When the Union-Pearson Express goes into service next year, Toronto’s newest train will be pushing uphill against brutal economics. The ticket price — which hasn’t yet been announced but is expected to be more than $15 one way — must compete against cab fares and parking fees. If you’re a business person travelling alone and staying downtown, the math makes sense. If you’re on holiday with a family of four, not so much.

Strangely, Metrolinx last week revealed that the case for riding the UP Express just became even more daunting due to a $2 ticket surcharge that will flow to the Greater Toronto Airports Authority for lost parking revenue.

The decision is perverse: with a creaky business case, the $456-million UP Express doesn’t need to be encumbered by disincentives and operating shortfalls. More broadly, the parties to this silly deal seem to have forgotten the environmental case for a service meant to take cars off the highways and ease gridlock.

But the surcharge agreement reveals a more worrisome blind spot in the way Queen’s Park has been thinking about its massive investments in transit.

Public spending on such infrastructure is a necessary step in the battle against congestion and emissions, yet it is far from sufficient. New transit lines need to be convenient and cost-effective relative to other options. But despite years of warnings by transportation economists, Queen’s Park has no overarching financial strategy to encourage drivers to shift to transit as a more affordable alternative — a gaping policy void that the UP Express surcharge story confirms.

Consider the evidence: the $29-billion infrastructure fund announced by Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals won’t include a single dollar of revenue that might have hit drivers at the gas pump, despite the fact that both Metrolinx and Anne Golden’s transit investment panel last year urged the government to hike gas taxes.

Gas taxes are an effective form of road pricing, and they tend to be less politically divisive than tolls. With both, the revenue raised is less important from a policy perspective than the economic signals such levies send to drivers.

Yet for more than a generation, successive Ontario governments — Tories and Liberals alike — have refused to take advantage of this policy lever. According to Kim Jarvi, an economist with the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, the provincial gas tax rate — 14.7 cents/litre — has remained unchanged since 1992. George H.W. Bush was president, Brian Mulroney was prime minister, and “911” didn’t yet have a sinister second meaning.

In the 22 years since, gas prices have tripled, while the effectiveness of Ontario’s gas excise tax as a road pricing tool has plummeted. In 1992, Jarvi says, it accounted for almost 30 per cent of a litre of gas. Today, that figure has fallen to 11 per cent.

Jarvi is hardly alone in his critique: an International Monetary Fund study released in July concluded that Canada’s gas taxes are among the lowest in the developed world, and should be hiked to 55 cents/litre to “discourage overuse of environmentally harmful energy products” (in Ontario, federal and provincial gas taxes account for 24.7 cents/litre).

Gas taxes aren’t the only means of influencing driver behaviour. A new study by Virginia Tech researchers on the commuting habits of 4,600 people in Washington, D.C., concluded that when employers offer workers free parking, that perk proves decisive in commuter transportation choices, even if they also have access to transit. The implication: if governments want to influence commuter behaviour, employer-provided parking needs to be treated as a taxable benefit.

Politicians are fearful of such moves, for all the obvious reasons. But what the Ontario government has failed to articulate is the long-term cost to taxpayers of underwriting the operating losses of inadequately used transit lines.

Wynne convinced voters to back her plan to spend $15 billion on GTHA transit projects, such as two-way/all-day service on the GO network. What she hasn’t yet done is lay out the consequences if that massive level of investment fails to attract sufficient riders and fare revenue. Nor has she scoped out a coherent strategy to use a range of road-pricing policies to encourage drivers to take transit.

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She has time, as many Metrolinx projects are still years from completion. But if Wynne wants to embed these game-changing capital investments in a clear-eyed policy framework designed to ensure that they deliver on the promise of cleaner air and less crowded highways, cancelling the UP Express ticket surcharge is an excellent point of departure. Indeed, such a move should mark the beginning of a long-overdue journey.