Tackling traffic

The report is published by the C. D. Howe Institute in collaboration with Clean Energy Canada and the Real Estate Foundation of British Columbia as a way to stimulate discussion of transit policy and does not represent the official positions of any of these organizations. [...] The Mayors’ Council Investment Plan and Estimates of Congestion Costs Under the Mayors’ Council transportation infrastructure investment plan, the immediate financing strategy is for the province to charge an extra 0.5 percentage points on the Provincial Sales Tax (PST) to pay for the region’s share of the plan. [...] Rather than compare current travel time to travel time on an unutilized road, HDR (2015) sets the optimal level of congestion as the speed at which the costs of reducing congestion are higher than the benefits of reducing congestion. [...] The magnitude of the all-encompassing agglomeration benefits for Metro Vancouver that I estimate in Table 1 will depend, first, on the strength of the agglomeration economic benefit of interpersonal connections6 and, second, on the geographic size of the region benefitting from enhanced accessibility. [...] These ranges are close to the low- and high-range estimates of the relationship of population and income from online Appendix Table 1. These are equivalent to a doubling of the population resulting in 2.1 to 2.8 percent higher incomes.