Rider pride

Without much fanfare, the NDP has been promoting its climate change plan over the past week, focusing particularly on transit funding. And the NDP's push raises some interesting questions about how best to get municipalities to invest in public transportation.

From the Globe and Mail link above, here's how the NDP's plan is being described:

Mr. Layton said the NDP's plan to take 1 cent of the federal excise tax applied to gasoline and dedicate it to public transit across the country - distributed on a per-rider basis that favours big cities - would see Toronto receive $452-million over four years.

Under his party's cap-and-trade green plan for businesses, in which "big polluters" would be forced to buy and trade carbon emissions credits, much of the proceeds would be put into public transit, Mr. Layton said, producing $388-million over four years for Toronto.

It's not clear from the article whether money coming in from the carbon trading system would be distributed on the same basis as the portion funded by the excise tax. But it's interesting that the former at least would be distributed on a per-rider basis - and it seems like the Globe's coverage largely misses the significance of that choice by assuming that it primarily favours big cities.

Roughly speaking, the decision as to how to apply funding intended to support transit might be based on one of three principles. A government could follow the Cons' usual system of doling out money on a per-capita basis with no regard for where money would be best used; it could choose to reward past behaviour by providing incentives for desired results; or it could direct money toward investments with the highest apparent incremental value in improving the desired outcomes in the future.

My initial inclination would be toward the third type of funding formula. And that could differ in important ways from the second: while it's possible that some cities (of whatever size) which have high ridership might be able to put added funding to extremely good use, it's also possible that the best immediate results might come from putting money into cities where few people use transit precisely because basic investments haven't been made.

Instead of creating that type of system, the NDP's plan first rewards municipalities for what they've already done, as a city which has made transit enough of a priority to have a proportionately larger ridership will see greater funding as a result. But for the future, it largely puts the onus on municipalities to make investments for themselves, with the promise that an increase in ridership will boost their return on that investment later.

Again, that kind of after-the-fact incentive isn't my first choice as to how to get the best possible return in the near term. But it does offer the benefit of bypassing the need for what might be a lengthy process to compare the impact of different proposed projects - and it could well be just as effective if the money available for distribution is enough to make it worth municipalities' while in making new investments for themselves.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not that will be the case. But one way or another, a significant push toward improved public transit figures to be a vital step in reducing Canadians' dependence on less-efficient forms of transportation - making it a positive step simply to bring the issue back into the public eye.