Has Toronto met its L.A. moment?

The California city — an emblem of sprawl and traffic — took bold steps toward reforming its reputation in 2006.

That’s when the realization hit “that we were crossing a threshold in terms of traffic congestion, and we knew that we were going to grow significantly over the next 25 years. Our traffic was almost literally crystallizing,” says Denny Zane, who founded a transit advocacy group called Move LA .

It mobilized a coalition of business, labour and civic leaders. They laid out this proposition, said Zane: “If we were not going to invest in new transit capacity then, given the congestion now and the growth, we were going to be in a world of hurt.”

Around the same time, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made transit a key plank in his campaign.

By the time Los Angeles County voters were faced with a 2008 referendum for a 30-year, 0.5-per cent regional sales tax, they were sufficiently convinced to pass it with the required two-thirds majority. The key to acceptance was dedicated funding: the tax will pour $40 billion into transportation projects, including LRT and subway.

If the first part of the L.A. story sounds familiar, it might be because Toronto’s traffic problem has actually surpassed that of Los Angeles, and on Monday the Toronto Region Board of Trade suggested that a sales tax, gas tax, high-occupancy-vehicle toll lanes and a commercial parking levy could be part of the solution, estimated to cost $2 billion annually.

There is no Villaraigosa fronting the Toronto fight for transit dollars. But a coalition of academics, community groups such as CivicAction, and the board of trade has been united in support of the 25-year, $50 billion Metrolinx transportation plan called the Big Move .

Advocates are adamant that if Toronto residents are to pay up, government has to break from standard practice and earmark those dollars for transit, the way Los Angeles did. Committing taxes to a particular project or fund is unusual here, says University of Toronto city studies professor Zack Taylor.

“Nobody wants to pay substantial new taxes that just disappear into the common pot. This is why they hated the vehicle registration tax in Toronto. They got a bill for $60 on their birthday and it just disappeared into the city’s operating budget. It just felt like it was punitive without any obvious result,” he said.

Americans have shown they’ll vote for a sales tax increase if it comes with a promise to get traffic moving. But in Toronto, transit taxes have been positioned as something that will be inflicted on us by the province, Taylor said.

‘We are only reaching that moment of mass public engagement right now. It would have been nice to have a much longer run of this sort of public discussion and softening of the ground, rather than having this technical discussion happening at a high level,” he said.

Grassroots support has been key in implementing many transit revenue tools elsewhere, as has charismatic leadership such as that of Villaraigosa, New York’s Michael Bloomberg or Ken Livingston in London, says Metrolinx vice-president John Howe.

But it doesn’t have to be political leadership, he said. Academics, for example, are often credible with the public, he said.

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Many jurisdictions use several funding tools to support transit, and not all are created equal. Some have behavioural impacts, such as London’s congestion tax, which discourages many drivers from taking personal vehicles into the city. Others, such as charging single-occupant cars a toll to use HOV lanes, have the benefit of providing choice.

Paris’s payroll tax — based on the size of the workforce and the proximity to transit — presumes businesses benefit from good transportation access.

“All other jurisdictions have a reliance on these dedicated tools but also a direct reliance on government funding,” Howe said.

There have been hundreds of transit-oriented referendums in the U.S., such as the winning propositions in places like Los Angeles and Seattle. They don’t always win on the first try, he said.

Seattle advocates tried and failed in 1995 to gain support for a sales tax dedicated to transit expansion. So they scaled back the original $6.7 billion plan to $4 billion and promised a shorter delivery schedule. The following year, the scaled-down version passed.

Although Metrolinx’s plan also calls for non-transit projects, such as cycling, pedestrian and road improvements, those aspects receive scant attention in the Toronto region discussions.

“I’m struck by the preoccupation (in Toronto) with investment in transit instead of developing a transportation system that sits together with the roads and transit,” said Ken Cameron, adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University and a planning consultant in Vancouver.

A parking tax and a 17-cent/litre gas tax are among the funding methods for Vancouver’s transportation authority, TransLink, which manages roads as well as transit.

“The thing that made the funding formula for TransLink somewhat acceptable was that the money wasn’t simply going to transit. It’s going to road infrastructure, which is used by the buses as well,” he said.

How other cities pay for transit

Vancouver: 17 cents/litre gas tax on top of provincial fuel tax; 21% parking sales tax to users of commercial lots

Montreal: 3 cents/litre gas tax; $30 of the Quebec vehicle registration fee, plus an extra $45 charged for the Island of Montreal

Chicago: 1.25% sales tax in Cook County and .75% in surrounding counties; tolls ranging from 40 cents to $1 for cars and $1 to $4 per day for trucks

New York: .25% sales tax; 17% corporate tax; mortgage tax of 30 cents on every $100 of the mortgage; bridge and tunnel tolls; payroll mobility tax

Seattle: .4% sales tax; .3% vehicle excise tax

London: Congestion charge of 10 pounds for 24 hours to bring a car into the central district

Paris: Employer payroll tax based on the size of the employer's payroll. Small employers are exempt. Those in central Paris with the most transit access pay more than the suburbs. There may also be exceptions for priority neighbourhoods.

Source: Metrolinx

Correction - March 20, 2013: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled the given name of Zack Taylor.

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