On Sunday, after months (and arguably years) of delays and political interference, New York City finally activated its congestion charge system. The policy to charge motorists who insist on driving their cars into the most densely-built, transit-accessible urban core in the Americas had taken so long to implement first because of a lengthy federal environmental approvals process and then, earlier last year, the political cowardice of New York governor Kathy Hochul. Hochul “indefinitely paused" its implementation, supposed to begin last summer, in a move widely perceived as an attempt to shore up Democratic fortunes in advance of the November election. Welp. Since Hochul’s move was also legally questionable (to say the least), the congestion charge is finally in place.
And it’s working. The $9 charge to enter lower Manhattan during peak hours has increased travel speeds for the motorists who choose to pay the fare, but even more importantly has massively increased the speed and reliability of the city’s bus fleet. There will probably be a rebound in traffic as a growing number of motorists decide the toll is worth the faster travel time, but the results for now are impressive.
As far as Ontario (and specifically Toronto) are concerned, this might as well all be happening on the far side of the moon: there’s basically zero prospect that any of this will affect events here in the near- or medium-term, politically. The Ford government is not only opposed to any new tolls on Ontario highways, it has removed some tolls where they existed — with the enthusiastic support of the NDP — and performatively legislated against implementing road charges in the future.
Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie told Steve Paikin and I last year that she’s not considering congestion charging as part of the party’s platform in the next election, and that fits both with her own announced opposition to a consumer-facing carbon price as well as the history of the Liberal party when in power: it was Kathleen Wynne who deep-sixed Toronto’s last attempt to bring a congestion charge in the face of strong opposition from her MPPs in the 905 belt around Toronto.
(Mike Schreiner and the Green Party have previously endorsed the idea of congestion charges, and budgeted for $1.6 billion from them in their 2022 platform costing, but didn’t exactly trumpet the idea during the campaign. In any event, the chances of Schreiner leading a majority in the legislature after the next election seems remote.)
The near-unanimous political settlement against tolls and congestion charges in Ontario is regrettable, because a) prices work and b) almost nothing else seems to. The menu of other options we’re pursuing in this province instead can be boiled down to highway expansion, transit-building, and prohibiting bike lanes.
Highway expansion, particularly the highways that the Ford government is actually championing, will do very little to solve congestion, especially in Toronto itself. The 413 highway and Bradford Bypass, whatever their virtues, will not help people commuting in and out of the employment core that is Toronto’s downtown. If we’re honest they’ll accomplish little else in terms of congestion relief for anyone else, because literally no highway expansion has ever durably reduced travel times. The idea of a new tunnel under the 401, meanwhile, deserves little more substantial analysis than a hearty “LOL.”
Transit building offers many virtues, including supporting a much more climate-friendly way to move people around a growing city (doubly so if we’re able to build transit-proximate housing and employment). But it has slim odds of being able to realistically reduce road congestion in Toronto on its own. First there’s the theoretical argument: every potential driver who opts for transit has simply made more room on the roads for someone else to choose to drive instead. Or you could simply look at the reality: New York City has an endowment of mass transit assets that Toronto is unlikely to be able to match anytime this century, yet the roads were still regularly gridlocked — until the implementation of congestion charging.
And then we have the Ford government’s latest proposal, making it functionally impossible for Ontario cities to add bike lanes and removing them in places where they already exist. I’ve already written about this a bunch last year, but the short version is this won’t do anything to address Ontario’s actual problems, least of all road congestion.
So instead of pursuing a policy that actually works Ontario’s political leadership is nearly unanimous in supporting alternatives that won’t, and there’s little prospect that’s going to change anytime soon. The only slender reed of optimism I’m willing to hang on to here is Toronto’s enduring inferiority complex in relation to New York: if congestion charging survives both the most recent U.S. election and the next round of state and local elections (which is far from guaranteed) we might see the argument in Toronto shift from “it can’t possibly work here” to “New York made it work and Toronto can too, we’re a real city please love us.” It’s not much, I grant, but the alternative is the status quo: spending billions of dollars into the indefinite future to not solve the problem.