Comment 103226

By AnjoMan (registered) | Posted July 15, 2014 at 11:46:20 in reply to Comment 103222

The fact is that both the capital and operating budgets come from only one source: my wallet and all the other taxpayers.

This is inaccurate. The operating costs would come from the wallets of Hamiltonian tax payers, while the capital cost would come from Ontarian tax payers. To equate them is naive and a gross oversimplification. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't care about whether this is a wise use of provincial funds; I'm arguing that it is not as simple as adding up the savings made by the city and equating them to the extra capital investment required by the province, since they are funded by different, albeit overlapping, tax bases.

If we want to talk about whether this is a wise use of provincial funds, I think a better way to look at this would be to compare the initial capital investment to how long it might take for the province to recoup that cost in increased income tax, corporate tax and sales tax revenues resulting from economic development around the B-line. However, it seems to me that this question has already been answered because, as the article states, the ITDP found that BRT and LRT give a similar ROI relative to their capital cost in terms of economic development. Given that, it seems pretty short-sighted to choose BRT solely on the basis of making the project cheaper, especially when the Province is planning to spend $2B per year on transit investments.

In other words, people in London and Toronto don't really care about whether Hamilton saves money operating an LRT instead of a BRT, but in 20 years they will care about whether or not increases in Hamilton's tax base enable the province to spend money on transit in their communities.

Comment edited by AnjoMan on 2014-07-15 11:47:25

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