By: Elise Burgert
Vancouver is a city defined by the Fraser River, which offers both opportunity and challenge. One major challenge is the ongoing construction of multibillion-dollar bridges to connect Vancouver’s regions.
To fund two badly needed transit improvements, namely the Golden Ears and Port Mann bridges, the province resorted to tolling vehicles that crossed them. The rationale is that the bridges should be paid for by those who use them.
To remain popular with the majority, tolls are a politically sound choice for a government. They face less opposition to billion-dollar regional infrastructure proposals if those who would only rarely use the bridges do not feel that the projects come at their expense.
This is what the provincial Liberals did under Christy Clark, with both the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges. Unfortunately, the bridges were severely underused, in large part because the high tolls disincentivized their usage; many drivers opted to either use other forms of transport, such as the public transit system, or to avoid the tolls by using different bridges.
Despite the Port Mann Bridge improvement having massively increased capacity, fewer drivers used it under toll in 2015 than the old bridge in 2011. This caused the two bridges to lose $120 million annually. Additionally, people such as BC’s Premier John Horgan argued that these tolls are an unfair tax on specific communities, saying, “you shouldn’t have to pay tolls because of where you live.” Clearly, tolling new bridges is not as simple a solution as some politicians might like.
As a result, Premier John Horgan has recently announced the removal of these bridge tolls. However, critics are quick to point out that removing these tolls directly adds to the debt of the province. The money for these infrastructure improvements needs to come from somewhere, and simply removing the tolls does not solve the problem of funding them.
With all of these concerns, perhaps transportation needs to be looked at as a bigger picture. While it is tempting for the politician in office to address only the most pressing transportation issues as they become problematic, building more and more expensive bridges without a proper plan to fund them does not address the nature of the entire transportation grid.
Firstly, if, as a province, we can agree that we need a system of vehicle bridges to cross the Fraser River, these bridges should be funded, like our government, by the whole province. Instead of looking at a bridge as a single connection exclusively between two regions, we should view bridges as part of a transportation network shared by all. In time, all regions will have their transportation projects built, and none will suffer the individual hardship of sudden high tolls.
Secondly, there is a role for tolls as part of a transport demand management strategy. Since tolls can incentivize commuters to use less intensive forms of transportation, the overall cost and demand for these expensive pieces of infrastructure can be reduced simply by using tolls as a deterrent for resource-intensive, low-occupancy vehicles.
A fiscally, environmentally, and socially responsible solution for this transportation issue would be to apply a toll to all the bridges in the Lower Mainland, as opposed to a select few new bridges. This would continue to deter expensive single-occupancy vehicle transport, but would cause cash-strapped drivers to use the closest and most appropriate bridge for their journey instead of being funneled to older, over-capacity, non-toll bridges, such as was occurring on the Pattullo Bridge under the Port Mann toll. This would give the government the funds it needs to pay for these new infrastructure projects.
While this solution requires more foresight than our decision makers often consider, perhaps it is time to come up with a proper, sustainable source of funding for bridges instead of passing the problem onto the future.
