Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Toll Roads and Government Giving Money to Other Countries

I saw an article on a poll done on converting high congestion areas to toll areas to stop people from taking their cars. This sounds like a good idea but where would the money from the tolls go? Would it go to helping transit? Probably not if you look at past examples of taxing in this manner.

1) Gas tax does not go to Go Transit and the smaller transit areas. If it did that would be a lot of money that transit is getting.
2) 407, sure make people pay for riding the highway but this highway is not owned by the government and they have no control over how tolls are collected and where the money goes. The 407 is owned partially by Royal Bank and partially by some country outside Canada. Imagine if the profits from 407 went to transit. We would have one heck of a transit system.
3) The new toll road to the airport is supposed to be built but again it will be privatized so the profit will not go to help the transportation issues but into someones pocket.
4) The government is paying for the expansion of rail for the GO Trains to run on but CN will own the rails and have control of them. This is another example of government giving in to private corporations. Go Transit owns the customer service desk and ticket checkers, but CN drives the trains owns the land and Bombardiar runs the trains. All this private profits from public transit.

One thing to note, when CN was on strike we had a lot less delays because of signals waiting for CN trains to shuttle in and out of the freight corridors. As for switching, I have watched as I have been taking the train and just doing a simple switch optimization would save a lot of delays. When I take the 5:43 train and it gets to burlington it arrives in the north track but then close to the station it switches across 1 if not two switches to get in on the middle or south track. If we didn't have to switch and came in on the north track then the delay waiting for a switch would be gone.

Common senses but in 40 years of service Go Transit still has not done switch optimization.

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