Evil Tolls

Toll roads bug me. I avoid them like the plague when there’s a useful option and resent it with some serious passion when I’m forced to stop and pay. The publicly owned ones are bad enough, but I feel especially ornery when I fork over money to some private and decidedly for-profit Australian or Spanish commercial behemoth that did a deal with province or state to buy a road.

To buy a road! Gimme a break. What could be more public? It takes me back to medieval Europe when toll roads and bridges were apparently invented. Just seems wrong in the modern world.

I actually wasn’t around in those times, honest, but I did experience first-hand the building of a toll bridge and used it many times. Even paid the modest toll happily because I knew it would be applied only until the capital costs were recovered. And that’s how it worked.

That was many years ago. I was a kid living under the shadow of the lift bridge over the canal that allowed ships to enter Hamilton’s harbor, sometimes called Burlington Bay — an hour southwest of Toronto — from Lake Ontario with their loads of iron ore to feed two sprawling steel plants.

One night we heard a huge bang and instantly thought that the bridgemaster must have been a bit slow on the uptake. I don’t remember the cause in fact, but one of those long, long Great Lakes freighters had indeed run smack into the bridge, ruined it big time and temporarily destroyed the main link between Burlington and Hamilton. More critically, the road running between Toronto and Niagara and on to the U.S. — the Queen Elizabeth Way — was cut in two. This was in 1952.

The bridge was eventually repaired but the incident inspired the building of the very high Burlington Bay Skyway bridge, at the time probably the longest such span in the country at about 2.5 km. It was opened in 1958 after four years of construction, and it meant the end of traffic tie-ups while ships entered or left the Bay. It also completed the four-laning of the QEW.

I wasn’t yet driving in ’58 but four years later I hit the road on my own and paid my first toll across the Skyway. All of 25 cents, if I remember correctly. That really wasn’t a tiny amount, a pack of cigarettes being about the same, but it only lasted a few more years. As officials had promised, the toll disappeared when the debt was paid.

I like that financial model, the simplicity of it, but would it work today? Beats me, but maybe not, costs to build such infrastructure being what they are. In all the discussions and debates about toll roads, the idea of retiring a toll at some point just never comes up. We seem stuck on the idea that public/private partnerships are required to raise the money in the first place, and then the private outfit gets to charge pretty much what it likes within a 99-year lease or some such — long after costs have been recovered.

This does not strike me as brilliant public policy, and the perfect example is Ontario’s Highway 407 that runs east-west just north of Toronto. It’s about 100 km long, built in a public/private partnership and later sold to the private entity involved. And now a tractor-trailer gets dinged nearly $60 to travel that stretch in peak hours, a car just under $20. And as far as I can see, it doesn’t always save much time or heartache. Not surprisingly, many truckers won’t use it.

Compare that to the 186 km of the Coquihalla Highway in B.C., which cuts out some pretty tough mountain driving and quite a few miles in the process. It’s only 10 bucks for a car and as much as $50 for a truck. Much as I love driving old Highway 1 out there, and much as I hate tolls, this represents decent value compared to 407 — with much less traffic density to support it. Happily, a few years ago the people beat back the Premier’s announcement that the road and its revenue would be turned over to a private operator.

Unfortunately, I can’t imagine the Coquihalla’s tolls being dropped or even reduced any time soon. Same with the 45-km-long Highway 104 over the Cobequid Pass in Nova Scotia. And there’s no chance of it happening with 407, of course.

I fear that our road reality will include more and more tolls as time goes on, a notion backed up by a report just released by the C.D. Howe Institute.

The study is called “Congestion Relief: Assessing the Case for Road Tolls in Canada” (downloadable at www.cdhowe.org) and it offers toll roads as the cure for urban congestion. The author, University of Alberta economics professor Robin Lindsey, says governments should look at tolls and fees to deal with gridlock in our cities.

So maybe tolls are inevitable, but I don’t have to like them. And I can’t help wondering if the growing acceptance of the idea really signals a lack of imagination on the part of governments big and small. Just pray that we don’t get user fees charged to enter our cities.