Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
Fatos do Mes de Maio 2000
June 23, 2000

"A resposta é rodovias pedagiadas"

Três mil pessoas morrem nas rodovias canadenses a cada ano, estando a rodovia de Ontário entre as mais perigosas. Entretanto, a Highway 407 ao norte de Toronto com pedágio eletrônico, inaugurada 3 anos atrás, ainda está por registrar sua primeira fatalidade. A taxa de acidentes da rodovia 407 – 0,27 para cada um milhão de quilômetros trafegados – é também invejável, cerca de um terço da taxa que ocorre na rodovia 401, que corre paralela à rodovia pedagiada, a poucos quilômetros ao sul.

Ainda com relação à Rodovia 407, conquanto extraordinariamente segura quando comparada com a 401 e outras principais rodovias americanas sem pedágio, ela não se destaca quando comparada com outras rodovias pedagiadas. A taxa de fatalidade em rodovias pedagiadas é, basicamente, a metade ou dois terços das taxas das rodovias sem pedágio. Em uma sociedade cujos membros põem segurança pública acima de tudo, rodovias pedagiadas – e não rodovias sem pedágio – constituem o caminho a seguir.

No próximo mês, um investigador de Contraio irá pesquisar uma das piores calamidades ocorridas em rodovias canadenses – um terrível acidente envolvendo 84 veículos em setembro/99, que ceifou 8 vidas, na extensão Windsor/London da 401, apelidada Alameda da Morte. "Nós temos que examinar (se) há lições que possam ser aprendidas e maneiras de tornar as rodovias mais seguras em Contraio", disse o Dr. James Young, Investigador Chefe de Contraio, duas semanas depois do acidente.

Precisamente o que o inquérito irá examinar é mantido em segredo: o investigador não deseja revelar que testemunhas serão chamadas ou a natureza da evidencia a ser apresentada, até que a investigação se inicie. Mas as investigações anteriores a respeito das mortes no sistema rodoviário têm, basicamente, limitado suas recomendações a soluções de engenharia tais como melhor iluminação, barreiras medianas e pavimentação, ao invés de encascalhamento, acostamentos. Nenhuma investigação, segundo os registros do Serviço de Investigação, sequer pesquisou ou muito menos recomendou o que poderia ser o melhor aperfeiçoamento de todos em relação à segurança: pedagiar as rodovias existentes.

Em parte, a rodovia pedagiada tem um registro de resultados sobre segurança muito superior, porque suas equipes operam uma rodovia em particular, tornando-se mais familiarizados com suas características específicas. Em consequência, eles atuam mais rapidamente na limpeza de resíduos, remoção de neve, localização e solução de problemas de estradas congeladas.

Mas, mais importante de tudo, a operadora de rodovias pedagiadas, seja ela pública ou privada, tem um sinal de alerta. Quando o tráfego não está fluindo, uma rodovia pedagiada perde $30.000 por hora ou mais, o que representa um forte incentivo para investir em segurança e em outros equipamentos que permitam dominar o problema antes que ele se torne grande. Ainda que prevenir derramamento de sangue sobre a rodovia possa motivar menos do que ter registros contábeis no vermelho, a orientação voltada para lucros, motiva, entretanto, as operadoras de rodovias pedagiadas a descobrir novas maneiras de incrementar a segurança.

Um exemplo desses incentivos em funcionamento é a Route 91 Express Line, na Califórnia, uma rodovia pedagiada construída na área central reservada de uma rodovia sem pedágio na área de Los Angeles. Para monitorar a rodovia, a Express Line emprega câmeras de tv de alta tecnologia e uma frota particular de carros-reboque no patrulhamento permanente. Quando o Centro de Controle Operacional identifica um problema, ele imediatamente manda um dos carros-reboque para solucioná-lo. O operador troca pneus furados e baterias descarregadas, fornece gratuitamente um galão de gasolina para os veículos que tenham ficado sem combustível ou, se necessário, os reboca – fazendo o que for necessário para colocar os carros fora do acostamento da rodovia, onde eles atraem a atenção de motoristas curiosos, diminuem a velocidade do tráfego e criam riscos de acidente.

Para evitar congestionamento – a principal causa de acidentes – a Express Line aumenta o valor dos pedágios durante as horas de pico. Esta técnica é tão eficiente para manter livre o fluxo das rodovias que a Express Line oferece uma garantia de devolução do pedágio a qualquer pessoa que não possa dirigir no limite da velocidade permitida de 65 milhas por hora. Outras rodovias pedagiadas estão desenvolvendo métodos para dar avisos antecipadamente quando a neblina encobre uma região – uma causa frequentemente citada do acidente da Rodovia 401 que, espera-se, o inquérito examine. Elas planejam avisar os motoristas que estão entrando em trechos perigosos por meio de mensagens colocadas ao lado das rodovias e – e mais cedo do que se possa imaginar – por meio de mensagens enviadas ao painel dos veículos.

Os operadores da Rodovia 401 e outras rodovias não pedagiadas nos Estados Unidos não gostam de ver vítimas fatais na rodovia mais do que seus congêneres que cobram pedágio, e muitos governos têm investido significativamente em equipamentos de alta tecnologia, tanto para melhorar a eficiência das suas rodovias como para poupar vidas.

Mas, diferentemente dos operadores de rodovias pedagiadas, que estão, basicamente, concentrados na lucratividade das operações, os governos, que são os responsáveis pela operação das rodovias sem pedágio, têm muitos senhores para servir. Comunidades influentes obtêm melhores condições de tráfego para si próprias às custas de outras. Em algumas administrações, apadrinhamento, mais do que mérito, determina quais funcionários serão admitidos. Acima de tudo, uma vez que os investimentos em rodovias saem do caixa geral, eles competem com assistência médica, educação e outras demandas públicas para novos gastos. Como observou Ezra Hauer, professor emérito do Departamento de Engenharia Civil da Universidade de Toronto e participante do Instituto de Engenharia de Transporte, em uma conferência internacional sobre segurança rodoviária, em Alberta em 1998: "Qualquer iniciativa em matéria de segurança na infra-estrutura de transporte pode ser custosa e os recursos terão que vir do Tesouro, sem imediata compensação por meio de tributos."

Por esta razão, os governos de todo o Canadá têm permitido que o nosso sistema de rodovias se deteriore muito, a despeito de insistentes avisos das organizações sensíveis à segurança. Não obstante governos e autoridades rodoviárias reconheçam que as modernizações necessárias da infra-estrutura de rodovias do país salvariam 250 vidas por ano, eles empacam diante da cifra de $17 bilhões necessários. Para uma operadora de rodovia pedagiada, rodovias sem segurança são péssimas para o negócio. Para um governo, rodovias com segurança constituem um luxo. A questão que se coloca para a sociedade é: podemos pagar pelo custo das vidas humanas perdidas em rodovias não pedagiadas?

* Lawrence Salomon é diretor executivo do Urban Renaissance Institute, e colunista do jornal National Post, em Toronto, Canadá, em cuja edição de 2/05/2000 foi publicado o artigo "How to cut highways’ human toll", ora traduzido e mencionado no boletim Tollways do IBTTA, USA, edição de maio/2000.

Read Fatos do Mes, the Brazilian newsletter in which this translation appeared. (Portuguese only)

Lawrence Solomon

July 11, 2000

Transport 2000 Ontario now distributes Urban Renaissance Institute’s "How the free road lobby led us astray" to supporters seeking information about transportation issues.

Visit Transport 2000

Lawrence Solomon/Don Bell
National Post
April 16, 2001

Re: Toronto’s Magic Bullet (Lawrence Solomon, March 27) and Truck Versus Rail (March 29).

There’s much hype and ignorance about trucking. Most trucking is local or short-haul, where rail can’t compete. Only 10% of trucking is long-haul, which is still faster than rail. Much of trucking is multiple calls – rail can’t do this. Many towns and most businesses don’t have rail facilities. Trucks give faster and superior service.

Railroad locomotives’ diesel fuel is much higher in sulphur content and other pollutants than diesel trucks! Cars cause more congestion and pollution than trucks. Winter/spring weather changes cause most road damage, potholes and heaving.

Mostly, businesses have no choice but to ship by truck. If truck road-tolls were introduced, any increase of costs would be passed on to business and consumers. Don Bell, Mississauga, Ont.

View Mr. Solomon’s editorial, http://urban.probeinternational.org/torontos-magic-bullet

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
August 18, 2007

Toronto, awash in debt and a $575-million deficit, is raising taxes and cutting basic city services. That harms rich and poor alike. Plus the middle class. Toronto should instead be raising revenue and cutting taxes, while retaining basic city services. That would help rich and poor alike. Plus the middle class.

The revenue needed to lower taxes and retain services should come from the sale or lease of unneeded or redundant city assets. In city hands, as in the hands of other levels of government, such assets tend to be undervalued, to underperform and to deteriorate. In private hands, such assets are put to more productive work, to the relief of the citizenry as a whole.

Chicago, a beautiful and booming city of accomplishments to which Toronto often aspires, shows the way. To finance the social and neighbourhood projects that Chicagoans want, Mayor Richard Daley decided to sell a 99-year lease to operate the Skyway toll bridge. City financial experts, using city valuations, told him it would bring in up to US$900-million. At auction, a private group, recognizing it could manage the Skyway more productively than the city had imagined, paid twice as much – US$1.83-billion. Chicagoans won a windfall that gave them exactly what they wanted: a freeze in property taxes for the third year in a row, a freeze on other fees and taxes, and a US$100-million boost in funding for all manner of local community services.

The Skyway was just the beginning. Chicago asked itself if it needed to be in the parking-garage business and decided no. It invited others to bid for the right to run the business and obtained 13 responses, including five from foreign nations. City bureaucrats no longer hire the car jockeys, making Chicagoans better off to the tune of half a billion dollars.

The next big windfall that Chicago is pursuing is Midway Airport, which local experts expect would fatten city coffers by a whopping US$3-billion. But the price it ultimately fetches, history shows, could soar above that, once it, too, is auctioned off to the bidder offering the best service, and the best price.

Chicago is pursuing an asset-sale strategy for the same reason that Toronto should: The city raided the kitty, leaving it with unfunded liabilities and projections for an irresponsibly large deficit next year, though only half as large as Toronto’s.

Next door, Indiana’s new Governor is pursuing the same asset-lease strategy, after a study he commissioned of the Indiana Toll Road revealed that it costs the state US34¢ for every US15¢ it collects. His bureaucrats valued the 157-mile road at US$1.8-billion. The auction revealed it was worth almost US$4-billion.

Taxpayers are getting more than the cash windfall, however: They’re getting better governance. The proud new holder of the 75-year Indiana toll-road lease is contractually required to meet government performance standards, to ensure road users get a smooth ride. So, too, is the Skyway leaseholder. In all likelihood, both leaseholders will exceed government standards – users of private roads get more value out of the infrastructure they run by attracting more customers by running better roads. Within three months of taking over the Skyway, the new operators had ramped up Skyway use – and Skyway revenue – by boosting rush-hour staff to shorten wait times for cash-paying customers, and by installing an electronic toll-collection system to eliminate wait times altogether for transponder-equipped customers. Unlike government-run roads, which are characterized by potholes, strewn rubble and gridlock, private-road operators need happy customers to reap their rewards.

The Chicago and Indiana approach is part of a trend occurring across the United States and around the world. Last year saw some US$150-billion in infrastructure asset deals, three times as much as the previous year. Toronto has too much at stake not to get in gear, too, and capture the same benefits for its citizens that obtain elsewhere. Chief among Toronto’s needs is an affordable city.

With each tax increase that Toronto has seen, more of its middle class has been pushed out of the city, as has more of its businesses. With the loss of these relatively affluent taxpayers, the cost of funding the city falls on a dwindling group of residents and businesses, who must now be taxed more heavily, which convinces more to leave. Through such vicious circles, cities go into slow decline, and sometimes never recover.

To arrest this decline, Toronto can start by cashing in the gift of highway assets – the Gardiner Expressway – that the provincial government gave it a decade ago. Under city management, the highway has been a deteriorating embarrassment – part of the $300-million backlog that the city faces in needed road repairs. Sell or lease the Gardiner –and other valuable, under-performing roads, such as the Don Valley Parkway and the Allen Expressway – and the city can dispose of its severe road-maintenance deficit, with billions left over to cut taxes, improve our neighbourhoods, and make Toronto affordable.

Next, the city should dispose of the Toronto Parking Authority, the largest municipal parking operator in North America. Taxes can drop again, public-transit use can rise and the environment can benefit – the parking authority’s mandate includes the subsidization of automobile use in the outlying areas, making it one of the city’s chief agents of sprawl.

Then there are the miserable city utilities – an ageing power system plagued by blackouts and high costs, a rusting water system that has one of Canada’s highest rates of water-main ruptures, an ever-more costly transit system that’s always in crisis and never reliable. The assets that are wasteful in city hands are, as a practical matter, without end – so many that it would take decades to dispose of them prudently.

With each successive sale, taxes could drop, city services could improve, the city environment could become cleaner, city residents would find city life more affordable, and city communities could strengthen. With each successive sale, the city breaks the vicious circle of decline and succeeds to thrive.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and author of Toronto Sprawls: A History (University of Toronto Press).
 

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Lawrence Solomon
The Next City
December 1, 1995

Privatizing residential street parking will keep the lilacs blooming, the larks singing and the pavement to a minimum

On my street in downtown Toronto, presumably out of a sense of fair play, the street parking used to alternate every month — one month the parking would be on the east side, the next the west, and so on. The result was bedlam once a month. People forgot to switch and ran out in their bedclothes to avoid getting ticketed. It was worse in winter — people caught colds. And sometimes the schedule changed because of holidays.

This problem of alternating parking is not limited to my district in Toronto, of course. This problem unites English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Canada. This problem thrives south of the border. To help out harried homeowners in New York City, an entrepreneur has been publishing something called "The New York City Alternate Side of the Street Parking Calendar" for more than a decade. The current edition lists 153 days that vehicles don’t have to switch sides.

Canada doesn’t have a similar planning aid. And in my area of Toronto, at least, this system of sharing the misery proved unbearable.

Then somebody got a better idea. Parking would be allowed only on one side, the east side. No more switching back and forth. It was a simple solution to the bedclothes problem. But people were still dissatisfied: Parking was still unpredictable — you couldn’t always count on a nearby parking spot. In fact, you couldn’t always count on a spot being available anywhere.

There was a shortage of parking spots, and to get one you had to wait in line, sometimes for six months. So, the city started rationing the use of street parking. Only one spot per household — if you had a nice, large extended family and needed two cars, a second spot cost six times as much as the first — about the same cost as renting parking privately. This nudged people to move to houses with garages, or to install one, or to build a parking pad on their front lawns.

But that form of rationing still wasn’t enough. So the commissars at city hall issued a new decree — anyone with a garage or with parking on his lot was no longer entitled to inexpensive parking on the city street. Now people with two cars had an extra incentive to build two-car garages, or two-car parking pads, or to move to the suburbs.

Due to conundrums like these, people on the west side of the street decided to convert their front lawns to parking pads. The city gave approval readily, because that side wasn’t used for parking any more, and no one objected on parking grounds. And people on the east side, who didn’t have parking pads, generally liked the trend, since every new pad meant less competition for spots on the east side of the street.

Ah, but people will never leave well enough alone. The saga continues. Now people on the east side want to put in parking pads, and the street is up in arms. When people park on their front yards, it doesn’t free up parking on the street because the driveway is about as wide as the length of a car. So, while the front yard parker gains, his neighbors don’t. In fact, they lose, because they have a bit less flexibility — they now have a smaller pool of parking spots to choose from. As each new request for a parking pad appears, it creates not only opposition, but an incentive for others to stop fighting and join the trend. If nothing is done to stop this trend, most people on both sides will be parking on their front yards. We will have cleared cars from the parking lane on the street, and moved them onto front yards. Put another way, we’ll be seeing more concrete, less lawn and fewer gardens.

The planners have decided to stop this by a crude form of democracy. The dozen or so neighbors just north and just south of any proposed new parking pad get to vote — if 25 per cent turn thumbs down, no pad. But no matter which way the vote goes, we have unhappy parkers.

There’s got to be a better way to do all this and there is. Here’s my planning solution for this and other rationing problems. Like most of my solutions, my approach is pre-Keynesian and very traditional: No eggs get broken. My plan is voluntary, it involves privatizing a commonly held resource, and it involves recognizing property rights and creating competition to minimize the need for regulation.

Of course, the status quo — the chaotic process that I’ve just described that is creating all these parking pads — also involves privatizing a societal resource. But the status quo privatizes without compensation for society. When society okays a parking pad for a homeowner, the street in front of his pad is no longer available to everyone for parking, but only to the homeowner and his visitors for access. Although people don’t think of this as a form of privatization, that little bit of street has been privatized as surely as if Mike Harris had done it through legislation. All the neighbors lose; the one homeowner gains. And his gain can be substantial. In my neighborhood, in fact, because parking is scarce, the permit alone for a pad can be worth $10,000. People often apply for a permit for a pad just before they move, in order to fetch a higher selling price.

This method of allocation of resources is ambiguous and perverse — why should the individual homeowner gain at the community’s expense? This method is also environmentally harmful — that parking pad not only removes green space, its asphalt helps heat up the city, which increases the air conditioning load and may exacerbate global warming. Another effect of removing street parking: Traffic speeds increase. Street parking has a well-known traffic calming effect. Without street parking, the neighborhood streets become thoroughfares for commuters looking for shortcuts around congested main streets.

Instead of this perverse form of privatization, where people have ambiguous rights, I propose we unambiguously privatize the street parking, by selling outright the street parking space outside homes outright to homeowners. The parking spots on the street in front of your home should be yours if you want them. Others, whether pedestrians or vehicles, would retain an easement over the street parking spots. They could cross them freely, but they wouldn’t be able to occupy those spaces without your permission any more than they can park in your driveway without your permission.

Just think how this would revolutionize parking. Imagine that you’re a homeowner, with a 25-foot lot, wide enough for one small car and one large car — and that you could buy the strip of road in front of your house for fair market value, say, $1,000 a linear foot. If you had two cars, you might buy all 25 feet. If you had one small car, you might buy 10 feet, and someone else in the neighborhood, perhaps someone across the street with a larger car, might buy the other 15 feet. Now you would both have secure parking, and no incentive to pave over your front yard. Suddenly, that problem is solved. The city would no longer be destroying our green spaces.

The city would have been paid market value for the piece of street it just sold, so now there’s money in city coffers. Taxpayers aren’t being ripped off, and you would have an incentive to buy a smaller car — especially once it sinks in that every extra foot tacked onto your car cost you an extra $1,000.

But the benefits to society are just beginning. Most likely, you don’t need that spot 24-hours a day and, if you wish, you can make it available to others when you’re not using it, the same way people with unused garages rent them out to people in their neighborhood. You can do this informally — by working out an arrangement with a neighbor — or you can install your very own, personal parking meter, available for use by others during whatever hours you yourself specify, at whatever price you yourself wish to charge. This would also eliminate another problem created by rationing — there’s no system in place for temporary users, such as guests or tradesmen, in neighborhoods with tight parking. My neighbors down the street who are renovating their house were surprised to learn that the city refuses to issue temporary daytime parking permits for the contractors, even though the street has plenty of daytime parking. As a result, one contractor bidding for the job added more than $2,000 to his quote — a great way to make the city more affordable. The contractor who got the job — a different contractor — is routinely ticketed for illegal parking, but thanks to connections at city hall, just as routinely has the tickets torn up — a great way to promote clean government.

Petty corruption aside, privatizing street parking in the way I suggest would ensure that affordable parking was always available for visitors — in economic terms, this resource called street parking would now be allocated efficiently.

People wouldn’t be circling the block waiting for spots to open, or parking illegally too near street corners, or too near the front of other’s driveways. They would be saving themselves time because parking would always be available, and they would be saving society pollution from their exhaust.

Now let’s look at another car problem that neighborhoods face: unwanted traffic from drivers taking shortcuts through neighborhoods. To foil these people, planners have turned neighborhoods into mazes of one-way and wrong-way streets. These mazes are effective at keeping out through traffic, but they also confuse residents and their visitors. I defy anyone who wants to visit me at my home before 9 a.m. any weekday to do so without taking an illegal turn — there is a way, but it took me years to discover it.

For a while, a colleague of mine who lives two blocks away in the same neighborhood often picked me up mornings on the way to regulatory hearings we were attending. It took this lawyer weeks to figure out how to do it legally, but it’s so awkward that he prefers the illegal turn. Another colleague, who has just learned that her neighborhood’s streets are going to be remapped, swears the proposed plan is so confusing that there is no way she will be able to reach her house by car legally.

Neighborhood mazes, of course, are not always enough. So streets get barricaded to add to the misery of street users, and speed bumps get installed to slow down traffic. The upshot of this form of planning is that grown-ups, at any time of day or night, can be seen driving around in circles, and stopping and starting at speed bumps. Merchants on the main streets bordering the neighborhoods also suffer, because their customers often lose easy access to the neighborhood store.

And why?

The main things neighborhoods dislike about drive-through traffic are the noise and the hazard. These drivers take shortcuts because they’re frustrated and in a hurry, and they often exceed the neighborhood speed limit. Now, has anyone asked why legions of drivers traveling from A to B on a main artery would prefer to detour through residential neighborhoods to get to their destination?

They don’t do it for the scenery. They do it out of frustration with clogged arterial roads, out of frustration with a road system that creates bumper-to-bumper traffic. They do it because of incompetent rush-hour traffic management. Planners have failed abjectly here — all we’ve had are feeble efforts such as car pooling, or destructive ones such as freeways or the encouragement of businesses to move away from congested areas. For the most part, planners use congestion to ration the use of the roads.

Yet traffic problems would vanish if we stopped pricing the use of our roads at zero. Charge people for the use of roads — all roads — and watch reason enter this irrational world. The British have taken the first step on this journey — they are in the process of converting all highways to toll roads that will be charging drivers by time of day and by distance traveled. Their next step — which politicians openly say will not be introduced until after the next election — involves congestion charges for the City of London. But in Canada, we haven’t even begun to think of taking these self-evident and necessary steps, despite the enormous benefits that would flow from them.

With time-of-day pricing, fewer cars would be traveling at peak times, more at off-peak. Car pooling would pick up. Public transit’s market share would increase. Detours through neighborhoods won’t be routinely taken to bypass congested traffic because congested traffic would become a thing of the past.