Potential impact of Toronto tolls

Two UBC professors were interviewed about Toronto Mayor John Tory’s call for road tolls to pay for transit.

Robin Lindsey discussed the topic on CBC’s On the Money.

“If you don’t pay for roads and public transit service through tolls, you have to pay for them another way,” he said. “The alternative revenue source would include the property tax and the sales tax, and both of those are known to be regressive in the sense that poorer household pay a larger fraction of their income in those forms.”

Lawrence Frank, a UBC sustainable transportation professor and the director of UBC’s health and community design lab, also spoke to News 1130 on the topic.

“I think many regions around the world are looking to variable pricing for the transportation system, including roads, based on peak demand,” Frank said. “Variable road pricing real time information is now possible, we have the technology to do it, and we should get on it.”

He also discussed variable road-pricing in the Lower Mainland for another News 1130 story.