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You often talk about the “benefits” of public transit. How much does this transport actually cost per kilometer traveled and per passenger (construction, financing, operation and maintenance) compared to car sharing, for example?
Pierre Trudeau
More than 6 billion dollars to extend the blue metro line, 66 million dollars for the purchase of 20 electric buses, 584 million dollars for the construction of an STM garage on rue Bellechasse…
The sums invested in the maintenance, operation and development of the public transport network strike the imagination.
“Is it money well invested? wonder some taxpayers. My car costs me a lot less…”
True, the network is expensive to develop and maintain, but it has a very large number of benefits: it transports more people, reduces the number of cars on the roads, helps reduce GHGs, etc.
The fact is that when we compare the collective cost of public transport to the collective cost of the car, we tend to leave out a lot of things.
“When we look at automobile costs, we often indulge in dishonest accounting,” says Catherine Morency, professor and holder of the Mobility Chair at Polytechnique Montréal. We forget to account for operating costs that are often classified in the “household budget” category, even though they are car-related expenses. »
This point of view is fully shared by Florence Junca-Adenot, associate professor in the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at UQAM. “Beyond the cost of the car, there are insurance, maintenance costs, gas, tires, parking. Then there are the externalized costs: the loss of time in traffic, GHGs, the impact on health and safety. And that’s not counting the cost of road maintenance, which is paid for by our taxes. It’s 5 to 1 in favor of public transport. »
A 2018 study by Trajectoire Québec and the David Suzuki Foundation estimated the annual cost of car use in Quebec at $43 billion (or 11% of GDP that year). At the time, the director of Trajectoire Québec had described this amount as minimal because it did not take into consideration externalized costs such as those related to road accidents, pollution, etc.
Considering all these impacts, we arrived at the sum of 51 billion dollars, he said.
Finally, we can push the cost estimate even further, as does Jean Dubé, professor at the Graduate School of Territorial Planning and Regional Development at Laval University and author of a study on the total cost trips in the metropolitan community of Quebec.
Mr. Dubé notes that the development of public transport has a positive impact on real estate value. An example: in Montreal, a condo near a metro station is more expensive than a house along an urban boulevard or a highway.
Urban sprawl also has a cost that we pay collectively.
In short, no matter how we approach the problem, we always arrive at the same result: the use of the car costs more individually AND collectively for society than the development of public transport.