Province warming to HOT lanes: Hume

HOV is good; HOT is even better. As we saw during the Pan-Am Games, High Occupancy Vehicle lanes were great for cars with three or more people and other designated vehicles. The trouble was that they went largely unused. High Occupancy Toll lanes solve that problem by opening up the designated space to cars that don’t have the numbers but whose drivers are willing to pay for the convenience.

Premier Kathleen Wynne has hinted that she’s willing to implement HOT lanes, but has not been specific about where and when. If the U.S. experience is anything to go by, however, this is an idea whose time has finally come.

Of course, there will be howls of outrage across the Greater Toronto Area. So what else is new? Drivers have had it their way for so long, they lost the habit of sharing the roads, let alone paying for them.

Ah yes, drivers say, we pay for those streets and highways and their maintenance through our taxes. So do all those who don’t drive. But just as transit riders must pay to ride the bus, drivers must pay to use the roads and highways.

Despite the historic sense of entitlement that informs car culture in Ontario, HOT lanes mark the start of a more democratic and equitable approach to the sharing of public resources.

“When a new road opens,” says Transport Futures founder Martin Collier, “people assume they can use it for free. When new transit opens, people assume they will have to pay to use it.”

According to Collier, Wynne’s mistake was to close the HOV lanes after drivers had grown accustomed to them but before HOT lanes were introduced. The complaints, which came from the usual political and economic suspects, were more a reflection of outdated 20th-century attitudes than 21st-century realities.

As Collier also points out, even the temporary HOV lanes led to “a huge spike in the amount of car-pooling and a sudden increase in the sale of mannequins.”

Though critics worry that HOT lanes will be too expensive for the driving poor, history tells us otherwise. “In the U.S.,” Collier notes, “low-income drivers are the most supportive of HOT because they’re the ones who are usually stuck in traffic.”

Besides, part of the American approach is to spend money raised by tolls in the area where it is collected. Those who fear the cash will disappear into general revenues find this reassuring. In addition, “dynamic pricing” means drivers pay different rates at different times.

Also important is the fact that less congestion means less wear on the highways, important at a time when we can no longer afford the costs of our crumbling infrastructure.

Needless to say, the real impediment to HOT lanes is political cowardice. Though cars turn too many drivers into monsters, issues such as the environment, economy and democracy are too important to be decided on the basis of road rage. That was Rob Ford’s starting point; look where that got us.

Car culture’s assumptions about what belongs to them amounts to a kind of modern-day droit du seigneur. But for 60 years, politicians and planners have worked tirelessly to please drivers, so who can blame them for thinking they are the cock of the walk?

Though numerous Torontonians still believe what’s best for the car is best for Toronto, they tend to be old, sclerotic and no longer capable of change. They, too, shall pass. As will the tyranny of the automobile.