A 407 ISSUE Canada

A 407 ISSUE

Canada’s highway leap

The 407 Express Toll Route is such a bold new highway, such an important effort to advance the state of highway art that we’ve thrown balance to the wind this month, and held over several strong reports on other tolling issues, to give this project the space it deserves.

The Canadians have a heap of world firsts in the deployment of 407’s technology (see box p2) and its performance deserves worldwide attention because it can produce a revolution in how roads are run. That’s because (1) it is a toll road that is fully as convenient to use as a free road and (2) it introduces time-of-day road pricing onto a modern multi-interchange urban motorway providing a test of the concept of congestion pricing that transport economists have long expounded as the only answer to urban traffic congestion, and (3) it has the potential to reduce the cost of collecting tolls below the cost of collecting taxes, the usual source of roads’ money most places.

If the economy of modern toll collection is established then in theory highway service can be run routinely by competitive, customer oriented businesses which if their highway concessions or property are tradeable, will owe their survival and fortune to investing wisely, spending prudently and managing the highway for their motorists as customers. Their income will depend on serving the people! No longer will highway service be at the mercy of hamstrung bureaucrats and pork-barrel dealing politicians. Of course such may be libertarian fantasy, a wishful thought that the new technology will be deployed on behalf of more and better highways that people want. Equally environmentalists who hate cars could use 407-technology to price them into a subordinate role and thereby to tame what they see as an anarchic force which has been thwarting their worthy efforts at urban planning and regulation of land use. Between these two political extremes the 407-technology can be used very beneficially by familiar state highway agencies to produce a dedicated revenue stream to fund the

maintenance and extension of existing highways. 407 technology is suited to both the retrofit of existing free motorways and to new ones to earn toll revneues. Given the tedious and uncertain nature of annual budget battles for tax funds for roads this would be revolution enough.

There’s something unusually creative about what the Canadians are doing with 407, drawing on talents and ideas from all over, and having a global perspective on what’s being done elsewhere that is unmatched. Canadian Highways International Corp the driver behind the project is more bold, innovative and active internationally than any American, British, German or Japanese highway design, construct and operate outfit, perhaps only matched by a couple of French and Spanish companies. Of course the word ‘bold’ can easily be turned to ‘foolhardy’. 407 taps heavily into US-developed Pentagon-derived technology that the Americans themselves have been reluctant to to deploy.

Noone knows how well it will work though someone had to try, and these Canadians deserve respect for their risk-taking alone. Bell Canada’s senior systems engineer for 407, Chris Hopkins, a dark precisely spoken man in about his mid-30s, who showed me the heart of the tolling system in the secure room at the 407 operations center was impatient to have the real traffic run: “We have done every possible simulation, lots of modelling and many many test runs. I decided Friday night a week back (Apr 11) at about 11pm finishing up: I’m through with this stuff. We’re done testing. I’m just finishing up documentation now, waiting really. We need real traffic now to do real tests. We are going to have glitches, for sure, probably a number of different ones and we are going to have to fix each of them as they turn up. But it’s basically very good stuff and we’ll make it work.”