what else to say

The CAQist government seems to be fully behind the personal vehicle by supporting a billion dollar car battery plant and meantime refusing to fund public transit to the amount required to offset forecast deficits.

So I had this idea; not that the idea will go anywhere except on this blog.

Transit agencies get some of their money from the car registration fee charged for people who own cars; and also, a portion of the taxes applied on fuel for when people fill up their cars. The latter is diminishing as more and more electric cars get out on the roads.

When people register their car their address is known. So, for people whose car registration address is within 800m of an active REM or Metro station, quadruple (or more) the transit portion of their car registration fee. There are also a few bus terminals further out in the suburbs, so do the same thing, 800m around that terminal, raise significantly the transit portion of the car registration fees.

The city has a number of high frequency bus lines, including all day high frequency and rush hour high frequency. If the car registration is within 600m of the street that has an all day high frequency line, increase dramatically their transit portion. If it is a rush hour high frequency, also increase the transit portion but not quite as much.

There are other cities that have transit agencies, like I was in Saguenay this past summer and they have a transit service with a terminal in Jonquiere and another in Chicoutimi; so similarly increase the transit portion of the car registration fee significantly for anyone whose car registration is within 800m of one of these two terminals. There may be other ways to increase that fee within the boundaries of those cities.

As it may shock the car owners, perhaps implement this increase over three years so that the car owners have time to adjust their budgets, or to move out of these high fee zones.

The last thing I can say about all of this is that the transit agencies should get either funding, or guaranteed low interest loans from the government to build TOD to generate revenue from the TOD that goes towards transit. This is a model that was led by Japan, and now it is starting to happen in BC.