[goreckm]

Rental and home prices are pretty unaffordable across the entirety of the GTA. Further outside the major population centres (say travelling from Shelburne to Toronto) they're going to be paying an inordinate amount in gas every week anyhow. Low-middle class stand to benefit most from money going into transit. Reliance on over-paying for transportation is a real thing here in Canada. Owning a car in any community in the largest population zone in the country shouldn't have to be mandatory for anyone. Any change will bring short-term pain for those involved, no doubt. People need time to adjust, but fearing that has been half of the political problem here in the province. Drivers suffer anyway when we do nothing and still have to repair road damage (see the current Gardiner woes).

When given the option to take fast, efficient transit, most will take it. It's ultimately the stalwarts who refuse to give up using their cars are the ones who will suffer. And they are exactly the people targeted with tolls.

Even the Financial Post has gone to bat for tolls to ease costs:

How road tolls could help ease Canada's big city housing crunch

Haider-Moranis Bulletin: A carefully designed road toll regime has the potential to generate revenue that can then be used to help develop new communities

financialpost.com

Yeah, they're going to be paying a lot for gas already. No wonder they're angry at the carbon tax, and would be furious at any tolls. They can't afford it. But they also don't have a choice, except move out of the GTA, which is what many are doing, and that's going to cause much bigger problems in the long run.

And transit is all well and good for someone that works downtown, but if someone is living in a suburban community in Pickering, and commuting to an office / industrial park in Brampton, for example, there's no transit you could build that would make that trip time effective.

That's why it's a housing issue. Housing mobility needs to be higher, affordability needs to be dramatically increased, the types of homes that families are willing to live in need to be built near transit nodes. That's the only world where we can start making significant inroads into transit being a bigger part of the solution.

 

[turbanplanner]

There's a veritable army of office workers who don't need to be clogging the roads. Obviously it's not a perfect solution, but it buys us a boatload of capacity at rush hour. It's a no brainer.


Well it's also the commercial real estate tax base which is why Olivia Chow is pushing for return to office. As well as the automakers, auto insurers, retailers, restos etc who make money from people being in office. It's all greed.

Again, I have friends in small companies their managers/owners couldn't care less what Chow or the Landlords want. They don't even have a full floor in their buildings. They still went back into work since they saw productivity went down. This doesn't apply to every company but it seems silly to think if there is a conspiracy everyone is buying in.

 

[evandyk]

Yeah, companies are getting more people back in the office because their senior leaders think that their employees do better work from the office than home. I tend to think that's generally true of a lot of office work (not all, of course) even where your presence isn't specifically needed to accomplish your work tasks. Sure, Chow and other politicians are publicly pressuring them to get back to office, but they don't care - they want to make money, and they won't do that by leasing office space that they don't need because their workers could work just as effectively from home.

Amazon just called everyone back to work five days, and they're known for being pretty efficient. They don't care what any politician or landlord says, since they're bigger than any of them.