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Next week, the Vancouver City Council is scheduled to deliberate on recommendations from city staff to pursue road tolls for the area deemed to be the Metro Core – the entire peninsula of downtown Vancouver and the Central Broadway Corridor.
However, several leaders of Metro Vancouver’s suburban municipal governments have expressed their concerns about the autonomous approach proposed by the city of Vancouver to charging for mobility, given the knock-on effect it will have across the region.
They suggest that the city look at the approach with a more regional lens – a consideration of the issue from a regional perspective.
Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West told Daily Hive Urbanized on Friday he was questioning the lack of alternative options for suburban residents, especially public transit services that offer competitive travel times by car.
“We have hundreds of thousands of people in this region living in the suburbs where, due to the lack of available transportation options, people are almost entirely dependent on their vehicle,” West said in an interview Friday.
“I have a real challenge with the idea that those people should be targeted through a mobility tax, when the areas where transit systems are much more built are also the most expensive places to live in the region. This is the thrust of many people’s concerns. You will have huge regional inequality based on current reality. We have SkyTrain in some cities, but we also have many cities that don’t have it. “
Some proponents of mobility pricing have pointed to the success of congestion charging systems in global centers like Singapore and London, but West says these comparisons make no sense given the breadth of alternatives their public transport systems offer.
“It’s a donkey subject and it’s not even worth mentioning because the options and alternatives to people in Singapore and London are very different than what we have here,” he said.
West points out that any mobility pricing scheme must be paired with concrete plans to rapidly implement attractive public transport alternatives.
The region, he says, would need a much more aggressive investment strategy to improve the public transit system, at a pace that is faster than the current approach of building a new SkyTrain extension about every decade, which is not holding up. pace with the rapidly growing population of the region.
“People have no realistic alternatives. And to say that your alternatives are a bus that comes in once an hour and takes a long winding route to where you need to go is not acceptable, “West said.
“People who think it’s realistic are detached from the reality of most people. People don’t have time to waste an hour or more getting somewhere, while if they could get in the car they could get there in 15 minutes. “
He says Vancouver’s mobility pricing proposal represents a disconnect with TransLink and the Council of Mayors’ approach, which led to the 2018 report with key findings from the Public Transportation Authority’s Independent Mobility Pricing Commission. This was the “lay of the land” for how the region as a whole would pursue mobility pricing after further study.
“The Vancouver approach took many people by surprise. It wasn’t obvious that they were looking into it, and suddenly they came up with a well-defined proposal for mobility pricing and congestion rates, “West said.
There’s also a question of motivation, West says, which will need to be ironed out as part of the larger considerations.
West says that in addition to the rationale for reducing congestion and carbon footprint, advocates argue that mobility prices are also needed to create a new source of revenue, especially to replace TransLink’s diminishing tax revenue from adoption. of battery-electric vehicles and to help finance public transportation expansion.
But the Vancouver City Metro Core mobility charging scheme is intended to increase revenue for the municipal government’s budgetary needs, with vague commitments to redirect revenue towards municipal-level transportation improvements. It will not go back to TransLink’s budgetary needs for regional transport priorities.
This is also of concern to Craig Cameron, West Vancouver District Councilor and Jurisdiction Representative on the Board of Mayors.
“The city of Vancouver is planning to acquire the revenue for themselves for other purposes, which concern me,” Cameron said. “Mobility pricing makes sense and is much more bearable for the public if the revenue goes directly to public transport and other alternative modes of transport.”
“I’m concerned about the piecemeal approach and the fact that they haven’t really raised it with TransLink to have some thoughts on how it could be integrated or transformed into a regional system at some point.”
Cameron says he generally supports some form of mobility charging given the ability to increase revenue for TransLink and help address congestion and emissions targets, but it needs to be planned within a regional framework.
The type of mobility charging systems examined should strike a balance with other important considerations to ensure that they are fair for different groups and sectors of the economy.
“We need to think about regional and economic equity in terms of people with lower incomes and make the system non-punitive to them,” Cameron said.
“For example, many of the operations we have on the North Shore come from elsewhere, so we may need to address them with some sort of discount or time to charge them less.”
To address North Shore’s public transportation needs, Cameron notes that the provincial government’s recent release of the North Shore Rapid Transit study results is a good first step forward.
The next step, he says, is to incorporate the SkyTrain extension to the North Shore as a future phase of the Council of Mayors’ plan, following the already identified second and third phases that outline the completion of the Surrey-Langley and UBC SkyTrain extensions.
For his part, West also supported a short extension of the SkyTrain to reach Port Coquitlam. The Evergreen extension of the Millennium Line has been completed with a spur section and a track change at Coquitlam Central Station to allow for a potential future eastward extension towards Port Coquitlam. Under his direction, the City of Port Coquitlam is conducting its own feasibility study on this extension to support the cause of the project’s inclusion in a future Council of Mayors plan.
West adds that the final decision on the Vancouver City Metro Core mobility pricing scheme will rest with the provincial government. For this reason, he believes municipal road tolls in Vancouver are unlikely to go ahead, even if they receive city council approval.
As one of their first political decisions shortly after taking office in 2017, the BC NDP under Premier John Horgan removed the tolls on the Golden Ears and Port Mann bridges and campaigned in the latest election to keep tolls off the bridges. .
“Add to the fact that the new BC NDP majority was built in the suburbs. They reached the government majority because they broke through the eastern Vancouver subway and further into Fraser Valley, “West said.
“It would be very difficult to give the green light because it is the people in these areas who would pay the highest prices for this type of offer.”
Last week, TransLink CEO Kevin Desmond said mobility pricing should be pursued regionally.
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