like London, New York and Singapore, has proven this approach works to ease road congestion, it says.
Transit Over Traffic was authored by Environmental Defence, an environmental advocacy organization, and Transport Action Ontario, a volunteer driven transit advocacy group.
The organizations believe the report is the first of its kind that compares and contrasts transit versus road construction costs. The transit ridership project projections and estimated construction costs are based on figures contained in Metrolinx and other government documents.
By using the proposed Highway 413 as a case study, the report says equivalent investments in a number of major transportation focus areas would provide better transit options while relieving congestion faced by commuters.
They include the $30 billion GO expansion, which proposes to bring two-way 15-minute train service on core portions of five out of seven GO corridors.
But beyond that, there are other important proposed — but unfunded — GO rail projects in the same geographic area as Highway 413, says the report.
They include a $1.5 billion expansion of the GO train service between Kitchener and Bramalea; the $1 billion, 30-kilometre-long construction of a GO train to Bolton; and a $2-billion, five-kilometre spur line extension of the GO train to Pearson International Airport.
Municipalities are also still waiting for public transit funding identified long ago, says report, which calls on the province to move forward with three municipal projects.
They include the recently proposed $6.4-billion, 43-kilometre-long east-west bus connector route in the Highway 407 corridor; the $2.8-billion, Brampton Main Street light rail train; and the 24-kilometre-long Brampton Queen Street/York Highway 7 bus rapid transit, with an estimated cost of between $0.1 to $0.5 billion.
“In total these rapid transit projects would move between 18,300 people per-hour, per-direction, more than twice as many people per hour as Highway 413, at roughly the same cost.”
To accommodate upcoming population growth, the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area needs to move in two new directions: major transit expansion, including new lines and better service, and stopping urban sprawl, says Transport Action Ontario president Peter Miasek.
“North America has wasted untold billions of dollars building expressways in urban areas to solve gridlock with no success. It’s nonsensical,” he says.
Transit Over Traffic is a continuation and expansion of an anti-Highway 413 report the two groups published about five years ago. But it’s much broader in scope, in large part, because of a series of government policies, directions and announcements since that earlier report was published, says Miasek.
Among those many announcements is the tunnel under Highway 401.
“It’s a harebrained proposal,” says Environmental Defence associate director Mike Marcolongo.
“At a time where unrealistic boondoggles such as the 401 Highway tunnel are being proposed, this report proposes some hard truths: to solve the congestion problem we need to get people out of their cars. In order to do so, it requires frequent, reliable, convenient transit service across the entire region,” he says.
Citing the findings of a Liaison Strategies poll, he says there is significant opposition to the tunnel proposal.
Ontarians are also concerned about the rising costs of Highway 413, both in terms of the construction and the costs of acquiring land for it, he says.
Work on preparing and writing the Transit Over Traffic report commenced about a year ago. It was released in December shortly after the publication of the government’s Highway 413 draft Environmental Impact Assessment Report (EIAR) was released for comment.
“The timing was a good coincidence,” says Marcolongo, noting the EIAR offered no alternatives to the highway.
Neither the government nor pro-Highway 413 construction associations have commented on the analysis and recommendations contained within the report.
However, both Marcolongo and Miasek consider the report as a “great resource” non-government agencies can access and may be a factor in the upcoming municipal elections later this year.
