Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 19, 2003
Canada’s mayors are thinking big transportation thoughts this week, full of hope that Next-Prime Minster Paul Martin will finance a new era of public transit lines, roadways, trains and other showcase projects.
While they’re waiting, they might turn their mind to long-neglected little improvements. Though unsuited to ribbon-cutting ceremonies, taken together they would dwarf the benefit of any new infusions of cash they’re likely to get.
Here are four small ways to make a city’s neighbourhood roads work better, all of them cost-effective, all of them betterments to the quality of life, none of them needing money from away.
Fire hydrants. On-street parking, typically the biggest neighbourhood grievance, is often in short supply, particularly where land is valuable. Cities sometimes respond by razing houses to create parking lots, sometimes by requiring new developments to oversupply parking. City governments would do better to move fire hydrants that have no business being where they are.
Because cars are prohibited from parking on either side of fire hydrants (three metres in Toronto or Regina, five metres in Montreal or Victoria), a fire hydrant placed in the middle of a block often removes two or more parking spaces from public use. When parking shortages exist, such hydrants should be moved near street corners (where parking is in any case prohibited), near driveway entrances, across the street (when parking is prohibited there), or to “choke points” and other traffic calming devices that now protrude from curbs. While we’re at it, let’s also adopt a more sensible prohibition: Australian cities such as Adelaide allow parking to within one metre of a fire hydrant – plenty of room for the burliest of firefighters to get through.
Two-way neighbourhood streets. To improve traffic flow, cities converted many two-way streets to one-way streets, and sometimes banned parking on one side. Through-traffic then used neighbourhood roads more intensively, and at higher speeds. When neighbourhoods objected, cities responded by adding speed bumps, changing street directions to turn neighbourhoods into mazes and otherwise punishing all users of the local roads. It punished locals in other ways, too – speed bumps increase gasoline emissions and impede emergency vehicles. Much better to restore two-way streets where feasible, increasing the convenience of local roads for local residents, or to allow parking on both sides of streets. Either measure would slow driving speeds – they provide “choke points” in spades – while providing great amenity.
Expand rights to residential street parking. Households that include a disabled person are often entitled to a reserved spot on the street in front of their house. This is sensible: Although the disability can be mild and the car rarely used by the household’s disabled occupant, a dedicated parking spot aids all house occupants.
But those without disability may be no less worthy, and have no less need. Take the elderly, who might not pass as disabled but are nevertheless frail or at risk of falling on slippery wintry sidewalks. Why should an arbitrary city bylaw require them to walk considerable distance from car to home? Or a parent with young children, one of them asleep, returning home with the week’s groceries. The impossibility of comfortably negotiating such everyday circumstances coerces people into leaving their city homes for less dense locales. Elder- and family-friendly on-street parking bylaws would give city residents more choices. Dedicating most or all street parking to local residents and their visitors would extend the choice to all and more efficiently use scarce road space to boot.
Currently, when a disabled resident with a dedicated parking space is away for the day, or for extended periods of time for business or leisure, the parking spot can stay idle, useful to no one. Other street parking spots, whose access is generally governed crudely by restrictions that apply at certain times of the day or the year, also operate inefficiently: Tradesmen avoid servicing residents at those times, to avoid parking tickets, or they keep an eye out for the parking police if they do. Guests might also schedule their visits to avoid parking prohibitions.
But if residents controlled their own street parking spots, they’d soon learn to manage them well. Some would share them with neighbours and others who had extraordinary parking needs, much as neighbours lend each other lawn mowers. Others might choose to rent their spots out during hours they wouldn’t otherwise be needed – earlier this year in London, when a new toll system for vehicles entering the downtown core created a demand for parking just outside the core, an Internet site soon materialized to match up those with parking spots to those without.
Give businesses access to dedicated parking, too. Businesses should likewise be able to control parking spots outside their establishments. Some – say daytime businesses such as dry cleaners – may reserve them for their customers during business hours and then later make them available to evening businesses – say restaurants. Businesses that want to provide their customers with additional dedicated parking during peak hours would also be able to reserve parking spaces with their residential neighbours around the block, who might not need the parking space while they’re at work.
Whether businesses or residents controlled street parking, the city treasury would justly benefit: Dedicated parking spots would warrant much higher parking permit fees, helping to fund the social services and other needs that cities provide.
An urban economy is full of niches that centralized road or parking authorities – political bodies that seek to maximize neither revenues nor individual benefits – can’t possibly manage efficiently. Turn over some responsibility to those best able to capitalize on them – the thousands of little businesses and residents on the ground in the community – and big benefits will follow. For more benefits still, attend to the fire hydrants and other relics of some long-gone bureaucracy that survive unquestioned to silently stifle the modern economy.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute, a division of Energy Probe Research Foundation. www.urban.probeinternational.org, E-mail: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.
The Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce position on paid parental leave is that if society demands it then it should be funded by the taxpayer. It makes no sense simply to impose another levy on employers and the Chamber is pleased that Labour is committed to funding parental leave from general tax. We hope that in the context of the coalition this line can be held.
We also note that Labour has promised no increases in company tax on the pledge card, which is Helen Clark’s and the Labour Party’s commitment to the electorate. This means that there will need to be a reallocation of tax revenue to cover parental leave not an increase in taxes or either the corporate or personal sector.
The other issue which employers are struggling with at the moment is ACC. Labour has pledged to renationalise ACC. From a commercial perspective this does not make sense. The interesting issue with ACC is that under present settings there appear to be no apparent beneficiaries from a renationalisation from ACC. Employers have every prospect of suffering increased levies, the insurance companies will lose, there will be additional costs to be covered by government and importantly the linkage between safety at work and the level of levies paid will be diluted. When ACC was privatised Labour made the claim that their rates were low because the insurance companies were taking a loss leading position and deliberately putting rates below where they should be. We now hear claims that under a renationalised ACC scheme Labour indicates we will pay no more than we are currently paying. They can’t have it both ways.
The Employers’ Chamber firmly believes that ACC should remain in the private sector for all of the right reasons and we are yet to be convinced that anything other than political ideology is driving the renationlisation of ACC. If the privatisation of ACC is demonstrated over time not to work then why would we agree to considering the renationalisation of Accident Compensation. What we can’t understand is if its not broken now why try to fix it?
Peter Townsend
Chief Executive
Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 15, 2003
Wednesday, Nov. 5: “We’ve been impressed by your recent columns on auto insurance in the Post,” the insurance industry’s public affairs rep tells me over the phone. “Would you be willing to go to Fredericton next week and offer your views at a luncheon?” Thus began my adventure into the zany workings of lawmaking in New Brunswick.
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I replied as I always do when given a compliment and offered a speaking engagement. I thanked her for the former and quoted my fee for the latter. She accepted. I then sought to make my trip to New Brunswick more useful to Consumer Policy Institute, a non-profit group I head, by trying to make a difference at government hearings that were about to conclude. |
My columns on automobile insurance systems around the world, and which ones best deliver safety and value for consumers, had started a month earlier. I knew New Brunswick’s debate would have national significance. I asked the rep to try to arrange a long shot: a last-minute appearance before the committee, if necessary by ceding an insurance industry time slot to me.
She paused. “You wouldn’t be allowed to make your points,” she cautioned. “The mandate of the committee is limited to choosing between different forms of public insurance.” I requested that she try.
Monday, Nov. 10: Emelie Hubert, the researcher for New Brunswick’s select committee on public automobile insurance, phones me to discuss a possible appearance. “Will you have anything fresh to say,” she asks, explaining that she is exasperated by the tiresome presentations that the committee has had to endure from insurance industry representatives. I assure her that my presentation will be unlike anything the committee had heard. She schedules me to appear at 5 p.m. Wednesday, advises me on the weather, and suggests I bring walking shoes to take advantage of the city’s trails. Emelie (by now we are on a first-name basis) asks no other question about my presentation.
Wednesday, Nov. 12, 11 a.m.: I introduce myself to Emelie in the lobby of the Sheraton Fredericton, the site of both the luncheon and the hearings. She updates me on the many preposterous “scare-mongering” arguments that numerous presenters have made against a government takeover of the auto insurance industry. After several minutes of describing these people to me as jerks, it dawns on me for the first time that Emelie must think I am, like her, committed to public automobile insurance. Although she is the key staffer and the author of the committee’s final report, she somehow had missed my columns, which unambiguously opposed public auto insurance. I turn to her and set her straight. Emelie’s face blanches. I assure her that I will limit my remarks to public auto insurance and hand her an advance copy of my presentation, to let her see for herself. It describes me, my organization and the insurance industry’s role in financing my trip to New Brunswick.
1:30 p.m.: By now, I have given my luncheon address, followed by a flurry of media interviews, most of them with New Brunswick newspapers, radio and TV stations. The interviews occur outside the luncheon ballroom, in the hall that also serves an adjacent ballroom hosting the hearings. The reporters delve into why I believe public auto insurance increases the fatality rate and harms consumers. The CBC-TV reporter, who arrives late, is an exception. She cares only about scandal – the expense to which the insurance industry went to fly me to Fredericton; the insurance industry’s self-interest in bringing a critic of public auto insurance. She then asks me to walk up to several people standing in the hall 15 feet or so away, and engage them in conversation. I ask her why. She explains that she wants to end the interview with film footage of me “with my colleagues in the insurance industry.” I decline her invitation – the people she was pointing to were perfect strangers to me. Several minutes later her cameraman approaches me sheepishly, and asks me to please co-operate by staging the conversation. It won’t take long, he indicates. I decline again.
2 p.m.: Emelie confronts me, furious. “You deceived me,” she declares. Perplexed, I ask how. I discover that she had expected me to identify myself as an opponent of public auto insurance in asking to appear at the hearing. “But we’re honourable,” she states. “We’ll let you speak anyway.”
3 p.m.: After returning from a CBC-radio studio interview, a reporter at the Sheraton tells me that the committee’s chair, Elizabeth Weir, may bar me from appearing. In later CBC news reports, I will discover that she criticized me for misleading her committee by not volunteering that insurers had paid my way, even though the application form for presenters asks nothing about funding, and neither did Emelie.
5:30 p.m.: It is finally time for me to appear. The genial deputy chair, who had been running the afternoon’s proceedings, gives way to Ms. Weir, who returns to the hearing room to take custody of me. She is less genial. Minutes earlier, she had ordered the sole cameraman remaining in the hearing – a freelancer working for the insurance industry – to leave. He had filmed that day’s previous presentations, including MADD, the NDP and the New Brunswick Law Society. She would not allow a visual or audio record of what would follow.
All other presenters had been allowed to make their comments uninterrupted, following which they had all been questioned by committee members. Ms. Weir interrupted me almost from the start, and repeatedly, on the pretext that my analysis did not have New Brunswick data. When I finished my presentation, I invited questions. From the expression on Ms. Weir’s face, I knew none would be forthcoming. She quickly panned the committee members to her left, then her right. “No questions,” she smiled. “The meeting is adjourned.”
This had been my first direct taste of New Brunswick-style democracy. The freelance cameraman – a veteran BBC and CBC Newsworld International journalist who had covered Third World wars, natural disasters, corrupt administrators and tin-pot dictators, took New Brunswick in his stride. As he had done in other places, at other times, when ordered by local authorities to stop filming, he slowly gathered his equipment and packed it away, all the while letting the camera roll.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation. E-mail: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com; Postscript to a series.
Saturday, November 15, 2003, National Post
Excerpted from Lawrence Solomon’s Nov. 12 testimony to New Brunswick’s Select Committee on Public Automobile Insurance (The Weir Committee).
When other jurisdictions moved to public insurance, or away from systems that stress full accountability, the death rate immediately went up, typically between 5% and 10%. In Quebec under a no-fault system, according to a University of Toronto study, it climbed by almost 10% within a decade. In B.C., which has a tort system but not a system to actuarially determine price, an extra 140 people a year die, according to an Insurance Bureau of Canada study. Similar findings have been found for various U.S. jurisdictions and an Australian jurisdiction, and in New Zealand, which saw a 16% increase in fatalities after its switch to public insurance in 1972.
If New Brunswick moves toward a public system, the legislature should be careful to minimize the loss of life that will almost surely accompany this move. I believe a determined province could do much better than other jurisdictions have done but courage and integrity would be required. To avoid needless loss of life, politicians would need to stand up to seniors and youths – the same groups that now complain that private insurers are discriminating against them.
This is the challenge in a public insurance system: In a system that decides rates politically, it takes great courage for politicians to tell their constituents that they are risky drivers. But if they don’t level with their constituents, innocents will die.
The record to date is not good. Politicians are human, and they succumb to special interest groups. No public insurance system I’m aware of has performed as well as private tort systems that are faithful to actuarially based premiums.
Let me provide some statistics from the OECD, which compares death rates among various countries. The English-speaking nations, it is widely accepted, tend to outperform the rest of the world because the British system of torts and strict liability, and market-determined pricing. The British system is one which Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand inherited. These legal and economic traditions have served us well.
The U.K., which has remained truest to insurance principles, has an especially low death rate. The U.K. doesn’t have an equivalent to the Facility Association here in New Brunswick, which keeps poor drivers on the road at the expense of good drivers. In the U.K., drivers are most accountable because they face premiums that reflect the true costs that they foist on society.
Canada and the U.S., which have some jurisdictions that have strayed far from the strict accountability we see in the U.K., do well but less so. The worst of the English common-law nations is New Zealand, which abandoned accountability for a fully public system.
I suggest that any public system that New Brunswick adopts build in iron-clad mechanisms to minimize the loss of accountability in a move to public insurance. For example, if the death rate increases, the minister in charge and the responsible deputy ministers should face penalties: perhaps they should be forced to resign, or have significant pay cuts. To show that New Brunswick is serious about minimizing the loss of life that typically accompanies public insurance, these penalties should be legislated, and be a litmus test of responsible government.
More is needed, too. Generally, when governments operate businesses, they are held to a lower standard than the private sector. For example, it is much easier to prosecute a CEO whose reckless policies lead to loss of life than a government minister, or government employees, who can claim to be merely following government policy. New Brunswick shouldn’t tolerate this double standard, particularly when we are dealing with public safety. I recommend that any public system of auto insurance hold government workers, and elected officials, to the same standard that would apply to a counterpart in the private sector. By making the operators of a public system fully liable for policies that lead to loss of life, including criminal liability should it come to that, we are less likely to see politicians succumb to pressure from the electorate. If the elected officials and the bureaucracy do not become fully liable, then I fear that nothing will prevent carnage on New Brunswick’s roads.
Related articles:
Killing the industry that saves lives
Private insurance saves lives
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Letter to the Editor
National Post, December 8, 2003
Re: Kangaroo Court, Nov. 15.
As New Brunswick attempts to push through public auto insurance, it is no doubt touting the schemes in other provinces as being successful. Nothing could be further from the truth in Manitoba. Below is a list of the treatment taxpayers can expect:
They also insisted on keeping custody of the car while we were in arbitration, but it was treated so badly that it looked like a wreck by the time any independent person could view it. Parts were stolen, the new paint was all chipped, and the new interior was all torn and scratched.
This is the reality of public insurance schemes. They are inefficient and, like all bureaucracies, they operate for their own interests instead of the people they are supposed to serve.
Ron Lyons, Winnipeg
National Post, November 24, 2003
Assuming the details of Lawrence Solomon‘s treatment by the Weir Committee are completely accurate, the committee’s behaviour was not only undemocratic but unwise. Had the committee been more interested in thoughtfully examining the validity of Mr. Solomon’s arguments instead of nursing feelings of perceived deception, an intelligent discussion could have made a useful contribution to the automobile insurance debate.
Mr. Solomon’s basic argument appears to have been that public auto insurance necessarily means unaccountability; unaccountability by drivers and unaccountability by government.
These unaccountable high-risk drivers then generate more than their share of highway “carnage” because under a public system insurance rates are not “actuarially based.”
Here are some questions the committee should have asked but did not:
1. Are there not two issues here: the pros and cons of a public system and the pros and cons of age-based actuarial premiums?
2. In your research, Mr. Solomon, were you unable to find even a single example of a public auto system that met at least some of your “accountability” requirements?
3. If you could find no example whatsoever of an accountable public system, is it impossible to imagine one that could effectively remove high-risk drivers from the roads and yet at the same time incorporates the large-scale efficiencies inherent in a public system?
4. If the principal goal is to remove high-risk drivers from the highways is an age-based actuarial system the most effective means?
Shame on the committee for apparently not only treating Mr. Solomon shabbily but for letting his arguments go unquestioned.
He won the day by default!
Donald S. Dunbar, Hillside Boularderie, N.S.
Mark Roberts
CFXY-FM Radio (Fredericton)
November 13, 2003
[Excerpt] New Brunswick: If New Brunswick adopts a public insurance system, it will be a disaster. That from a leading consumer and environmental advocate Larry Solomon. He has studied auto insurance systems across Canada and the world and believes that public auto insurance results in higher deaths and accident rates.
CKHJ-FM Radio (Fredericton) by Leigh Watson
[Excerpt] New Brunswick: If New Brunswick adopts a public insurance system, it will be a disaster according to a leading consumer and environmental advocate. Larry Solomon has studied auto insurance systems across Canada and internationally and believes that public auto insurance results in higher deaths and accident rates.
These news reports are based on interest generated by Lawrence Solomon’s presentation to New Brunswick’s Select Committee on Public Automobile Insurance (The Weir Committee) on November 12, 2003. To read his original presentation, please see:
Urban Renaissance Institute 