The 407 ETR is the road some people love to hate. The Liberal government of Premier Dalton McGuinty spent years fighting a bitter court battle over 407 tolls. Drivers often grumble about them or even refuse to pay them, though the road is a private enterprise and drivers take it by choice. Exactly why the 407 excites such loathing is something of a mystery. The ETR, or Express Toll Route, is a transportation marvel. When it opened in 1997, it was the world's first all-electronic, barrier-free toll highway. There are no booths to hold you up. An electronic eye reads your licence plate and bills you later. For regular users with a transponder in the car, billing is automatic.
The road is sleek, well-maintained and often blissfully open, a vivid contrast to the crowded, crumbling government roads all around it. Since a private consortium paid the provincial government $3.1-billion for it a decade ago, the 407 has spent another $1.18-billion on new ramps, interchanges and lane expansions. Despite the tolls, 375,000 drivers travel it every work day. Yet some people still insist on seeing it as a sort of dark conspiracy to fleece the city's drivers.
Witness the latest fuss over tolls. Dodging them is no better than hopping a subway turnstile. It's stealing, plain and simple. But it is the 407 that takes the heat. Critics complain about how the 407's parent company pursues drivers who fail to pay up. Under an agreement with the provincial government, drivers who don't pay can have their licence-plate renewal denied. The Toronto Star says that "may be the most treacherous double-cross ever foisted on Ontario taxpayers" (though it has been repeatedly upheld by the courts).
The critics are even more exercised over the 407's insistence that it can pursue drivers for up to 15 years for the amounts they fail to pay. Provincial law says that companies must start legal proceedings to collect on unpaid bills within two years of the initial billing - unless they have an agreement with the debtor. That is a problem for the 407. As an open-access road, it can't stop dodging up front. It must try to collect from dodgers afterward. As a result, it has been stiffed by quite a few drivers over the years, especially during the five-year period when the province was childishly refusing to uphold its contractual agreement to halt licence-plate renewals for dodgers.
Putting a two-year limitation on pursuing dodgers would prevent the 407 from recovering the missing money. So every 407 invoice contains a highlighted, boldface message warning users that the company reserves the right to keep after them for up to 15 years if they don't pay. It says that each trip the driver takes on the 407 after the billing date constitutes the driver's agreement.
That's an outrage, says the Star, condemning the 407's "bully-boy billing practices." Merely receiving a note on an invoice then taking a drive on the 407 doesn't bind the driver, it argues. And interest charges on unpaid bills can add up to thousands of dollars over 15 years.
Well, boo-hoo. Drivers can easily avoid being chased through the courts by the 407 through the simple expedient of paying their bills. A letter to the editor in the Hamilton Spectator put it nicely: "Let's get this straight - we use a toll road, a road clearly marked as a toll road. We get a bill. We don't pay it. We use the same toll road. And then we complain about being pursued for payment?"
Toll roads are so novel in Ontario that the road operators, not the dodgers, are the ones who get tarred as thieves. It's a twisted way of seeing things and it's going to have to change. With governments strapped for funds, we are going to need more tolls to pay for building and maintaining city roads and for underwriting better transit. The success of the 407 shows the way. Let's celebrate, not condemn, it.
Marcus Gee