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Not an April Fool’s Day joke: TransLink’s 12-year struggle to find money

April 1st, 2012 · 50 Comments

Transit funding: the most boring topic on the face of the earth, right? Until its problems happen in your backyard.

Here’s a story I contributed to in the Globe about the long struggle of this unique transportation authority to find ways to pay for its system.

While there are undoubtedly things to criticize about the way TransLink spends money and makes decisions, one of the agency’s core problems is what it’s trying to do with the money it is.

The Toronto Transit Commission spends about the same amount TransLink does — $1.5 billion to TL’s projected $1.4 for this year. But its system is paid for 70 per cent by fares and only 30 per cent by property taxes. And there are no gas taxes, no carbon taxes, no vehicle levies, and so on, at least for the moment.

What’s the difference? One is that the TTC serves about 460 million riders a year in a territory of 622 square kilometres. TransLink’s 2011 ridership, not quite tallied yet, looked like it was heading for a record … 220 million riders. In a territory of just over 2,800 square kilometres.

TransLink is also a still-growing system. So you end up with an agency getting fares from half as many riders across four times the space and with big capital projects to build yet, as it tries to capture more riders. (To be scrupulously fair, I don’t think the TTC’s budget numbers cover capital costs. Nor does the TTC have to deal with building roads or bikeways, as TL does.)

All of that means riders pay less than half the bill and the rest of it gets covered through the array of property taxes, parking taxes, tolls, and gas taxes. I don’t see that, by the way, as drivers subsidizing riders. I see it as drivers helping to pay for a complete system that helps remove some of their competition from the roads by converting some drivers to transit users, which helps reduce congestion. Transit doesn’t benefit only the people who are on it.

As you can see from the handy chart, mayors are trying to find a different mix of taxes and fees to cover the hundreds of millions needed beyond fares. That will be needed until the city and system is built up enough to the point where fares cover a bigger part of the bill.

Until then, it looks as though everyone else will have to pay more, one way or another. As Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart said to me this week, it’s not as though taxes will go down if the region stops building transit projects. There are more people and more commuters being added to the region all the time. So if there are no transit projects, there will have to be new roads — and that will cost tax dollars too.

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