{"id":32964,"date":"2012-09-26T09:00:15","date_gmt":"2012-09-26T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/?p=32964"},"modified":"2013-01-21T15:18:30","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T20:18:30","slug":"paying-for-transit-in-the-gtha-the-big-four","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2012\/09\/26\/paying-for-transit-in-the-gtha-the-big-four\/","title":{"rendered":"Paying for transit in the GTHA: The big four"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Toronto region is very congested, and if it is going to continue to grow, it needs more and better public transit. At this point in time, most people in the region seem to accept this idea.<\/p>\n

The elephant in the room, of course, is how to pay to build more transit. The province’s regional transportation agency, Metrolinx<\/a>, has a plan called The Big Move<\/em><\/a> that identifies what needs to be built. This plan covers the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, referred to as the GTHA.<\/p>\n

The provincial government put up a considerable amount of seed money to get this plan started — $11.5 billion across the region, of which $8.4 billion is going to Toronto to pay for the Light Rail Transit lines now going in on Eglinton\/Scarborough, Sheppard East and Finch West. But that was just to prime the pump — the rest of the plan will need some $50 billion over 25 years<\/a> in order to get built, and it looks like that money is going to have to be raised in the GTHA. (Note: all funds are in 2010 dollars, which is what has been used in all discussions of the plan’s funding).<\/p>\n

Metrolinx was supposed to have a proposal for raising this money in 2012, but that got delayed until 2013 (after the provincial election, perhaps not coincidentally)<\/del>. Metrolinx has to present a proposal for raising this money in 2013.\u00a0 The deadline is coming up soon, and it’s time for the inhabitants of Toronto and the rest of the GTHA to talk about what kinds of funding model<\/a> (read: taxes and fees) they would accept in order to pay for transit.<\/p>\n

The delay in the funding plan may have turned out to be useful, in the end, because Toronto’s transit drama of the winter of 2012, when Mayor Ford’s plans for a subway on Sheppard collapsed because there was no reliable funding model, made everyone aware that the city would have to raise money to build transit. Even Ford himself and right-wing members of his executive committee started proposing fees and taxes to pay for transit construction.<\/p>\n

The problem with all of the funding plans that have been proposed by members of Toronto City Council is that they are nowhere near enough. They might raise $100-$200 million a year, but Metrolinx’s plans will eventually require $2 billion a year to get built. A single, modest tax is not going to cut it.<\/p>\n

The better news is, any funding mechanism proposed by Metrolinx will cover the entire GTHA. For one thing, that means a lot more people contributing. Equally important, it means that one of the primary objections to any tax imposed only within Toronto — that people would drive to the suburbs to avoid it — no longer applies. The new revenue tools will cover the entire GTHA, meaning that any drive to get away from it would be long and inconvenient, minimizing that issue.<\/p>\n

In 2010, the civic organization CivicAction<\/a> released a study, “Time to Get Serious: Reliable Funding for GTHA Transit<\/a>” (PDF),\u00a0 that looked at the various revenue options available to Metrolinx (disclosure: I was part of the working group that prepared this study<\/em>). Over the next few days, I’d like to look at the “big four” — the four possibilities that would raise serious amounts of money — assessing the advantages and disadvantages of each one and providing a forum for discussing them.<\/p>\n

The “big four” revenue possibilities are:<\/p>\n