November, a month where conversations tend to lament the long lost days of summer, has seen a remarkable number of conversations about a similarly depressing topic: overcrowded transportation infrastructure in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area (GTHA).  At the beginning of the month, the Canadian Urban Transit Association held its fall conference. Sponsored by TTC and Metrolinx, the title was Public Transit: Investing in Quality of Life. This was followed up with Toronto Talks Mobility, a session organized by the Pembina Institute, Councillor Joe Mihevc and the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre. Coming up later this month is a “Mobility Pricing Stakeholder Forum” sponsored by Transport Futures.  These conversations are driven by projections that the GTHA will add close to 3 million new people in the next 20 years. Given current car ownership trends, this will result in an additional 1 million automobiles trying to access roads that are already hopelessly congested.   But isn’t the GTHA already at “peak car” with traffic congestion rates among the worst in North America? And aren’t vehicles already the largest sources of greenhouse gases in Ontario (see chart below)? Can we afford to put all these additional vehicles on the road, you ask? Good question.

The message emerging from these conversations is that we need to get serious about moving people out of their cars and onto mass transit. But with the GTHA’s public transit system in its own state of chronic underfunding, significant investment – $80 billion dollars was the amount being tossed around at the Toronto Talks Mobility session – is required to make it a viable alternative.  That is a huge sum of money for cash strapped governments in a time of fiscal austerity, and so innovative funding mechanisms will be required. Metrolinx is required to release an investment strategy to find the money by no later than 2013; why the delay? Let’s get this strategy released for public discussion sooner so that it can influence and inform transit planning and decision-making in 2012. The longer we wait, the greater the chance that we’ll continue to make planning decisions that will lock-in our commuting patterns for decades to come.

While I have pointed to the potential for road pricing to bridge the funding gap in both my 2010 and 2011 annual greenhouse gas progress reports and in a recent blog, most decision-makers in the region are reluctant to entertain it as a possibility. Most of the speakers at the Toronto Talks Mobility session danced around the issue of road pricing. Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion did suggest, however, that road tolls and related road pricing will have to be evaluated as a funding option. She stressed repeatedly that this will be tough to sell to the commuting public, especially those traveling to work in single-occupancy vehicles. She conceded however, that if the monies were put towards funding rapid transit – and only rapid transit – this would be an easier sell.  The elephant in the room is making its presence known.