By Dr. Alain Verbeke

I come from Brussels, the Belgian and European Union capital. Brussels has the dubious “advantage” of being approximately 10 years ahead of Alberta cities, especially Calgary, in terms of severity of transport problems.

Dr. Alain Verbeke

Three specific transport problems come to mind immediately:

1. Increasing congestion, leading to daily traffic jams, some of them 30 kilometres long, during peak times to get access to downtown areas. This is in spite of extensive recent investments in road infrastructure expansion.

2. Increasing traffic diversion from main arteries to collector roads and even neighbourhood streets. This constitutes a major problem for people whose neighbourhoods are becoming increasingly crowded by cars transiting to and from the city centre. It leads to tremendous discomfort in terms of noise pollution, atmospheric pollution and a feeling that the neighbourhood has become unsafe, especially for children and the elderly.

3. Increasing driver aggressiveness. Indeed, aggressive road behaviour including tailgating, not stopping for pedestrians at sidewalks, speeding, erratic changes of lanes to gain a few seconds, and most importantly road rage, are now common practice in Brussels.

Alberta is fortunately lagging behind the Brussels region in terms of severity of transport problems, but the situation is getting worse quickly.

In Brussels three “solutions” have been used in the recent past to cope with the problems.

1. The construction of new road infrastructure. This has often led to induced traffic, i.e. more cars on the road stimulated by easier access to downtown areas. It has also allowed people to shift their residential location even further away from their work location than in the past.

2. “Speed Limits.” These are increasingly used in urban areas, especially in family neighbourhoods as a tool to increase safety. Unfortunately, speed limits in Brussels have had little impact: speed limits are not enforced because their introduction has not been accompanied by a rise in police controls on speeding.

3. Road taxes. This tool is not yet used extensively in Brussels or in the rest of the European Union, but it is on the policy agenda of many regional and national governments. Unfortunately, road taxing, as a stand-alone policy instrument, is mostly an ineffective tool to reduce congestion. Indeed, road taxes will, in most cases, not have an important impact on traffic volumes, for the simple reason that road users take into account their “generalized cost” when deciding to take the car to go to their office. The most important component of this generalized cost is the time cost, which is usually much more important than the cost of gas or the cost of a road levy.

Alberta, just like Brussels, must start thinking about alternative solutions to solving future transport problems beyond merely expanding road infrastructure. The recent city elections in Calgary have focused to a large extent on transport problems, but the solutions put forward seem largely an expression of old-fashioned thinking.

For example, it has been suggested that improvements be made to a number of interchanges to allow easier access to main arteries such as Crowchild Trail.

One wonders if the individuals putting forward such solutions ever use these arteries during peak times. They would then observe that Crowchild Trail is getting increasingly congested and that improving or adding a few new interchanges will just add to the congestion further down the road.

There are no miracle solutions or quick fixes to solve today’s complex urban-transport problems. However, a long-term strategic vision on the future of Alberta transport is clearly required. The elements below may provide useful building blocks for such a vision.

1. The future role of public transport. Paradoxically, in this era of privatization and deregulation, there is a clear need for more, rather than less, public transport. But public transport should be more than a substitute for the “real thing,” used by people only because they cannot afford to use a car. It is critical to fundamentally rethink the role of public transport in Alberta.

It is interesting to observe that no one ever makes a serious financial analysis of the full social costs and benefits of road use, but financial considerations become the only focus of attention when the expansion of the public transit system is contemplated.

This problem is not confined to merely the intra-city urban transport. In the future, it will also be necessary to fundamentally rethink the linkages between, for example, Calgary and Edmonton, and their respective airports.

The European experience suggests that a high-speed rail connecting the airports and the two major cities is critical. Conventional financial analyses and social cost benefit analyses performed by last-century thinkers will obviously always lead to negative results.

However, when a project such as a high-speed Alberta rail is contemplated, other criteria should be used. These may include the increased effectiveness of the future spatial design of Alberta cities and the likely impact on Alberta as an attraction pole for foreign direct investment, once the Calgary-Edmonton axis becomes a bi-pole with approximately two million citizens in the future.

A socio-economic evaluation that would take on board such criteria would likely come to different results than analyses performed in the past.

2. It is nice for people to be able to live far from the city centre where the air is clean, the roads are uncongested and the real estate is cheap. People have the right to make such choices. However, individuals who choose to live close to downtown and pay very large amounts of money for their real estate have a right to be protected against the former category of individuals. Inner-city neighbourhoods have a right to protect themselves and their children against aggressive commuters who think that they have a “God-given right” to drive through these areas. Neighbourhoods should, within reason, be given the right to pay for protection against the inconveniences of commuter traffic.

The commuter traffic would thus be forced to remain on the main arteries and people choosing to live far out of town would be faced with the real costs of their decisions, rather than being allowed to transfer these costs to the people living in inner-city areas.

3. Completely alternative solutions to the present transport system have to be contemplated, especially solutions such as telework. Many people work gruelling hours in steel office towers downtown, five days a week. They may be well paid and they may occupy prestigious offices, but many are little more than prisoners of their gold cages.

The management of large organizations in city centres should rethink the necessity of daily presence in the office. Studies that I have done in Brussels lead to the conclusion that up to 40 per cent of all workers downtown could work at home from one to three days a week, without a fundamental managerial change in the organizations affected.

4. There is no excuse for aggressiveness on the road. Zero tolerance is the only correct response. But this requires the allocation of substantial resources to enforce zero tolerance.

People don’t have a right to speed and to break the law. In Brussels, the situation has deteriorated to such an extent that there is probably no way back. No citizen living or working in Brussels would dare to cross a sidewalk if he or she saw a car less than 100 metres away, because the car would never stop. In cities such as Calgary and Edmonton, it is not too late. But the clock is ticking . . .

(Dr. Alain Verbeke holds the McCaig Chair in Management, Faculty of Management, University of Calgary. He is a member of the board of the Van Horne Institute for International Transportation and Regulatory Affairs.)