Category Archives: transportation

Tory does the right thing

Posted by on | economy, Ontario, transportation

Finally, a centre-right we can believe in! A right-wing politician who, instead of just pretending that various collective action problems do not exist, instead acknowledges them and proposes market-based solutions… I’m not always a huge fan of market based solutions to collective action problems, but if I have to choose between a market-based solution and no solution, I’ll take the market-based one.

What am I talking about? Toronto Mayor John Tory proposes road pricing for the DVP and Gardiner Expressway. This is a drum that I (and many others) have been beating for a long time. Here’s a piece I wrote for Policy Options a long time ago (link). This remains my favorite line:

Roads are congested because they are free. If we gave away cheese for free, too many people would eat too much cheese. Similarly, when we give away use of roads, we get too many people driving too much of the time.

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Spotted in the wild today in Toronto

Posted by on | transportation

While walking along St. Clair, what should I see but the new TTC low-floor, high capacity streetcar/LRT:

newride1

That picture doesn’t exactly give you a sense of how much more train-like these bad boys are. Here’s a different angle:

newride2

Okay, maybe not super-interesting for everyone, especially if you don’t live at the Centre of the Universe. Nevertheless, I think many people across the country are very frustrated by the collective paralysis that seems to have descending upon the nation — our seeming incapacity to do anything about any of the major collective action problems that we are confronting, from environmental protection, to pharmacare, to transportation. So it’s nice to see, every once in a while, something actually improve in the public sector.

Incidentally, they were built by Bombardier, in Thunder Bay (something that Rob Ford complained a lot about, but I can’t get too upset by).… Continue reading