clearing congestion in toronto - core car fees
February 1st, 2007Toronto has traffic problems and I hear if it isn’t solved soon, we’ll be in a Boston situation in the next 10 years. One of the proposed solutions is to charge a fee to each car that drives into the city - thus reducing the traffic. However, there is never any specific discussion of transit in that idea. If you increase the cost of driving into the city, and part of that money goes to the TTC, it would make sense to make transit more affordable - $2.75 a trip is on the edge of crazy.
Think about the $2.75 cost for a second. If there are 2 people traveling somewhere, that’s $11 in transit fees. Parking generally costs less than that for a few hours, and in some cases less than that for an entire day! The cost of transit is too close to the cost of parking to have people choose transit over driving.
Back to the point… if a fee is charged to drive your car into the core, it would make sense to have some TTC fee relief as a result of increased ridership. No?
Increasing parking fees would have a similar result, but that assumes government workers are treated like the rest of us. I know gov’t workers get cheap parking in Manhattan, I’m sure they get cheap (if not free) parking in Toronto which means they all drive to work (who wouldn’t?). Government workers should be leading the pack - if they get free parking, why not switch it up, charge for parking and subsidize a metro pass? Shouldn’t they lead by example?
February 6th, 2007 at 11:35 am
One of the things I like about Mayor Miller is that he takes The Better Way. I’ve seen him on the subway on numerous occasions.
February 6th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
I couldnt have said it better myself, although i havent yet hit that ‘crazy’ transit fee yet (I pay $1.70 per ticket). The ridership of the TTC and other transit systems is like a scale, the more the cost the less amount of people will use the transit (ligitimently) the lesser the cost the greater amount of ridership because to increase ridership of the transit and lessen the amount of traffic is to provide more comfortable and ‘Afordable’ method of proceding to work and as you said if the transit costs more than the parking and the gas to get to work only crazy people would use the transit (asides from the car less people).
February 9th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
I don’t know any Govt workers that get free or subsidized parking in Toronto…
We need an intergrated mass transportation plan that integrates transit into the mix. Hopefully the GTTA will address this.
And even though a congestion charge works in London, UK - doesn’t mean it will work here. London also has intergrated mass transit across the Greater London Area - and we never have.
We have haphazard transit, across our 29 municipalities. Hopefully the GTTA can address some of these concerns.