Urban Renaissance Institute

Road safety

Posted on May 4, 2000 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
CBC: Commentary
May 4, 2000

Next month, a coroner’s inquest will investigate one of Canada’s worst-ever highway calamities – the fiery 84-vehicle crash last September on a stretch of the 401 between Windsor and London. That stretch, which took 8 lives on that occasion and many others before and since, is dubbed Death Alley. Other stretches on other Canadian highways have names like Killer Road. All told, 3000 Canadians lose their lives to traffic accidents each year.

But one highway in Canada has never claimed a life – Highway 407, which runs parallel to Highway 401, just a few miles to its north. In part, that’s a coincidence – no highway is immune from fatal car crashes. But Highway 407 does have something going for it. Highway 407 is a toll road, and toll roads are remarkably safe. Highway 407’s accident rate is about one-third that of Highway 401.

U.S. toll roads are also safer than U.S. freeways. In terms of fatalities across North America, your chance of being killed per mile traveled on a freeway is typically 50% to 100% higher than on a toll road.

In part, the toll road has a vastly superior safety record because its crews tend to be dedicated to the one road, making them more familiar with its particular characteristics. As a result, they more promptly clear debris, plow snow and find and treat icy patches.

But more importantly, toll road operators – whether public or private – have a bottom line. When traffic isn’t moving, a toll road can lose $30,000 per hour or more, giving it a powerful incentive to invest in safety equipment and in other equipment that lets it pounce on small problems before they become big.

One example of such incentives at work is California’s Route 91 Express Lanes, a toll road built in the median of a freeway serving Los Angeles. Express Lanes employs high-tech cameras – and a private fleet of tow trucks on continuous patrol – to monitor its road. When the control centre spots trouble, it immediately dispatches the nearest tow truck. The tow truck operator will change flat tires, boost batteries, provide a free gallon of gas to cars that have run out – anything to get cars off the side of the road, where they attract the attention of gawking passersby, slow traffic and create an accident risk.

The operators of Highway 401 and other freeways don’t like to see carnage on the road any more than their for-profit counterparts.

But unlike toll road operators, which are primarily focussed on road profits, government freeway owners have many masters to please. Because road investments come out of the general purse, they compete with medicare, education and other public demands for new spending.

For this reason, governments across Canada have allowed our road system to deteriorate badly, despite persistent warnings from safety-minded organizations. Although governments and road authorities acknowledge that necessary upgrades to the national highway infrastructure would save 250 lives a year, they balk at the $17-billion price tag involved. To a toll road operator, unsafe roads are bad for business. To a government, they’re a luxury. The question for society: Can we afford the human toll of free roads?

Related articles:
Toll roads v. the Canadian Accident Association
London’s green streets
Toll skeptics be damned: London’s rolling
The toll on business
The take from tolls
Don’t tax, toll: Presentation to the Canadian Home Builders’ Association
London unjammed
Don’t tax, toll
Toll today’s roads, don’t build more
How the free road lobby led us astray
Toll road commentary
How to cut highways’ human toll

Posted in Automobile, Toll roads | Leave a comment

Letter to the Chief Coroner

Posted on May 2, 2000 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Lawrence Solomon

May 2, 2000

Dr. Thomas Wilson
Chief Coroner
Room 1-068, 1st Floor, Unit L
80 Dundas St.
London, Ontario
N6A 6A8

Dear Dr. Wilson,

I am writing regarding the June 7, 2000 inquest into the 8 deaths resulting from the accident on the 401 last September, and specifically your duty to assist the jury to make recommendations aimed at preventing similar deaths.

Based on press reports and communications with your office, I gather that the inquest is likely to consider recommendations such as adding lanes, rumble strips, and medians.

In addition to these considerations, I request that the inquest address the potential role of toll roads in creating safer highways. Toll roads, as you may know, typically have fatality rates of one-half to two-thirds the fatality rates of freeways or non-tolled roads.

I would be happy to assist in identifying any expert witnesses.

Sincerely,

Lawrence Solomon
Executive Director, Urban Renaissance Institute

Posted in Toll roads | Leave a comment

How to cut highways’ human toll

Posted on May 2, 2000 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 2, 2000

“The answer is toll roads, because saving money also saves lives”

Three thousand people die on Canada’s roads each year, with Ontario’s among the most dangerous, but Highway 407, the electronic toll road north of Toronto that opened three years ago, has yet to log its first fatality. Highway 407’s collision rate — 0.27 for every million kilometres of vehicular travel — is also enviable, about one-third the rate that occurs on Highway 401, which runs parallel to the toll road just a few miles to the south.

Yet Highway 407, though extraordinarily safe when compared with the 401 and other major North American freeways, is not remarkable when compared with other toll roads: The fatality rate on toll roads is typically one-half to two-thirds that of freeways. In a society whose members put public safety ahead of their individual pocketbooks, toll roads — not freeways — are the way to go.

Next month, an Ontario coroner’s inquest will investigate one of Canada’s worst-ever highway calamities — the fiery 84-vehicle crash last September that took eight lives on a Windsor-to-London stretch of the 401 dubbed Death Alley. “We’ve got to examine [whether] there are lessons that can be learned and ways of making roads safer in Ontario,” Dr. James Young, Ontario’s Chief Coroner, said two weeks after the crash.

Precisely what the inquest will examine is shrouded in secrecy: The coroner’s office won’t reveal which witnesses it will call, or the nature of evidence to be presented, until the inquest begins. But previous inquests into deaths on the province’s sorry highway system have typically confined their recommendations to engineering solutions such as better lighting, median barriers and paved, rather than gravel, shoulders. No inquest, to the recollection of the coroner’s office, has ever examined, let alone recommended, what could be the biggest safety improvement of all — tolling our existing highways.

But more importantly, toll road operators — whether public or private — have a bottom line. When traffic isn’t moving, a toll road can lose $30,000 per hour or more, giving it a powerful incentive to invest in safety and other equipment that lets it pounce on small problems before they become big. Though preventing blood from being spilled on the highway may motivate them less than having their own books bleed red ink, the drive for profits nevertheless pushes toll road operators to find new ways to boost safety.

One example of such incentives at work is California’s Route 91 Express Lanes, a toll road built in the median of a freeway serving Los Angeles. Express Lanes employs high-tech cameras — and a private fleet of tow trucks on continuous patrol — to monitor its road. When the control centre spots trouble, it immediately dispatches the nearest tow truck to deal with it. The tow truck operator will change flat tires, boost batteries, provide a free gallon of gas to cars that have run out or, if necessary, tow them — anything to get cars off the side of the road, where they attract the attention of gawking passersby, slow traffic and create an accident risk.

To prevent congestion — a chief cause of accidents — Express Lanes raises tolls during peak hours. This technique so successfully maintains free-flowing roads that Express Lanes offers a money-back guarantee to anyone unable to drive at the legal speed limit of 65 miles per hour. Other toll roads are developing methods to provide advance warning when fog suddenly blankets an area — an often-cited cause of the 401 crash that the inquest is expected to examine. They plan to warn drivers entering a hazardous stretch via roadside messages and — sooner than you might think — via messages to the drivers’ dashboards.

The operators of Highway 401 and other freeways across North America don’t like to see carnage on the road any more than their for-profit counterparts do, and many governments have invested impressively in high-tech equipment, both to improve the efficiency of their freeways and to save lives.

But unlike toll road operators, which are primarily focused on road profits, government freeway owners have many masters to please. Influential communities obtain better traffic enforcement for themselves at the expense of others. In some jurisdictions, patronage, rather than merit, determines which road crews are hired. Most of all, because road investments come out of the general purse, they compete with medicare, education and other public demands for new spending. As Ezra Hauer, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Department of Civil Engineering and a fellow of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, put it to an international road safety conference in Alberta in 1998: “Any safety initiatives in the transportation infrastructure might be costly and would have to come from the treasury, with no immediate compensation by taxation.”

For this reason, governments across Canada have allowed our road system to deteriorate badly, despite persistent warnings from safety-minded organizations. Although governments and road authorities acknowledge that necessary upgrades to the national highway infrastructure would save 250 lives a year, they balk at the $17-billion price tag involved. To a toll road operator, unsafe roads are bad for business. To a government, safe roads are a luxury. The question for society: Can we afford the human toll of free roads?

Responses to How to Cut Highways’ Human Toll

Toll Roads Are Safe Roads

Tollways Newsletter, May/June 2000
Neil Schuster, Executive Director, International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association (IBTTA)

A May 2 opinion editorial in the Financial Post, a Toronto, Ontario, Canada newspaper, points out that toll roads are among the world’s safest. The article was authored by Lawrence Solomon, Executive Director of the Urban Renaissance Institute.

Noting that accidents on Ontario’s toll road, Highway 407, are one-third the rate on a parallel toll-free road, the author suggests, “In a society whose members put public safety ahead of their individual pocketbooks, toll roads – not freeways – are the way to go.” The author adds that Ontario’s safety experience is not unique.

In fact, toll facilities around the world are among the safest roadways, the author states. He notes that Highway 407 is fatality-free, after three years of operation. He adds that California’s 91 Express Lanes, a privately-operated set of lanes in the median of a toll-free road, rely on high-tech cameras to respond quickly to incidents to insure that the road remains safe for all its customers.

The reason our industry enjoys its enviable safety record, according to Mr. Solomon, is that “Toll road operators – whether public or private – have a bottom line,” and therefore “a powerful incentive to invest in safety.”

Mr. Solomon concludes, “To a toll road operator, unsafe roads are bad for business…. The question for society: can we afford the human toll of free roads?”

The road to highways that work: letters

Tuesday, May 23, 2000
National Post

Frank Gray

I read with great interest Lawrence Solomon’s partially accurate column which recommended new tolls to reduce highway fatalities.

While his recommended solution of raising taxes on citizens and businesses who use public roads is utter nonsense, his arguments perfectly articulate the problem: the reality that governments are badly mismanaging our public road infrastructure.

There are, of course, billions of dollars of taxes already being collected from road users that are not spent on making the infrastructure safer and more compatible with today’s traffic volumes. Instead, they spend this money on endless government pet projects and tell us to take government public transit. The 407 is not safer because users get a monthly bill. It is safer because of its modern design, and ability to cope with the traffic volume demands. Our roads are in terrible shape, and overcongested because governments have been negligent in maintaining and expanding highway infrastructure, which has added to our pollution levels and cost Canadian businesses billions in lost productivity.

Government has proven beyond a doubt that it is incapable of managing our roads and highway systems. It is gouging motorists and businesses with high taxes that it uses for its own best interests.

It is time for government and its bloated transportation bureaucracies to step aside, and let the experts in the private sector provide us the highway infracture we need and deserve. The 407/401 comparison says it all. And no new taxes would be required.

Frank Gray, Unionville, Ont.

Basil D. Kingstone

Mr. Solomon’s article floats the silliest proposal I have ever heard of. To begin with, it is false that toll roads are better maintained than public ones. Drive the Pennsylvania turnpike and the (free) Keystone Northway, or the Ohio turnpike and I-94, and compare.

How could toll roads be better maintained? They are in business to make money. Highway 407 is new; wait till it is the age of Highway 401. It will perhaps never be as crowded as the 401, because first, it is further north, and second, many people won’t pay to do something they can do for free.

Toll road operators are in fact dumping traffic on the freeways, keeping those for whom it is worthwhile spending money to save time. This fact explains the lower accident rate alleged for toll roads, though the claim surprises me and I would like to know where it comes from — the operators themselves? The biggest improvements needed on our existing freeways? Widen them, provide more cameras in areas where traffic jams occur, and add more signboards for warning messages. Have tow trucks cruising around. Make work crews responsible for their particular piece of highway so they put some pride into it. Reserve lanes for cars with two or more people in them.

But don’t let governments abdicate their financial responsibilities. Oh yes, and get as much freight traffic as possible back on rail where it belongs. Build new railroads, as they are doing in Europe today. A little less free capitalism and a little more social responsibility from EPRF, please.

Basil D. Kingstone, dept. of French, University of Windsor.

Lionel Albert

Congratulations on your splendid piece. I have taken an interest in transport matters for many years and find there is rarely anything said that adds to the store of human knowledge on the subject.

I had thought that privately owned or leased roads simply make the construction and maintenance more efficient, with only indirect safety benefits.

For example, the system of contracts for construction or maintenance introduced in Britain under Mrs. Thatcher, with penalties for daytime road or lane closures or failure to meet target completion dates (and bonuses for the converse), has produced what look like impressive results. They also include free towing for disabled vehicles, but only in zones under major construction, where there is a long-term lane closure or lane shift to the shoulder.

In the terms of the completely private operation that you describe, the British system can only be called half-measures.

Lionel Albert, Knowlton, Que.

Posted in Toll roads | Leave a comment

Cut Canada’s forests — or else, ‘Managed forest’ laws put small woodlot owners under the axe.

Posted on April 18, 2000 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
April 18, 2000

Owners of forested land throughout Alberta — from the largest multinational forest company to the individual woodlot owner — won’t be getting a property tax break this year, all because of the province’s stubborn small woodlot owners. These smallholders could have signed onto a plan to turn their private “unmanaged” forests into government-certified managed forests, as other stakeholders wanted, and pocketed the money. The smallholders just couldn’t bring themselves to do so.

“A lot of private woodlot owners had more environmental concerns than economic,” regrets John Ball, an advisor with Alberta’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs, who has been doing his best to win over the various factions in the province’s woodlot association, an exercise that would reward those who agree to manage their forest lands for commercial purposes.

Initially, the government’s idea of managing a private woodlot required converting trees into whole logs. The woodlot owners’ reward — apart from their logs’ market value, which, to the government’s dismay, didn’t much motivate them — would be a 90% reduction in their property taxes.

But the woodlot owners balked at signing over to government their rights to use their land as they see fit. They tend to use their woodlots for multiple purposes — not just to extract whole logs, as some occasionally do, but also for birdwatching, hiking, hunting and other recreational purposes, and to serve niche markets, such as willow boughs, which some gather and sell to craft shops.

The province wants a managed woodlot program to keep the forest economy humming. Saw mills need logs, loggers need jobs. Yet increased land prices, pushed by residential, recreational and other alternative uses for the land, threaten to make the Alberta logger an endangered species. “Without the lower taxes, you might not have a forestry industry,” explains Mr. Ball, who now hopes the provincial Legislature can pass tax breaks for the 2001 tax year.

When it comes to putting private forests under provincial management schemes, Alberta is a laggard. In most of Canada, managed forests are the law of the land, focusing woodlot owners on seeing their forest as fodder for saw mills and other forestry industries.

In Nova Scotia, a determined provincial government locks forest land into logging by letting managed woodlot owners pay rural municipalities a mere 25 cents (yes, cents) per acre in property tax. Lest a smallholder consider changing the use of his land — say he wants to stop logging and retire on his land by converting it to cottage use — the province will punish him through a change-of-use tax. The tax — a harsh 20% of the land’s market value as a managed woodlot — dissuades sentimental owners from ceasing logging operations on their land and “keeps it in production, in forestry use,” Arden Whidden, the province’s director of private lands, explains cheerily.

Laid-back British Columbia may be 5,000 kilometres and a world apart from tradition-bound Nova Scotia, but present B.C.’s government with a majestic forest stand and it, too, becomes awestruck at its potential for pulp and lumber. B.C. landowners are less eager to cut: Some plan to leave their land for their children, others might want to develop it for other purposes, explains Mike Lane, senior forester with B.C. Assessment, a Crown agency.

To compete with these private dreams, the province offers public cash, in the form of cuts to their property taxes, typically by one-half to two-thirds. All the private landowners need do is put their land into the province’s high-sounding Forest Land Reserve and cut, cut, cut. While the land remains theirs, they can’t subdivide it or put more than one dwelling on it. If they later want out of the bargain, as some do, the Forest Land Reserve authorities may forbid it outright, or it may first require that the owner substitute a new parcel of land for the withdrawn land, as well as paying a penalty of the past taxes saved.

The de facto policy is “no net reductions in the Forest Land Reserve,” explains Mr. Lane. “We don’t want to see the allowable cut of the land base reduced.” To calculate the allowable cut, the province adds up all the forested land in B.C. that’s potentially available for forestry — in public as well as private forests — and determines how much can be cut on a continual basis. This contrived cut, and this contrived use of land for forestry purposes, satisfy the majority of the stakeholders for whom governments act: the loggers who would otherwise be in a different line of work, the logging towns that want to stave off the day they’re logged out, the forest products industries that want cheap feedstock for their mills and factories.

The minority stakeholders — the actual owners of the land, who want to preserve it for its inherent value — get short shrift, pressured by the others to conform and penalized through the tax system if they don’t. It really couldn’t be any other way, in any system that puts the preservation of our forests in the hands of governments — by definition, political bodies. Politicians, skilled in the art of compromise, will necessarily compromise our forests.

Posted in Forestry | Leave a comment

Drilling holes in forestry rhetoric

Posted on April 4, 2000 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
April 4, 2000

It’s not free trade our lumber companies want, it’s free trees.

The rugged individualists attending the Canadian Lumbermen’s Association convention in Montreal earlier this year must have welled up with pride.

“We must unite and present a strong case for free trade to the federal government when it negotiates with the United States,” exhorted Frank Dottori, chief executive of Tembec Inc. and chairman of the Free Trade Lumber Council, a coalition of Canadian forest products companies. Gerry Shannon, formerly a federal deputy minister of international trade and now a top lobbyist with Government Policy Consultants, also talks a tough free trade game: Canada should “return softwood lumber trade between Canada and the U.S. to the rules and principles of free trade,” he states categorically.

These two forest industry defenders have set their sights on the 1996 Canada-U.S. Softwood Lumber Agreement, which was negotiated to appease U.S. loggers opposed to subsidized Crown land lumber entering the U.S. market. Under the agreement, cheap Canadian exports are subject to a quota. Because the five-year agreement, which expires next March, will soon face U.S. congressional hearings, our forest industry is sharpening its free trade rhetoric to demonstrate the justice of its cause.

But Canada’s free trade specimens — the former career civil servant and the CEO of a subsidy-dependent forest company — have a credibility problem. Particularly since their idea of free trade is to get trees for free — or some equivalent — and then trade.

Canada’s provincial governments have the same idea. They provide subsidies to the industry that exceed the stumpage the forestry companies pay our governments for the trees. In effect, our governments are paying the companies to remove our old growth forests for us, convert them into two-by-fours, and send them south. Free trade, Canadian-style.

Our old growth forests — much of them now standing tall in U.S. suburban malls and subdivisions — delight U.S. home builders, who credit them for brisk sales of affordable housing. But the Softwood Lumber Agreement enrages U.S. logging interests, who say Canadians have been cheating on the agreement by drilling holes in construction lumber (making it a “manufactured” product) among other tricks. After losing one-third of their market to cheap Canadian imports, U.S. loggers want to replace the softwood agreement with a requirement that Canadian companies buy Crown-owned logs at full market prices, set by auction, instead of at low bureaucrat-set stumpage rates.

On paper, the U.S. loggers’ plan has some merits, particularly for Canada. Forest revenues would fill our governments’ coffers instead of depleting them, giving the fees to the true owners of the forests, the public-at-large. The economies of the forest provinces would benefit, especially that of British Columbia, the province with the country’s biggest forest industry. By bleeding the productive parts of B.C.’s economy to finance its deforestation program, B.C. governments have stunted the provincial economy, helping to make it Canada’s worst economic performer over the last decade.

But the U.S. loggers’ hope that higher-priced Canadian logs will slash Canadian exports — a hope shared by some environmental groups in Canada and the U.S. — underestimates the Canadian entrepreneurial genius for devising and delivering subsidies. Although the Canadian forest industry is small — about 2% of GDP, including pulp and paper and other manufacturing activities — it is a mighty lobbying machine with a phenomenal record of success at sucking in government subsidies for its maw. Despite handouts, this old economy backwater logged a dismal 2.5% average return on shareholders’ equity over the last decade, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, a forest industry auditor.

In heavily forested, heavily politicized B.C., where the industry accounts for almost 5% of GDP, the battle over who gets the subsidies is particularly bruising. To please its union friends, B.C.’s NDP government rejigged forest policies in an attempt to boost unsustainable jobs — this in an industry whose workers average $62,000 per year in wages plus benefits, about 50% more than the province’s non-forest workers. Had the NDP not won its upset victory in 1996 against the B.C. Liberal Party, labour unions would have had less influence and the forestry companies — who plied the B.C. Liberal Party with an eye-popping $500,000-plus in political contributions that election year — would have had more. Regardless of what party obtained power, the forest would have lost, the taxpayer would have lost, the economy would have lost.

If the U.S. loggers get their wish of fully priced Canadian logs, political leaders — whoever they may be — will find some way to funnel the funds back to exploiting forests, cheating on the new agreement just as they have on the last one. Five years from now, the Americans will be back, once again complaining that they’ve been had.

Subsidized forest exports are a fool’s game in which Canada loses a little in each transaction and hopes to make it up on volume. Our country’s most spectacular forests and fools lie in B.C., where forest industry exports, utterly devoid of free market discipline, insanely account for over half of all provincial exports. Canadians would do better if we simply wrote U.S. home builders a cheque for the value of our giveaways and left our forests intact. We would do best if we played an honest game of free trade, and kept our money and our trees.