Fighting for bike lanes, pedestrian spaces, HOV/bus lanes, and right-of-way streetcar lanes is difficult in Toronto. Much of Toronto’s population is suburban, and much of Toronto’s tax revenues are controlled by an Ontario government that is partially influenced by Ontario’s largest industry, car manufacturing.
Still, most of this fight has focused only on how to share road space. In my opinion, what we should be pursuing instead is a plan to share road-use time, in order to reflect the fact that the needs of Toronto — especially as it relates to bike lanes — are very different in summer than in winter. The political compromise we should be pursuing should be to make Toronto a great city for transit, cycling, and pedestrians during the warmer, brighter half of the year, while allowing cars to continue to be the dominant form of transportation during the colder, darker half of the year.
In the winter, most people do not want to bike, fewer people want to walk to transit stops or wait at outdoor transit stops, and more people want to have street parking so they do not have to walk far to get to and from their parked cars. This will only become true as Baby Boomers get older, as the risk of their slipping and falling on ice becomes more significant. In summer, on the other hand, more people want to bike, people do not mind walking further to and from their parking spot as much, and people do not mind walking to or waiting at a transit stop as much either.
In summer there are also more tourists in the city, who want to use transit (or taxis), and walk or bike. Summer tourism is likely to increase in the future as technology makes it easier for people to travel more, given that many other cities in North America (and the world) are unbearably hot in summer, and given Toronto’s proximity to the lakeside cottages and camping sites of the Canadian Shield.
There are also smog issues during the summer, which could be reduced by using cars less often.
But, you might ask, if we give over most of our road space to transit, cycling, and pedestrians during the good-weather half of the year, what will we do with all of our cars? And woudn’t we have way too few busses and streetcars to facilitate this huge seasonal increase in transit ridership? (And if we buy more busses and streetcars in order to solve this problem, wouldn’t they then be underused during the car-dominated colder half of the year?)
The solution to this problem may, at least in part, be a seasonal form of car-sharing. Torontonians could have the option to make a profit by doing one of the following things:
—not own a car
—renting their car to an Uber driver (or a service like Uber) during the warmer half of the year, so that it could be used as an UberPool vehicle in an HOV lane shared with ttc busses
— renting their car to Car2Go (or a service like Car2Go) during the warmer half of the year, in order to help people travel the first-mile/last mile to and from transit stations
—using their car in cottage country. Or, renting their car to a service like Car2Go in cottage country, so that people could take the train or bus to get to and from cottage country, so that we reduce the economically and environmentally damaging practice of clogging up the highways to Muskoka with cars every weekend
—rent the cars to towns in Northern Canada during the warmer half of the year, since the seasonal changes that Toronto experiences are nothing compared to those Northern Canada does
— maybe, partner with US Sunbelt cities. If they do a reverse version of the seasonal system we do (in other words, if they become transit, cycling, and pedestrian friendly in the winter, when they have great weather, but then go back to being car-friendly in the summer when their weather is way too hot) then Torontonians could perhaps save money by sharing a car with a Southerner, with the Torontonian using the car in winter and the Southerner using the car in summer
Of course, most people won’t rent out their car like this for half the year. But as long as some do, it should be sufficient, given how much more utility can be gotten out of a single car when used as an Uber/UberPool/Car2Go type of vehicle, as compared to when used as a conventional car that mainly sits idle all day and night.
So, instead of fighting for transit-only/cycling/pedestrian/carpool lanes, we should advocate for transit/cycling/pedestrian/carpool seasons.
Future Economics 