Rides, roads and rites of citizenship

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Hi, I’m Currents co-editor David Tough. Welcome to your weekly Peterborough Currents email newsletter!

I wrote an article about what users think of Peterborough’s bus system a couple weeks ago, and a lot of readers responded to it. I’m always happy to read what people think of what we’re writing. Often responses can be really interesting and inspiring. In this week’s newsletter, I’m responding to a reader who criticized the way I framed the funding issue.

Let’s get right to it!

Rides, roads and rites of citizenship

by David Tough

Last week a reader got in touch to query my way of framing how we fund public transit in Peterborough. I had written that a significant barrier to improving transit service is that the majority of taxpayers don’t use public transit, and won’t pay more for the minority that does use it.

Why is it, the reader asked, that we characterize funding for buses by non-drivers as a subsidy, while money for new and better roads is always available, with no discussion of the cost to by non-drivers?

It’s a good point. Peterborough is a city designed for driving. The two sets of one-way streets slicing through the downtown (George and Water, Reid and Rubidge) are evidence of that. Cars on roads are the overwhelming way people get around. Roads are provided for this driving majority, but the same roads also allow goods and services to move in and around the city and deliver packages to your door, even if you don’t drive.

Now, a plan that took sustainability seriously would de-incentivize personal vehicle use by residents, leaving mass public transit as the main way people got around, along with cycling and walking, and limiting standalone powered vehicles to special cases, like delivery trucks and emergency vehicles.

But how much can and should governments force this change on consumers and communities? The Trudeau government’s recent approach, with a highly publicized carbon tax and a push for electrical personal vehicles, had limited impact, generated massive resistance, and has since been abandoned.

A key factor in resistance is that people believe that money they earn in the market should be spent by them and on them: a car, maybe a second car, or a trip, maybe even a whole other home they can drive to a few times a year. And they’re generally resistant to spending on things they don’t use.

There are examples, however, where we have overcome this kind of thinking.

Education in Canada is almost entirely provided for free by the state using public funds, from kindergarten to grade 12. Only a tiny minority, of children from very wealthy or very religious families, attends a school they directly pay for, on top of the taxes they already pay to fund public schools.

If we compare public schooling to public housing, another area where a private market is available, the contrast is vivid. Only a tiny minority of low-income families live in public housing, where there is a significant administrative burden to proving you are eligible, and generally some stigma associated with it. Most people rent or buy houses in the private market, and despite loud concerns about housing affordability, that discussion remains focused on the private market.

Public transit in Peterborough currently operates more like public housing than public schooling.

But public education isn’t supported because it redistributes funds. It’s supported because there is a broad consensus that all children should learn basic literacy and numeracy together, as a shared rite of citizenship.

The goal of transit, similarly, should not be to subsidize the needs of a minority. Transit should be a universal system, a system for everyone to use and rely on without much thought about the cost and the alternatives, like car travel currently is for the majority.

The question remains: how do we get there from where we are? How do we build the necessary support for such a shift, from riding on a bus as a kind of punishment for those who can’t drive, to being a shared rite of citizenship?