Could a gas tax help fix Toronto transit? Remember, doing nothing will cost more

I took a crowded streetcar and a jam-packed subway to the University of Toronto last week to watch as Anne Golden and Paul Bedford explained their advisory panel’s recommendations on how to fund the transit improvements the Greater Toronto Area desperately needs.

I won’t lie. I was cynical. The thing about transit reports is that they’re not transit. It’s hard to ride them to work.

But I did come away impressed with the transit advisory panel’s work. Even though their report follows closely on a comprehensive and well-reasoned Metrolinx report on the same subject from earlier this year, there are enough new ideas here to justify it as a worthwhile exercise.

The nuts-and-bolts of the recommendations call for either a five- or ten-cent hike to the Ontario gas tax, which has been frozen since it was implemented in 1992. The five-cent gas tax option would also come with a half-point increase to the HST, where the ten-cent option leaves the HST untouched.

Both options include a variety of other revenue-raising measures: Debt-financing, a small increase to corporate taxes, the redirection of existing revenue from HST collected at gas pumps, and some revenue captured from increased property values located near new transit lines.

In all cases, the new tax money would go into a separate trust, making it challenging for future governments to raid transit money to fund other programs. And the spending model is set up so that GTA residents alone would pay for GTA transit — there’s no plan for residents in Timmins to subsidize the Toronto downtown elite and their fancy train rides to their Pilates classes.

The gas tax is the main revenue driver. It’s not going to be popular. But it is backed by some pretty straightforward math. And who doesn’t love math?

If the GTA doesn’t make critical investments in transit, your commute will get a lot longer. That increase in commute times is projected to cost the average household an extra $700-per-year in fuel costs. The ten-cent gas tax increase, on the other hand, will cost the average household $260 annually — and it’ll lead to investments that keep commute times from getting worse.

In other words, doing nothing will cost more.

This is a hard reality to accept, but Golden and the panel are adamant that there’s no genie in a bottle ready to grant our transit wishes.

“The money has to come from somewhere,” Golden explained. “This cannot be done for free.”

But it needs to be done. The results of more prolonged transit debates will hurt the region both economically and socially. There’s no benefit to more delay.

Having been shown the way, all that remains is for government to find the will.