Friday’s headlines

2 comments

1. Here’s a quick, exceedingly rough, smell-test on Councillor Ford’s “build toll lanes on the Gardiner to pay for transit” idea.

   The City of Toronto provides 24-hour and AM & PM peak traffic volume for all arterial roads & highways. Unfortunately in PDF format instead of tabular/GIS, but still useful.
   http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/publications/brochures/volmappm.pdf
   http://www.toronto.ca/transportation/publications/brochures/volmapam.pdf

   The Gardiner is about 17km long. Traffic volume is heaviest in the west (about 7-8k in each peak period) and lowest around the core (about 3k in each peak period) with some more coming from the DVP (5k/3k split). Roughly averaged across the length of the Gardiner, traffic volume is 4571 AM westbound, 4181 AM eastbound, 4948 PM westbound and 5072 PM eastbound. These are workday traffic counts, and we have about 252 work days each year.

   If we tolled every single one of those workday peak period drivers a nickel per km (85 cents for the whole length), we’d raise roughly $4 million each year. If we charged them $3 for the whole length, we’d raise roughly $14.2 million each year. If we toll all drivers, 24 hours a weekday, that’s $31 million each year at a nickel per km or $109 million each year at $3 per ride. Let’s throw an extra 1/5th in as weekend drivers, so $39 million & $131 million.

   But Doug’s talking about building and only charging for new lanes. Let’s be very charitable and assume a quarter of drivers decide they’re willing to pay the toll and drive in these new lanes (even that would mean the toll lanes are as crowded as the untolled lanes). We can also assume that outside congested peak hours, few drivers will choose to pay a toll. At a nickel per km we can raise $1 million a year, or $3.5 million at $3 for the whole ride.

   Neither of those numbers is within an order of magnitude of $200 million.

   Expansion of the Gardiner is constrained by available land (and condo locations) for a lot of its length, especially the most congested parts. So we’d need to purchase land, and potentially demolish a lot of buildings to expand it. The elevated part of the Gardiner would need a lot of structural work to support the new lanes, while the design of exits for a separated toll component would be quite the task too.

   Finding up-to-date costs for urban expressway construction is hard, but googling brought up some very out-of-date numbers from the University of Southern California. http://www-pam.usc.edu/volume2/v2i1a3s2.html

   Adding toll lanes to an LA freeway twenty years ago cost $48-80 million per km. Pretending inflation didn’t occur and the Gardiner would be comparable, that’s $680 million to $1.4 billion for new toll lanes along the length of the Gardiner Expressway.

   So let’s put these assumptions together…
   Price of building new toll lanes (low): $680 million
   Revenue from new toll lanes ($3 per use): $3.5 million / year
   Time to pay for toll lanes with new tolls (ignoring financing costs): 194 years

   That’s almost two centuries before there’s any toll money available towards a Sheppard Subway under Doug’s proposal.

2. You should email this to Coun Ford and see what kind of response (if any) you get…