Moving people between communities is not a recipe for those with a taste for easy street.
It takes a splash of foresight, a dollop of imagination and a pot full of money. Make that a very large pot full of money.
How large? In May 2005 the Ontario government revealed its $30-billion ReNew Ontario strategy, an infrastructure investment plan that promised $11 billion in transportation initiatives.
Funds pledged included $6.5 billion for improvements to the province’s highway system and $4.5 billion to expand and renew transit across Ontario.
Transit and highways: the twin pillars of mobility in a modern society. Both, however, have limitations. Highways cost a pile of cash and transit is only useful if you’re going where that particular route leads, or if you have the time to connect to other transit routes to take you to your final destination.
Funds pledged for 2007/08 to renew and/or extend Ontario’s highway system rang in at $1.7 billion, including $250 million to add another 13 kilometres to the six-lane Highway 404.
A quick calculation puts the cost per kilometre at $19,230,769. Another quick calculation gives you a cost of $3,205,128 for one lane of highway, a kilometre long. That probably includes overpasses and such, but it still represents a tidy sum to pave long, narrow stretches of Ontario.
Add to this the ‘operating’ costs of police, maintenance, snow clearance, etc., and building and renewing highways represents a very costly commitment.
But they do take you where you want to go? Despite its many attributes, public transit takes you where it goes. Cars and highways equal convenience and direct point-to-point travel. Public transit, for the most part, does not.
It seems to me that if the ‘planners’ want people to get out of their cars and onto the buses and trains, transit will have to do a better job of getting people where they want to go quickly for a cost that won’t empty the wallet.
Significant hurdles need to be overcome for that to happen. For starters, there’s the question of distance. Getting from one community to another, especially for those of us who live outside the GTA, can’t be reasonably done without the use of the highway system and a personal conveyance.
Our little family of four sets out for Burlington every three weeks or so to visit relatives. If we take the Civic, it takes about 90 minutes, barring traffic slowdowns, to get to mom’s front door, and costs about $20 in gas. If we take the Pathfinder, it’s about $35.
If we made the same trip using public transit, we’d have to go through Toronto to connect to the westbound GO Train. The trip there and back would take most of the day and would cost more than $100.
How do you make intercity transit both efficient and affordable? What about building a light-rail system alongside the 400-series highways, with transfer stations at points where the highways connect?
Our trip to Burlington, for instance, would involve a ride down the 400 to the 401, where we’d make a transfer to take us to the 403. Another transfer there would take us to Burlington.
The whole network would have to be coordinated to ensure a relatively delay-free trip.
And, presumably, it would have to be subsidized to make it affordable and competitive with the vehicle/highway option.
But if we’re spending $250 million to create 13 kilometres of highway, perhaps we need to think about using some of this money to expand transit efficiency and affordability.
It’ll probably never happen, and might not even be all that feasible, but it’s one idea to consider as we ponder public transit’s limitations.
