General Road and Highway Discussion

[NotStan]

From the Record: Region won’t talk tolls after Toronto endorses the idea

That's kind of a shame. It's probably not be something appropriate for us right now, but no one should dismiss it outright. What if a toll of a couple of bucks on the expressway wound up one day making the difference between needing to widen it at high cost in the future, or not? And municipalities do need more revenue tools.

I think that the Region of Waterloo should be very interested in the province allowing Toronto to implement tolls, and should add their voice (along with other municipal governments) to the call for that. One day, we might want to use them here, too. We shouldn't dismiss it flippantly.

Slightly different situation.  Here the expressway is a provincial highway (actually a number of them), while in Toronto the city owns the DVP and the Gardiner.  So its really not up to the cities or the region whether a toll is put on the expressway because it's not theirs, while in Toronto it shouldn't really be up the province if the city wants to charge a fee to people using a city asset.  I do recognize that enabling legislation is required for the Toronto tolls to happen, but fundamentally its not much different than city owned libraries charging a fee for people to take out books or city owned pools charging a fee for people to swim.