For next year’s budget (2024), the City of Toronto is projecting a $1.5 – $1.7 billion budget shortfall. And over the next 10 years, this shortfall is expected to grow to nearly $47 billion if changes aren’t made. This is according to a recent report… Read More
Daniel Knowles, who is a correspondent for the Economist, recently authored a book called Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It. I haven’t read it, yet, but I did just read this excerpt about Tokyo, and it was jam-packed with… Read More
Let’s assume that you’re Mayor of your city and that, for whatever reason, you have no need to pander to voters. You’re a benevolent dictator. You can do whatever you think is best overall for the city and it will just happen. What would you… Read More
I tweeted two polls today. The first one is mostly useless: It asked whether developers should build more 3-bedroom apartments/condominiums. And not surprisingly, the vast majority of people voted yes. Of course, the problem with this poll is that it says nothing about the overall… Read More
If you are a longtime reader of this blog, you’ll know that I am a supporter of road pricing. I believe it’s the only way to realistically solve the problem of traffic congestion and I believe that underpricing roads (such as not charging for them)… Read More
Below is a photo of Interstate 95 near Miami, which, for the record, I myself did not take while driving. The two empty lanes that you see are the “Express Lanes.” The price for using these lanes varies based on demand. During periods of low demand,… Read More
Joe Cortright of City Observatory recently published a post about the types of policies that cities should be looking to adopt in response to autonomous vehicles. It’s called: Pricing roads for autonomous vehicles. Many have argued, including urban economist Edward Glaeser, that autonomous vehicles are… Read More
I was out for dinner this evening and the topic of road tolls (road pricing) came up. All of us at the table agreed that this was a missed opportunity for Toronto. Yes we proposed it, but then we got cold feet and backed away.… Read More
Joe Cortright of City Observatory recently published an interesting post on HOT lanes (high-occupancy toll lanes) and cited a research paper by Austin Gross (University of Washington) and Daniel Brent (Louisiana State University). The paper looked at the behavioral response of drivers to dynamic HOT… Read More
When I wrote yesterday’s post about road tolls, it hadn’t been announced that Toronto Mayor John Tory was going to call for road tolls on both of the highways coming into downtown. That didn’t leak until late in the evening. So I was just writing another… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 