Montrealers, who know a thing or two about dodging potholes, are suddenly learning the true meaning of traffic hell. In a city already known as much for its orange pylons as for its joie de vivre, politicians have gone on an infrastructure binge as seemingly ambitious as the Pyramids.
A critical freeway interchange in the city's west end is being ripped down and rebuilt over four years (cost $3.7-billion). The Champlain Bridge linking the island of Montreal to its south-shore suburbs is being replaced (cost $4.2-billion). The demolition of the 50-year-old elevated Bonaventure Expressway is also under way, snarling traffic into the core.
Then there's construction of a new highway interchange into Trudeau Airport. It has been going on for almost 10 years and still isn't finished. And did we mention the numerous critical arteries being ripped up and "reimagined" in time for the city's 375th birthday in 2017?
Even if most or even all of this construction is necessary, undertaking so many infrastructure projects at once isn't just testing commuters' patience – the capacity of policy-makers and contractors to oversee it all is also being stretched to the limits. And the increased demand for labour and materials inevitably threatens to drive up the final price tag for taxpayers.
Montreal is hardly alone. Torontonians have been enduring constant lane closings on the Gardiner Expressway and are about to suffer through the rebuild of the thoroughfare's eastern leg. The $5.2-billion Eglinton Crosstown light-rail transit project is under construction. Indeed, countrywide, there are enough LRT projects in the works to rival the CPR – with no date in sight for the last spike.
Now, federal politicians seeking votes in the Oct. 19 election are promising to up the ante.
Stephen Harper's Conservatives have budgeted something like $80-billion in funding for infrastructure, including public transit, over the next decade. They've already promised $2.6-billion for Toronto Mayor John Tory's proposed SmartTrack plan, $1-billion for the next phase of Ottawa's LRT network and $1.5-billion for Calgary's Green Line LRT.
Justin Trudeau's Liberals, who see infrastructure spending as much an end in itself (to stimulate the economy) as an investment in future productivity, would go even further. They would boost federal spending on infrastructure to $125-billion over 10 years and run deficits to fund it.
The Liberals are heavily influenced by Larry Summers, the former White House economic guru who argues that developed countries are facing a period of "secular stagnation" that can only be remedied by massive public investments. This is only a theory, mind you, and one that is widely contested, including by former U.S. Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke.
Indeed, while Canada faces slower long-term growth, owing primarily to its aging population, there is little evidence of secular stagnation here. And while Canada underinvested in infrastructure in 1990s, it has been more than making up for it. For several years now, this country has ranked near the top of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries in infrastructure investment, spending close to 4 per cent of its gross domestic product on it.
The World Economic Forum ranks Canada's infrastructure 15th of the 144 countries included in its 2015 Global Competitiveness Report, with a score of 5.7 on a scale of seven. That's slightly behind Spain, France and Japan. But those countries are widely criticized for overinvesting in infrastructure, saddling their governments with unsustainable debts and the ongoing operating costs of white elephants, without any improvement in productivity to show for it.
There are much more practical solutions to traffic gridlock and strained public transit systems than widening highways or building new LRT lines. Congestion taxes, tolls, telecommuting and bus rapid-transit systems (BRTs) are far more cost effective in relieving gridlock and changing behaviours than the "build it and they will come" fetish of politicians.
But BRTs aren't sexy and congestion taxes are politically taboo. So what do we get? LRTs for everyone, even Mississauga and Hamilton, and projects like Toronto's $456-million Union Pearson Express. The UPX is a monument to hubris – its steep fares have turned off the elites (who prefer Uber) as much as the rest of us (who tend to take the perfectly efficient subway-bus route for one-10th of the price).
"On the whole, countries continue to invest in poorly conceived projects, take a long time to approve them, miss opportunities in how to deliver them, and then don't make the most of existing assets before opting to build expensive new capacity," McKinsey & Co. concluded in a 2013 report. "A bias among public officials to build new capacity … is common, leading to more expensive and less sustainable infrastructure solutions."
Think about that the next time a 90-per-cent-empty UPX train whizzes by.
Konrad Yakabuski