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They’re not a government body (despite the name) but they’re serious people with economic chops, including former Privy Council clerk Mel Cappe, ex-TD economist and government adviser Don Drummond and Western University professor Paul Boothe. We can have all the transit and bike lanes we want, their new report says, but as long as the only direct cost for joining the slow traffic on an overcrowded road is time, that’s the choice most people will continue to make.

In general, charging a bit of money to use the country’s busiest roads at the busiest times has to be part of the solution, the economists say, no matter how much people hate it. Highways cost (a lot, vastly more than gas and similar taxes bring in) and we can only fit so many of them into the limited land we have.

Widespread tolls would look different in different Canadian cities, depending on how they’re laid out and where their traffic pinches are. In Vancouver and Montreal, it’s bridges into and out of downtown. In more spread-out cities like Toronto and Calgary, it’s major expressways.

In Ottawa, it’s particularly Highway 417.

The Ecofiscal Commission recommends experiments to see what works best, starting with adding tolls to high-occupancy vehicle lanes so drivers in uncrowded vehicles can buy their way in if they need to — turning HOV lanes into HOT, or high-occupancy toll, lanes. That doesn’t usually mean building new roads, just dividing the ones we have into first- and second-class.