Ontario’s Tories And NDP Are Driving The Wrong Way On A Congested Highway In Their Opposition To High-Occupancy Toll Lanes

A Brief Commentary by Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

When the Ontario government set up high-occupancy vehicle lanes – HOVs for short – to ease highway congestion around Greater Toronto Area during last summer’s Pan American Games, former Toronto mayor and city councillor Rob Ford boldly confessed that he violated the rules for using them.

HOT lanes for reducing highway congestion opeating in the Washington, D.C. area.

“These HOV lanes are a complete disaster,” said Ford of the province’s decision to dedicate one lane on some of the multi-lane, 400-series highways around the GTA to vehicles with at least three people in them. Fort admitted using them while driving alone and whenever he couldn’t spot “cops over (his) shoulder” because they were less congested and as he put it; “I have to get to where I have to go.”

One would expect that kind of brazen opposition to the concept of lanes dedicated to vehicles which (by virtue of carrying more than one person) place a lighter carbon footprint on the planet from a character like Rob Ford or from another guy last summer who apparently buckled manicans on his car seats in an attempt to get away with using them.

But now that the province’s Liberal government wants to launch a pilot project along an Oakville/Burlington stretch of the QEW this coming year which will involves charging a toll to anyone driving alone and who still wants to do what Ford did and use an HOV lane, it is disappointing to see both the Conservatives and NDP oppose the idea on the grounds that all it does is represent another form of taxation.

I can understand why the provincial Conservatives would take such a myopic view of this pilot because both they and their federal cousins have a long record of viewing virtually any new program or service – even ones clearly benefitting  the common good – as one more underhanded way of stealing money from peoples’ pockets.

The NDP, on the other hand, might be expected to put the brakes on the knee-jerk; ‘It’s just another tax’ line when we are talking about a toll program that has worked in other jurisdictions in North America to reduce car and truck congestion on highways, along with the attendant air pollution, and encourage more people to carpool or use public transit.

There are certainly plenty of other issues like health care and the multi-billion-dollar mismanagement of energy generation and transmission in Ontario to go after Kathleen Wynne’s government for, but this long-overdue idea of charging a fee on single-occupancy vehicles for using one or more lanes on our more traffic-choked highways in the province is not one of them.

Indeed, this is an idea that those who are in Paris negotiating an international agreement to address climate change may very well like.

To view a story from USA Today on HOVs or HOT lanes clicking on – http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/04/controversial-hot-lanes-spread-nationally/1747319/ .

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