From the Calgary Herald – March 26, 2009

Calgary city council’s sudden about-face on Park-and-Ride fees is a good start. Will they have the courage and creativity to admit that the entire program was an error and regain some of the citizen confidence they have been so freely squandering?

On the day that the $3 charge started at three LRT stations, council realized that it applied 24/7–making the Park-and-Ride lots the only places in the city where the Park Plus system is enforced after 6 p. m. and on Sundays–and hurriedly tried to reverse course. They didn’t feel they had the ability to just change their earlier decision, so they asked for a report on the budgetary implications of the new fee, due back on April 6.

You would be forgiven for asking at this point, “what do you mean, they didn’t know the budgetary implications?Wouldn’t the right time to have asked for a report have been before they made the decision?” Well, yes, probably. Considering that council approved a user fee increase of up to $720 per year for certain Calgarians, one would expect that there would have been some public input, some soul-searching and a lot of questions asked.

What happened instead, near as I can guess, is that the “anti-car” aldermen found common cause with those who wanted to minimize the perceived property tax increase. Only aldermen Andre Chabot, Ray Jones, and Dale Hodges–whose wards have large numbers of people who ride transit but may not have 9-5 downtown jobs–stood against the fee.

Since the decision was taken, there have been many attempts to rationalize it. All are unsatisfying.

The issue that bus riders are subsidizing those who park, for example, is that the word “subsidy” is meaningless in this context.

Even if we pretended that transit users pay the full freight of their service (all taxpayers actually pay for over half), the feeder bus system is much more expensive to operate than are a few parking lots. One could argue just as easily that the drivers, by not taking expensive buses, are “subsidizing” the bus riders.

Navel-gazing aside, other arguments–that the fee will increase security and cleanliness, or that it is required to implement the recently-completed safety audit–hold no water. The money from the fee is simply not directed to these expenses.

The final argument is the true one–transit needs the money for its operating budget.

The problem is that this fee is a very inefficient way to raise that money. The actual amount that passengers will pay is about $9 million this year, of which fully one-third or more will go to enforcement and administration, leaving only $6 million in revenue. (The total budgeted increase in security and maintenance is well short of $2 million.)

If there were not other expenses in the city to be cut (a doubtful proposition, but work with me), there would be better ways to raise the funds with less money taken from Calgarians: even a large increase in fares or property taxes would have been much less wasteful than the path they chose.

So, what should council do? Getting rid of the fee on evenings and weekends is a no-brainer, certainly, but the right thing to do is to remove it entirely and admit that a mistake has been made.

If council does not have the stomach for that kind of mea culpa, then they should stop charging after 3 p. m., rather than 6 p.m. Since downtown evening rates start at 4 p.m., this would ensure that folks who want to go downtown to meet someone after work would still have an incentive to take transit to do so. It would also have the side benefit of helping people who work an evening shift–exactly the working poor people council has been trying to help.

If council really wanted to show it was thinking about policy, not money, it might even consider charging only until 9 a. m. This would be a real incentive to people to adjust their working hours and ease rush-hour congestion on the system, while maintaining most of the revenue from the fee.

We’ll see if council can be that customer-focused.

Naheed Nenshi teaches at Mount Royal’s Bissett School of Business. www.bettercalgary.ca

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