MATCHING VISIONS AND DOLLARS : A NEW FINANCE MODEL

This paper was presented at the Beyond the tooth fairy : responding to the crisis in urban transportation panel discussion. These proceedings are available on CD-ROM. Today, municipal leaders face the challenge of planning and delivering livable cities in the face of shrinking financial resources. The past half century of unrestrained urban sprawl and auto dependency has led to a host of social, economic and environmental problems in Canadian urban areas. New official plans and transportation plans in the 1990s recognize these problems and establish goals to deal with them. The nest step is to translate those long term goals into practical, daily decision making. This paper proposed a means for doing that, through a process of cultural change. A new model for financing urban transportation is presented as an example of such change in action. It suggests that urban transportation should be increasingly treated as a utility, with users charged based on consumption and revenues dedicated, by law, back into the urban areas from which they were derived. Current initiatives in Montreal and Vancouver are cited. This represents a fundamentally new way of financing urban transportation in Canada, with major potential benefits to the environment, society and the economy. For the covering abstract of this conference see IRRD number 490056.(A)