My name is David Jeanes.
[English]
I'm president of Transport Action Canada, which used to be Transport 2000, a non-profit organization advocating for better public transportation. We've been around since 1976. We're also a registered charity.
We strongly support the interest in a national transit policy. We participate in many consultation activities with all levels of government, and we also have experience internationally. For example, some years ago I participated in a very effective conference on light rail, in Washington, D.C., which was jointly hosted by APTA, the American Public Transit Association—the equivalent of CUTA , whom you heard earlier this week—and the Federal Transit Administration.
In Canada, we have no such body. Transport Canada, although it does regulate a very few transit agencies—OC Transpo and STO in the national capital area, and the bus company in Windsor—has no real role that is comparable to the research and policy involvement that the FTA has in the United States.
I want to touch on some major reasons why I think there is a federal interest in public transit. First of all, it's safety. The federal government has been involved in extensive discussion, for example, on driver hours for bus drivers. Although this only applies specifically to the transit agencies that are federally regulated, it is a matter of safety to the public that should be of concern for development of uniform standards nationally.
The next reason is rail safety. The government has extensive expertise in rail safety, and in fact it even provides that expertise to some provincial agencies, such as GO Transit and Metrolinx in Toronto, which don't maintain their own ability, for example, to do railway safety inspections but contract that to the federal government.
Yet the federal government has no overall responsibility for urban transit safety, particularly rail safety. Agencies such as the transit systems running LRT in Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, and the Montreal metro, are essentially self-regulating. This leads to inconsistencies across the country. Worse than that, it raises a very high barrier for other, smaller cities that wish to get into the use of railway technologies in their transit systems. Ottawa, for example, is facing very high costs to establish a railway safety competence that has to be at arm's length from the management of the planned light rail system. We feel there would be a continuing federal role that would be mutually beneficial in an area like this.
In the area of research, Canada has world-class capabilities in transit research. It was already mentioned, by CUTA, that in manufacturing we supply a large percentage of North American transit buses. Of course, you know that we also have a railway industry that has been extremely successful—for example, it supplies a large proportion of the bi-level commuter rail vehicles, such as the GO Transit and AMT cars, to many cities across the United States.
But we are not benefiting from our national needs for developing transit technologies in a way that would benefit our industries nationally. We haven't developed capabilities in the area of developing new light rail or street car systems; we are tending to depend on European research, or, in the case of the Canada line in Japan, buying from Asia.
Commuter rail is part of transit, although, as I've mentioned, it is normally not federally regulated. There are strong arguments that it should be, particularly because our largest cities that have commuter rail systems—Montreal, Toronto, and even Vancouver—could not function without these networks.
Again, there are potentials for those same technologies to be used in other cities across the country, but the barriers to entry for those cities are very high if there is no federal coordination that makes it easier for other cities that want to establish commuter rail systems. Here particularly we are talking about cost-effective reuse of federal railway infrastructure.
You may know that a good part of the Ottawa bus transitway was actually built on abandoned railway lines, as were the Vancouver SkyTrain and the Edmonton and Calgary LRT systems. In Toronto, Metrolinx is buying up railway rights-of-way to areas outside of the greater Toronto area. It is acquiring these lines from the freight railways that no longer have use for them. In Montreal, there are also major projects.
But there are lost opportunities because in many cases the local municipal levels don't have the resources to acquire these railway lines when the freight railways wish to dispose of them. Metrolinx can afford to, but we see a lot of other examples where it cannot be done. In fact, here in Ottawa, we're progressively losing a network of rail lines, radiating in many directions from the city of Ottawa, that were planned by the NCC as a coherent network in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the Gréber plan.
Electrification is a big issue. We are far behind the world standard in electrification of any of our railways. Apart from our urban transit systems and one commuter line in Montreal, we essentially have no railway electrification. Even the United States has extensive electrification of all its light rail systems and its passenger rail network in the eastern corridor. The problem here, again, is that there are many areas of Canada that wish to establish electrification. We know that Metrolinx, in Toronto, is under intense public pressure to electrify. The City of Ottawa is spending a lot of money, with provincial and federal funding support, to establish our first electrified passenger rail transit system. Again, the costs to entry are far higher than they would be if there were a more coherent federal approach to these systems. Some of the political issues we face, for example, in Toronto, could perhaps be avoided if we had a national discussion and national policies related to railway electrification.
Rapid transit to airports is important. The federal Department of Transport actually initiated the plan for the Pearson International Airport rail link, which is now moving forward as a provincial project. And the federal government was a partner with Vancouver in establishing rail transit access to Vancouver airport. But basically we're far behind the world standard in most of the rest of the country. The federal presence is very much on the sidelines or in the background for Ottawa, Montreal, and other cities where rapid transit to airports should be possible.
Rural transit is something that's of great concern to us. There are initiatives being taken by various municipalities, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, to try to develop, initially bus-based transit, but also commuter rail, using railway lines where they are available. In some cases, they are moving towards community ownership of lines that would otherwise be abandoned. This is being considered, for example, in Pontiac and Renfrew counties, west of Ottawa. There's also a strong interest in eastern Ontario, to the east of Ottawa. Again, the problem here is the barriers to those municipalities being able to acquire these lines. There are areas where the federal government can get involved, for example, by agreeing to tax policies that would allow municipalities that are qualified donees under the Income Tax Act to issue charity tax receipts to the railways in exchange for getting the land and the railway tracks. This is an interesting option that deals with the freight railways' need to realize something from disposing of their resources, other than for just scrap, and also makes it possible for municipalities or groups of municipalities to overcome the high barriers to keeping those rail corridors in service.
I want to mention a couple of things that I was reminded of when CUTA was speaking to you. CUTA organized a conference in Ottawa last year, their annual conference, and had a special session devoted to rural transit. It was extremely well attended. In fact, CUTA was surprised at the level of interest in this area.
Just to wrap up, I feel that we could have developed many more national strengths in areas that are of great importance to developing a sustainable transportation system, particularly in light rail. So many of our transit systems are either already using it or are needing to modernize or are embarking on projects with light rail. Yet at the moment we're facing a very fragmented approach. And as I've said, we're not really designing or manufacturing the vehicles for those systems in Canada, except possibly by licensing designs developed offshore. We also are missing some other opportunities, electric trolley buses, for example. We have no national strategy for electric trolley buses. Toronto lost them a few years ago. Vancouver and Edmonton still have them. Again, if there were a federal approach here, this is another technology that could be encouraged and that Canadian industry could respond to.
The last point is on taxation. CUTA mentioned to you the importance of employer subsidized transit passes. We were quite involved with this more than a decade ago with the proposal developed under a project performed by Todd Litman, who is now with the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, which recommended this approach. It differs from giving individual taxpayers a tax credit for their transit passes in that it brings the employers into the picture. It gives employers an incentive—not just to provide free parking spaces to their employees, which carries no tax implications, but also to provide or subsidize transit passes.
I was involved here in Ottawa when Nortel developed what was at the time the world's leading travel demand management program. It was oriented towards getting employees to use transit, walking, and cycling. In fact, no comparable program has yet been developed in Canada with any other major employer. I persuaded Nortel to start selling transit passes through the company cashiers and eventually through the retail stores that were established in major company locations. But the company was not interested in subsidizing these passes because the subsidies would be showing up in the payroll process as a taxable benefit.
Thank you.
:
Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you. I welcome the chance to share my comments about a national transit strategy to this all-party committee, because transit is an all-party issue across the country.
My presentation is mostly visual, so I'll run right through it as quickly as I can.
[Slide Presentation]
I want to start by looking at a map of Canada in terms of the major cities and the city regions across the country. If we look at Canada today, the population is about 34 million. As we know, in six short years we're going to celebrate the 150th birthday of the country. We'll probably be at about 36 million then, so we'll have added the equivalent of greater Vancouver. But I think the most important thing to focus on is where we're going to be in 2067, which is only 56 years away. We're going to add the equivalent of greater Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, the greater Toronto region, Ottawa, greater Montreal, Quebec City, and Halifax. That's what we're going to add to the country, and if we don't have a transit strategy for those additional 16 million people, we're in big trouble as a country.
Many of you know Jane Jacobs, who passed away several years ago. She was a wonderful lady. I had the pleasure of working with her. This was the last book she ever wrote, and in that book she, unfortunately, wasn't very optimistic. She looked at this dark age ahead. My position here is that we need to rise to the occasion and make sure that Canada's future is not in fact a dark age.
This is all too familiar to people in Toronto and most major cities across the country. This is the 401 at rush hour. It's basically a parking lot, notwithstanding that it has 16 lanes. The fact is that this is a very personal issue to Canadians in three areas.
First, over a 40-year working life--from 25 to 65--that we are all involved in, there are issues of lost time, lost money, and health, caused by sitting in gridlock. Very quickly, in terms of the time, if you commute one hour a day, it equals a loss of one entire calendar year over your 40-year working life. Two hours a day is a loss of two years. Three hours a day is a loss of three years.
Second, the average cost of owning a car in the greater Toronto area, according to the Canadian Automobile Association, is $12,000 a year all in. Over a working life you're spending half a million dollars on your Toyota. It's worth nothing at the end. If you have two cars, you're spending a million dollars; three is a million and a half dollars.
The third area, of course, is health. If you're stuck in gridlock, you're not doing much exercise.
So there are a lot of issues there. I don't know about you, but I can imagine being about to pass away one day when someone insists, “How would you like three more years of healthy life and a million bucks in your RRSP?” Who wouldn't say yes? So this is a very personal issue for Canadians.
This is a shot of gas prices around the world. It varies every week, but you can see, roughly speaking, that Canada is in the middle. I can guarantee that one day we will be at the level of the Netherlands. It's only a matter of time. That has huge implications for Canadians and how they move around their cities.
This is one of my favourite pictures. It's very important, and I always show it to my friends in Toronto. There's the exact same number of people in each of those three slides--40. The only difference is there's one per car, one per chair, and then everybody sitting on a streetcar with an empty street. What this says is we have to use the road space we have far more effectively than we do.
Here's another good one. This is Union Station in Toronto. For the number of people who go through that station every day, you'd have to build 72 lanes of expressway to equal the same number of people who go through that. The same numbers would apply for Montreal and other major cities. The point is that building more roads is not going to solve our problems. Transit has to be the answer. We do have a choice.
Unfortunately, across Canada many of our suburbs look the same. They look as the slide does in the top. There's a whole movement of smart growth in all the major cities of the country to intensify and concentrate and make development more viable to support public transit, as you see in the bottom slide.
These are some of the initial conclusions that I've been aware of in my career. What people are saying in Toronto and across the country is that they want more choice. A lot of people feel stuck because they only have one option now, and that is driving. They want smarter choices.
We have to look at moving people, not only cars, and land use and transportation go together like a hand in glove. We shouldn't forget that. We need to connect the dots, because as David Crombie has always told me, everything is connected to everything in any major city and any city region. All of these dots have something to do with a city, with a region, and we have to plan in its entirety. Everything is interconnected. These are some of the images that go with that.
Here's a very simple chart that we put together when we did the Toronto official plan. I thought it might be helpful for you. Everything you see on the top are the basic components of a transportation planner's strategy. Everything you see in green you can do for free. It simply means a policy decision. Everything in yellow costs some money and the red costs a fortune. Generally, what people focus on is only the red. The fact of the matter is, we have a huge scope federally, provincially, and locally to look at all these possibilities and all these levers to in fact achieve a transit strategy that we need for the country.
I will just move forward in terms of where we need to go in terms of 21st century challenges. The Don Valley Parkway and GO Transit are a very important part of the picture. One train equals 1,500 people. One lane of traffic is 1,500 people. The only difference is you can run a train every 15 minutes, whereas the traffic lane is 1,500 an hour. The new subway rocket cars in Toronto are very important for the system. I took the train coming up here today, and we just read that we had the highest number of passengers ever. In the last week 1.7 million people rode the subway in one day. We're almost at 500 million a year. So it's very critical for the larger centres of the country.
One of my passions is street cars. This is on Spadina Avenue. You can't forget street cars. I know there are very few of these left anywhere. We're lucky we have saved them in Toronto. But I want to tell you, if you add up the number of people who ride the street car lines in Toronto, it's more than the number of passengers who ride the entire GTA GO service every day. They're very, very important. They're urban work horses.
Calgary Transit, light rail in Edmonton.... Many other cities are moving in that direction.
And of course Yellowknife.... You can't forget the small communities. I was up there this summer because I always wanted to go there, so I did. This is my friendly bus driver in Yellowknife. There are two buses in Yellowknife. I had a great talk with him and with the administration there.
As we've heard earlier, small communities still need transit, but it's obviously got to be in the form of buses. So it runs the whole scope.
By looking to the future and moving forward, this is the kind of system that Metrolinx is looking at building over the next 20 to 25 years. The cost of this is $75 billion in terms of capital, operating, and maintenance, but it's going to serve a population of 10 million, and if we don't do it we're in huge trouble as an economic region.
Ottawa, as you well know, in terms of the light rail system, is tied to land use.
Vancouver is also very similar in terms of the various lines that have been built or that are proposed. I was out there last week and of course rode the line to the airport. They have an extensive transit plan as well.
Moving forward, the final piece here is in terms of where we are going to go in the future.
This is a shot of a little child. He is going to grow up one day to be a chief planner or a mayor or a member of Parliament, and the fact of the matter is I hope he has a full range of choice in terms of transportation.
If we look at international practices, without getting into any details, we are so far behind as a country it isn't funny. So many other cities and regions have all these other tools that you see listed across the top. We hardly have any, and we need to catch up.
Here are some of the tools that in fact are being looked at in the Metrolinx context in Toronto. Every single one of them is controversial, I'm going to be very blunt with you, but the fact is nothing's free. We have to have that kind of discussion, not only in Toronto but across the country, in terms of where the money comes from. Perhaps it comes from the federal government, from the province, from the locals, as well as from the community. All of these are important issues that we have to face.
I want to bring it down to a personal level, because the earlier deputant talked in questioning about road tolls and road pricing. That's one of the tools that we have to talk about. Here are some comparisons. People don't think anything about buying these commodities every day. In fact, lots of people have two Second Cup lattes, but as soon as you mention road pricing, people go crazy.
Here's another comparison. I just looked at a sample road toll price between Toronto and Oakville: 10¢ a kilometre would be $120 a month return. People are paying $121 now for a TTC metropass. They're already paying $215 return for GO Transit, and you see those other figures depending on the kind of plan you have. The point is we have to make sure that people get value for money if we're going to use some of these tools.
We did an extensive consultation around the GTA region on what was called “The Big Move” plan for Metrolinx, and this is the result. I went to every one of the public meetings in all the regions and I went by transit to every darn one of them, and the fact of the matter is, as you see in number 1, there is a huge degree of support. People say they want regional rapid transit and they're willing to pay for it, and they want it to be seamless and they want it to be integrated. But that's the message we got.
This is one of my favourite quotes: Again, nothing's free; you've got to pay for it and you've got to figure out how we're going to pay for it.
Here are some lessons I have learned in my 40-year career as a city planner: focus and simplify the message; respect public wisdom and political action; and develop and communicate strong beliefs. There's no point in doing something marginal. You've got to get things done.
To wrap up, in terms of what I call “future proofing Canada” between now and 2067, our cities and city regions are absolutely critical for the economic health of the country. About 80% of the people live in the city regions. That's where the economic wealth is. That's where the ideas come from. And that's where our economy will grow, if we have a great transportation system in those regions.
Ottawa, as you may know, is embarking on this exercise right now. In the current Canadian Geographic magazine, there's a feature on Ottawa, choosing our future: looking ahead a hundred years to build a capital region. Scientific American has a whole feature on smarter cities.
In terms of looking at how we're going to communicate this very important issue across the country, I think your committee could take the lead, frankly, and establish what I'll call tripartite forums in the city regions across the country. You have the elected representatives from the feds, the provinces, and the local areas, with the people in the transit agencies, urbanists, etc., to have that discussion about what this national transit strategy should look like and how it should be funded.
My message to you is that we can't go on with the status quo. We do want change. I beg you to take this very seriously, which I know you are, and to make no little plans. The future of the country is very much integrated into your work.
Thank you for your attention.