If you ever find yourself at a random party in Metro Vancouver and are struggling to make conversation, asking about the region’s traffic woes is a guaranteed ticket for a lively debate. Metro Vancouver has some of the worst traffic in Canada, and is intensifying with the region’s rapid population growth and confined geography. The […]
Last November, we released a report on how pricing congestion—charging drivers to use roads to ensure faster and more reliable commutes—can help solve crippling congestion in Canadian cities. Governments can design congestion pricing systems according to different objectives; we argued that the number one priority should be to reduce congestion in order to use road […]
Last November the Ecofiscal Commission released its report on congestion pricing in Canadian cities. Road congestion is getting worse in many Canadian cities—big and small—and we believe that congestion pricing is the crucial and missing piece of a broader, coordinated package of policies to improve urban mobility. Momentum is already underway: the Ontario government is […]
In our recent blog on Ontario’s coming HOT lane pilot project, we congratulated Ontario on moving forward on congestion pricing policy. However, a few specific issues with the proposed Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW) pilot project remain. First, using a monthly permit approach can limit the effectiveness of policy and increase costs. It can also reduce […]
Late last year, Ontario announced the details of two high-occupancy toll (HOT) lane projects as a means to improve traffic flow in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The Province will start by implementing a HOT lane—a hybrid of a tolled road and a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane—as a pilot project on a busy stretch of […]
By Kevin Vuong Now that we know when and where HOT lanes are coming, the next critical question is how do we bring GTHA commuters along for the ride? Earlier this week Minister of Transportation Steven Del Duca announced that the Ontario government will be moving forward with a high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes pilot in […]