ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[zanate]

Charging fees to the townships for services they do not benefit from is absurd.

I am an unswerving supporter of LRT but I don't think people should have to pay for something when there community is not serviced by it.

I don't have kids so  I want a discount on my school board taxes. I don't drive a car, so I don't want to pay road taxes. I don't get sick, so I want a discount on my medicare taxes. I never go to the townships, so I want to make sure that none of my tax money goes to them ever since I don't use their facilities.... I also want them to pay for the department of agriculture, which I never use either.

You get the picture, taxes do not work on a per use basis. We pool revenues on to the city/regional/provincial/federal pot and we entrust them to spend in the ways that society benefits the most from that money. Me?  I'm pretty happy some of my tax monies are going up north to improve the quality of drinking water in isolated communities.

And this is why the ultimate answer to this kind of question is always a political one. Because when you put your cases like that, you're both right, but you both can't be right. Which argument seems more right depends on where your audience's interests lie.


Look at Hamilton, which doesn't just differentiate between rural and urban areas when taxing for transit, but divides it up by ward. The result becomes a severe obstinance against expanding transit into areas that don't pay for it, because of this level of micro-targeting. Which means that Hamilton has yet one more pressure that forces people to drive. That results in an artificial easiness in growing the road network compared to providing any alternative. So, area rating for transit is bad.

But conversely, it doesn't make sense to most people to tax a small town outside of the KCW metro area to fund transit that doesn't serve it. And transit service out to places like Elmira and other towns has been funded on a per-route basis. (And still faces opposition on that account too.) So, area rating for transit makes sense, I guess?

It might be a different conversation if people understood that a new subdivision in Wilmot, for example, is housing a few hundred people who are primarily driving into KW to work and to shop, and this places pressure on our connecting regional roads, as well as the need for street capacity and parking room in the city. If that subdivision was a denser development in an urban area connected by good transit, the pressure on roads around and in KW would be reduced. So there's an argument that in lieu of paying for transit, there should be an additional road transportation levy.

Or maybe we should stop talking about paying for one type of transportation here, and one type there, we should talk about paying for any transportation across this region as a whole.

But we're not, because politics.