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Richard Bergeron is the leader of Projet Montréal. He is also a Montreal City Councillor and member of the Executive committee.  This text is excerpted from a presentation made on Friday June 18th at the Transport Futures Summit 2010 in Toronto.

Together with other concerned Montrealers, I founded this new party, Projet Montreal, to restore value to the urban way of life in Montreal. Our aim was to stop urban sprawl and our central strategy was to develop a large-scale network of modern tramways while gradually reducing the amount of public space dedicated to private cars in our City.

Over the last decade, the number of vehicles on the Montreal island grew by 80 000 units, while it skyrocketed in the rest of the metropolitan region with 325 000 new units. This has put enormous stress on the 13 bridges that link the off-island suburbs with the island of Montreal.

The Quebec Government has announced its intention to invest over five billion dollars in highways in the central part of the island of Montreal, plus one billion dollars to build 25 000 new parking spaces downtown. People living along these corridors are worried about the impacts the highways will have on their health. They also resent the Ministry’s plans to expropriate hundreds of homes. One of their major concerns is the Turcot Interchange reconstruction project, a huge project. The City of Montreal seems to have felt these pressures from citizen groups and from our party. Two months ago, the City has taken a firm stand against the Quebec Transport Ministry’s plan for Turcot and presented a counter-proposal of its own. Unlike the provincial government’s proposal, our plan was designed for a densely populated urban area and is respectful of the residents’ right to remain in their neighbourhoods with a decent quality of life.

Another pressing need is to eliminate a structural deficit in Société de Transport de Montréal (STM) operations. That deficit stands at 40 million dollars this year and is expected to rise to 75 million next year. We also need to fund the new transit projects that are part of the City’s Plan de Transport. An additional 240 million dollars a year will be needed to meet this objective over the next decade. And that will not suffice to meet a third key objective identified by the STM: the electrification of the entire transit network by 2026.

Montreal is considering tolls for financing many of its public transit projects. The leaders of all three leading parties in Montreal support the idea of reinstating tolls on bridges or creating a system of regional tolls. Even leaders from suburbs have said that they would consider tolls if the revenues were not only used for public transit, but also for roads.

Since May, the provincial government has added a new 1.5-cent per litre tax on gasoline in the Montreal region. The money, 53 million dollars, goes straight to the City of Montreal. However, the new revenues will only cover the STM’s structural deficit.

In its last budget, the Quebec government also implemented a new tax on gas in order to pay for its own infrastructure projects. This tax will rise by one cent per litre a year, during four years, with an estimated total of 350 million dollars. Only 15 per cent of the new monies will go to investments in transit systems, i.e. more or less 60 million dollars in 2014.

The City of Montreal also introduced a new tax recently to finance public transportation. This tax, which targets outdoor and underground parking lots in two zones, will only generate 20 million dollars a year. But it does have the merit of discouraging people from taking their car to the city centre. It also encourages owners to develop their properties instead of operating them as parking lots. My party, Projet Montreal, would like this tax to cover the entire city or even the entire metropolitan area. This way, more people would contribute, but at a lower rate. The revenues from such a tax would reach approximately 150 million dollars per year.

False premises

There is a lot of talk these days in Montreal regarding the costs of public transportation systems versus road construction projects. The media and public administrators often use false premises to build their comparisons. Obviously, these cost comparisons should consider not only the infrastructures, but also the cost of energy, the cost of rolling stock as well as operational costs, maintenance costs and garages costs.

They do not.

When a road building project is presented, typically only the basic infrastructure costs are considered: concrete, asphalt, gravel, lamp posts, road signs, etc. Imagine if we compared public and private transportation costs over 50 years. For road building projects, we would have to include all the costs associated with private automobiles using the road system, their upkeep, their replacement cost after a eight-year lifespan, the cost of gas and the costs of the garages where the automobiles are parked. Does this sound reasonable?

At first glance, it seems that roads are relatively cheap while public transport requires enormous sums of money. This is because, more often than not, public transport systems are funded through a single source: public funds. But where do public funds come from? They come out of the pockets of taxpayers.

As elected officials, we do need to base our comparisons on the right premises. And fully informed comparisons do not necessarily support investments in the road system – far from it.

Tramways’ return

Some cities have invested in recent years in new Tramway systems. These cities have succeeded in reinventing their public places and creating an urban environment of superior quality. Some of them, like Bordeaux, were even able to reverse urban sprawl.

Tramways go a long way back. I just love them and I first advocated bringing them back to Montreal in 2000, while I began working for the Agence Métropolitaine de Transport (AMT). Since then, this idea has come a long way in Montreal. In 2006, Mayor Tremblay discovered new tramways on the “boulevard des Maréchaux” in Paris. He then made them the top priority of the City’s 2008 Plan de Transport. The implementation of the first two tramway lines is now under study with one line making a loop around Old Montreal.

As a Montrealer, I must admit that I feel somewhat embarrassed to be presenting our humble project for a new tramway system. You, in Toronto, have historically made a much wiser choice through maintaining the tramway over time.

Projet Montréal wants nearly 40 kms of tramway lines to be built in Montreal over the next five years. Considering that tramways cost $40 million per km and the economies of scale that would be incurred, this represents a cost of 1.5 billion dollars.

In the long run, the second phase that we envision would cover another 100 km and would connect all the neighbourhoods of Montreal together with the south shore.

Available options

Basically, there are four main road pricing schemes to choose from:

1. The first one is tolls. It is the Government of Quebec who can take the decision to install new tolls, and it is likely not to take it. Montreal is looking further into the idea of a regional toll that would be implemented by the metropolitan community. Preliminary estimates indicate a potential of about $425 million per year, 200 of which would be allocated to the implementation of Montreal’s Plan de Transport.
2. Gas taxes, the second option, has many advantages: they are easy to implement, at no cost; payments vary according to the kind of vehicle one drives and to the distance one covers, following the pay-as-you-pollute principle; after a while, the tax becomes invisible, since it is hidden in the global price of gas, which itself fluctuates daily. The 1.5 cents that was introduced in Montreal this year only generated revenues of $53 million. We would need an additional 9 cents per litre to meet the needs detailed in the Plan de Transport.
3. The third possibility, parking taxes, is more difficult to implement. It would oblige the municipal administration to maintain an inventory of all parking spaces in order to tax them properly. It is also the most difficult in terms of logistics, since the city has to deal with each owner independently.
4. The fourth scheme, distance or odometer tax, looks easy to implement at the first glance. But in fact, odometers can be fiddled. Technologies like GPS do raise privacy problems, although they are used to tax the trucking industry in Switzerland.

Due to existing gaps between the provincial government priorities and those of the City of Montreal, Montreal has to look for all possible options, tolls included, to finance new developments in public transportation, that amount to 250 million dollars per year. We are very serious in our will to transform our streets and committed to find ways to achieve our vision. Toronto is doing fine, but do keep an eye on us: Montreal definitely remains in the race for urban quality of life.