[Genauso]

I know there's a difference the cost of building for peak vs average use.

I realize there may be some outliers that choose a commute that's significantly longer because they expect they'll save even more on the price of land.

But something that is forgotten, is that traffic isn't just kids driving up and down the street because gas is 5 cents/L and they have nothing better to do. It's not like a toll will reduce demand, as much as it will shift it.

Tolls shift demand because most people aren't thinking about driving most of the time they do it, it's automatic. Now you're asking them to gamble on paying a fee as one option for a set of uncertain experiences. I don't think price signaling will work until it's a closed loop where real-time traffic conditions are fed into your car so that it picks the best route for you.

I think we're talking about tolls right now because nobody wants to chip in more money, and that will be true whether you're talking about income taxes, gas taxes, gps-per-km tolls, bridge tolls. It's not a secret that land cost is leading Surrey's growth, and not booming jobs or amenities. We can talk about how great the economy is all day long on TV, but not being able to afford what was done easily in the past says a lot.


For now it'd be more practical to deal with weight/axle. Road wear is proportional to the weight^3 / area of contact patch. Maybe we could save some money if people switched to smaller vehicles, and covering the cost of damage should be built into the rate trucking companies are charging. Focus on the making changes that have the biggest payoff, and least effort.

I wonder what a fee based on kg&km driven would do to Translink, at what ridership level would it make sense to pick skytrain for a given line.