All good slogans, but they mask the complexity of the real world. Especially when it comes to highways. It's time we educated ourselves and our leaders. Let's look behind the notion that common sense always means more highways. Here's a taxpayer's A-B-C...

Accident
Every year, approximately 118,000 people in Ontario receive injuries from motor vehicle accidents. (Coyle, Jim, "Cost of the car more than most people believe," The Ottawa Citizen) Across Canada, road accidents cost $0.3 billion in health care subsidies. (Royal Commission on National Transportation, Directions, Vol.1,p.186--Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1992)

Bottleneck
Britain is finding that new highways create the very congestion they are intended to relieve. ("Traffic relief creates more overcrowding," Engineering News Record, January 16, 1995, p.25) Canada is also learning that more roads induce more traffic.

Car
"You can't have just one car in a family anymore; you've got to have two. More when the kids start to grow up. All of these cars need insurance, repairs, maintenance. They wear our. If you figured it out you would see that your cars are costing you a small fortune, so you don't figure it out." (Kaul, Donald, "Nation needs a thriving transportation system, including rail, to prosper." The Arizona Daily Star, 22 October, 1995)

Debt
Highway construction is funded by debt. That debt is charged to general revenues. Between 1984 and 1989, the annual cost of just the interest on Ontario's capital road expenditures grew from $0.831 to $1.173 billion. (Transport 2000 Ontario, "Government of Ontario Road Costs vs. Road Revenues," (flyer), citing Province of Ontario government financial records)

Emissions
"...the environmental cost of truck transportation is 2 - 3 times that of rail transportation. For example, a semi-trailer truck has an environmental cost of 72 cents/net tonne kilometer. The same truck trailer on a piggyback train has an environmental cost of 36 cents per net tonne kilometer." (Transport Concepts, External Costs of Truck and Train. Prepared for The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, p.21)

Fuel
In Nova Scotia, transportation consumed more end-use energy than industry, farming, commercial and industrial users combined.

Greenhouse
"Motor vehicles are responsible for 16% of man's contribution to global warming, 20% of ground-level ozone, and 13% of acid rain." (Coyle, see above, citing Pollution Probe) Improved emissions from individual cars are being outweighed by growth in the total number of vehicles.

Highway Services
In a U-S case study, drivers were found to pay directly for only 25% of the costs of services they require. (MacKenzie, James J., Roger C. Dower & Donald D. T. Chen, The Going Rate: What it Really Costs to Drive, World Resources Institute, June 1992, p.10, citing Stanley Hart, "Huge Subsidies for Autos, Trucks," California Transit, Sept. 1986)

Intervention Government Intervention. "The dominance of the automobile is not a free-market outcome, but the result of massive government intervention on behalf of the automobile. That intervention came at the expense of privately-owned, privately-funded, tax-paying public transit systems. Without government intervention, public transit might have a substantially higher market share..." (Weyrich, Paul M. and William S. Lind, Conservatives and Mass Transit: Is it time for a New Look?, Executive Summary. Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, prepared for American Public Transit Association)

Jam
Traffic Jam. "...suburban Toronto is choking with cars... The oldest parts of the city, which were laid out well before cars appeared, have managed to accomodate them with relative ease ... One of the reasons for this strange inversion of normal expectations is that the central city is still dense enough to support an efficient public transit system..." (Barber, John, "Suburban traffic strategy out of gas," The Globe and Mail, Dec. 7, 1994, P.A7)

Kill
Approximately 1,200 people are killed every year by car accidents in Ontario alone. (Coyle, Jim, "Cost of the car more than most people believe," The Ottawa Citizen)

Land
Sixteen highway lanes are required to carry the equivalent traffic to that of a fully utilized rail line.

Maintenance
According to a U-S study, "...user fees (such as gasoline taxes) account for about $12 billion (60%) of the $20 billion spent annually on road maintenance. The remaining $8 billion is financed at the state and local levels by taxpayers, property owners, and others, not directly by drivers." (MacKenzie et al., see above, p.9)

Noise
"The material costs of noise show up in budgets to build noise barriers beside highways, and in the influence of traffic noise on residential property values..." (Transport Concepts, see above, p.23)

Oil
Foreign oil. An oil supply outside our control. An oil-based economy that holds us hostage to foreign cartels and Middle East turmoil. Transportation consumed 64% of all petroleum used in Canada in 1990. Seventy-nine percent of this non-renewable resource was road related.

Property Tax
Highways don't pay it. Land consumed by highways is taken out of the property tax base. Yet in most provinces, railways have to pay property tax for every kilometer of track. Then we wonder why they can't compete with roads.

Quota
Canada has not been meeting the commitments it made at the 1992 Earth Summit. "Canada is the largest per-capita energy consumer in the industrialized world ... We're the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide ... we have very strong political support for the fossil fuel sector..." (Skinner, John, "Chretien censured by environmental group," Saint John Telegraph-Journal, June 2, 1995) "Canada ... lags behind in dealing with air pollution because of an increase in carbon dioxide emissions and nitrogen oxides. Carbon dioxide, tied to the use of carbon-based fuels, is the leading greenhouse gas. Nitrogen oxide comes mainly from cars and trucks and is the primary component of smog." (Eggertson, Laura, "Canadian environment waning rapidly - report." The Halifax Herald, April 10, 1995, p.C15)

Road Rage
It's already part of British vocabulary, and it's coming to Canada. "... in 1920, when the car was new and the road uncluttered ... the car was freedom. But now? You drive to work in a traffic jam, the fumes from your fellow freedom riders seep in through the air conditioning. People honk their horns at you, they cut you off, they make rude gestures." (Kaul, see above)

Subsidy
Hidden subsidy. The National Transportation Act Review Commission found that in 1990-91, roads enjoyed a hidden cash-flow subsidy of $2.225 billion, and a hidden book-value subsidy (which averages out depreciation costs) of $4.585 billion. This is after assuming that the federal excise tax should be considered a user-pay charge. The federal profit from this tax is more than outweighed by the cost of municipal roads, resulting in a net loss. (National Transportation Act Review Commission, Research Report, citing research by Hickling) In the words of Ken Cameron, senior planner with the Greater Vancouver Regional District, "We realized that the public subsidy enjoyed by the private automobile amounts to $2,700 per automobile per year, or about seven times the amount we subsidize public transit." (cited by Saunders, see above)

Tax
Sales tax. Arguments to deny any subsidy exists for roads, often include sales tax on automobile parts such as tires. Does that mean when you buy a pair of gym shoes, your sales tax should be used to provide basketball courts? Sales tax is a general revenue. If people did not have to spend their money on car parts, they would be able to spend it on other things. And when they buy other things, they would still pay sales tax. Sales tax has nothing to do with roads.

Urban sprawl
Highways encourage urban sprawl, while sprawl requires more driving and leads to even more roads. "The Greater Vancouver Regional District ... concluded that the region could save $2.2 billion on transportation costs alone if urban growth became more concentrated. This is largely because of the higher costs of transportation in communities that are heavily dependent on private cars." (Saunders, Doug, "Suburbs a 'drain', economic study shows", The Globe and Mail, Wed., Jan. 10, 1995)

Value
Value for money. Your money that could be spent on other things, but has to be spent on that second (or third) car. Money that you pay in taxes to perpetuate your need for another car by subsidizing urban sprawl. Money that could be used to give you an alternative to that car. Money that could be used to invest in a better way, a way around the congestion, a way back to liveable communities.

Write
The letter you could write to your MP, to your MLA, to your Municipal Councillor. Most of them think you really want to drive everywhere, every time, in all kinds of weather, and on roads that are always getting wider. Tell them you'd like some choices. Tell them you'd like some balance in what kind of lifestyle your tax dollar supports. Ask them how they plan to stop the highway drain on your tax money, and what they plan to do about Canada's deepening automobile dependence.

X marks the spot
The X you put on your ballot at the next election. Tell your candidates you want a balanced transportation policy. A policy that takes advantage of the strengths of each mode, from cars to buses, ferries, trains, and planes. We need them all. Don't let government talk about "subsidies" when discussing transit but "investment" when discussing highways. Ask your candidates how they will make the different modes work together instead of against each other.

You
It's up to you to speak out if what you've read here concerns you. Write that letter. Make that call. And join Transport 2000, Canada's national research and advocacy group for better public transportation. Our $20 annual fee ($25 in Ontario) is only a fraction of the $170 you paid in tax to subsidize roads in 1990. (1990-91 cash subsidy for roads, Royal Commission on National Transportation Act, divided by number of employed Canadians, including self-employed, for November 1990, Statistics Canada)

Zoo
Children's zoo. The zoo we will leave to our children if we don't tell our governments to get Canada's transport act together. Common sense is fine, just as long as they know their ABCs.

Hon. David Anderson, Minister of Transport
House of Commons, Ottawa, ONT., K1A OA6
(no postage required)

Your MP
House of Commons, Ottawa, ONT., K1A 0A6
(no postage required. For your MP's name, phone 1-800-667-3355)

Your MLA/MPP
Check the Blue Pages for your province's general enquires phone number. They can tell you your MLA or MPP's name and address.

Transport 2000 Canada
P.O. Box 858, Station B, Ottawa, ONT., K1P 5P9
Tel.: (613) 594-3290; Fax: (613) 594-3271

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