This just in from the New York Times:
A New Map for America
America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters. …
The problem is that while the economic reality goes one way, the 50-state model means that federal and state resources are concentrated in a state capital — often a small, isolated city itself — and allocated with little sense of the larger whole. Not only does this keep back our largest cities, but smaller American cities are increasingly cut off from the national agenda, destined to become low-cost immigrant and retirement colonies, or simply to be abandoned. …
There are now seven distinct super-regions, defined by common economics and demographics, like the Pacific Coast and the Great Lakes. Within these, in addition to America’s main metro hubs, we find new urban archipelagos, including the Arizona Sun Corridor, from Phoenix to Tucson; the Front Range, from Salt Lake City to Denver to Albuquerque; the Cascadia belt, from Vancouver to Seattle; and the Piedmont Atlantic cluster, from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C.
Federal policy should refocus on helping these nascent archipelagos prosper, and helping others emerge, in places like Minneapolis and Memphis, collectively forming a lattice of productive metro-regions efficiently connected through better highways, railways and fiber-optic cables: a United City-States of America.
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This lesson applies to Canada as well, notably British Columbia – where the provincial government treats Metro Vancouver as a cash cow, but doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the health of the cow.
The whole notion of a nation state has been outdated for the last 20 to 30 years. We should be moving to a two tier level of government… one global and one regional. That would enable us to fix some of the problems on this planet that slip between the bureaucratic cracks.
The BC government 2014-18 budgets indicate a cumulative expenditure of almost $22 billion on province-wide highway operations, while transit receives $3.25 billion in the same period, presumably including grants to TransLink. The fact that the Metro authority has limited powers to charge levies and obtain a large amount of its transit funding independently of the province are vital considerations because they diminish the provincial share accordingly.
So, why does the Metro, which generates half the GDP in the province (over $1 trillion every decade) receive so little in transit funding, which is a uniquely urban requirement? Why is there a 677% discrepancy in operations funding between these two items and no analysis on return on investment?
With this bias in mind, when the premier and transportation minister go on to treat the regional authorities and their policies and plans with hubris and arrogance, I have to wonder when we will become smart enough to push the feds into recognizing regional / metropolitan rule in proportion to its actual economic power. How will Metro mayors coordinate use of that power to get out from under the boot that steps on their collective throats? In purely economic terms, the Metro is the province’s equal.
Mooooooo. >Cough< M-m-m-mooooo.
Similar to Joel Garreau’s 1981 book “The 9 Nations of North America”.
Governance indeed needs a major revamp in Canada, not just BC. Many rules or democratic institutions were drawn up well before the plane, the car, the TV, the internet or the smart phone. Does a federal parliament of well over 330 seats make sense ?
Does a parliament of only 3 parties make sense ? (2 in the US). We need more interests across the political spectrum, i.e. more green, communist or libertarian folks as 2-3 parties is too few a representation of the wide variety of opinion of 35M+ people, may of whom are immigrants.
Also, the very idea to have an MLA or an MP for a small region/constituency makes less sense, than say having 40 BCers being sent to Ottawa, for example, 25 from MetroVan. Those 25 should represent ALL views of 2.5M people, say 10% green, 15% NDP, 30% conservative, 5% Libertarian, 5% communist and 35% Liberal. Our first-past-the-post system is rooted in 18th century democratic British rules that ought to be revisited.
Funding also needs to be more aligned with population, i.e. we have too much money allocated for rural hospitals, rural schools and roads, for example, and too few in big cities.
The core issue is that we collect too many taxes centrally, say in Ottawa or provincially, then re-distribute them. If the feds took half the income taxes, and half the GST, for example, cities could then have their own city income and consumption taxes. THAT to me is the core issue: too high and income tax and GST collected federally.
Cities today rely too much on property taxes and “handouts” from province or feds. If they had their own share of income taxes and consumption taxes we’d have more prosperous cities.
Transportation in North America needs to be better thought out. Other continents, especially Europe and Asia, are leaving us behind with their forward thinking in building dense, complete metro systems and high-speed rail. It makes me wonder, as taxis fight so against Uber, whether airlines are going to the wall lobbying against HSR. Canada should jump ahead of the US and build the first HSR service, from Quebec City to Windsor/Detroit. Wisely it would be used by the Maple Leafs playing in Montreal or Detroit. And what’s stopping a service between Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington, the car lobby? It’s time we get into the 21st century and be competitive, if not leading. Beyond building infrastructure for electric automobiles, we should be building for obviating the need for any automobile within or between our major cities.
I think you need to consider the key distinction between Canada/USA and Asia/Europe: SPACE.
Or the related issue: population density per sq km !
People love their space, be it a garden or the open road or National Parks. Immigrants come to Canada or USA to improve their economic life and escape the very dense, often ugly, often polluted and often overcrowded cities. Whenever I come back from Alberta I think, “Wow Vancouver is dense”, but whenever I come back from Europe I see “wow, it is so spacious”.
Another key advantage Canada and the USA have (or shall I say had ?) over Europe is cost of energy. Energy use is highly related to economic progress. If you make energy expensive, through excessive regulations, taxation (incl. the latest tax grab, in the name of the environment or “climate”, carbon taxes) you directly impact negatively people’s well being. A $ spent on energy is a $ you cannot spend on other stuff, such as a nicer house/condo, a new dress, time with family or friends, a meal out, a new sail boat etc ..
Energy poverty is a new term as folks spend too much to heat (or cool) their home due to massive tax hikes and regulations, as we see in Europe where electricity is tripe to septuple (yes, 7 fold in some cases) what we pay here. That is why some countries, like Spain, Germany or UK, are dialing back the renewable clock and subsidy on all the green subsidies. Good views here, from a nuclear industry perspective http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/energy-subsidies-and-external-costs.aspx or here http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/business/international/uk-subsidies-solar-wind.html
[ love to see some more posts on that btw .. as nuclear has many advantages like very high energy density and low carbon emissions that is relevant to many .. it is real green actually ]
People in Canada and the US love their individual cars. Yes one day they will be electric, or a large %, or at least hybrid (like mine today) or self-driving, or with a self-drive assist mode, or far smaller, or pedaled with e-assist, or smaller, or three-wheeled, but the individual transportation vehicle will be here forever ! That doesn’t mean free parking or cars everywhere like in Vancouver today, it could also mean shared or parked outside a dense urban core. Not everyone loves to live in a small condo with 100,000+ other very near by. Some do, and many do not. As such we must design cities for every person in mind, not just the anti-car high-density crowd but also the green botanist in the Fraser valley or the 10 person family in Richmond/Surrey which needs 3-4 vehicles to move about !
What is missing today is proper road pricing – in both its state, driving and parked – as even a Tesla or an AV will use a bridge or a tunnel and as such ought to pay for its use. Road tolls or per km charges will replace gasoline surcharges eventually. However, the individual car will stay with us for many more decade, centuries likely !
Paul; California is building a high-speed rail line from San Francisco to LA and on to Anaheim.
At this point the cost is US$64 billion, or about $80 billion Canadian.
Québec City to Windsor would comparably cost over $100 billion. One has to also take into account snow. Trains will not be cruising along at 200 kpm during or after a big snowfall. You’re going to need some big snowplows along that 1,100 km run. The usual way to handle big snowfalls along rail tracks can also be massive blowers on the front of plows. These go slowly, so during much of the winter the trains would probably be going very slowly.
It’s difficult to conceive any other route in Canada. Even if there is another route the Québec one will obviously be first. California hopes to be in service in 2029 – 13 years time, if all the money can be found. Even if the Liberals in Ottawa were to consider this they’d have to commission an updated study first. This would take a few years. The earliest we could see any fast train in Canada is likely 2040. Justin Trudeau will be celebrating his 70th birthday. Ringo Starr and Raquel Welch will be 100.
$100 billion? You’re looking at roughly the same price to purchase land, build and operate a series of international and local airports in the same corridor. I suggest as a HSR line is completed from Windsor to Quebec City, and is subsequently interconnected to public transit in every city it touches, it will pull ridership from both airports and highways.
What HSR (or even fast commuter rail) can offer is very convenient downtown-to-downtown service. That convenience is very competitive with short-haul airlines which do not usually have inner city airports.
Thomas brought up population without acknowledging 80++% of it is concentrated in a narrow corridor along the US border. The Windsor-Quebec City corridor captures well over 15 million people. Calgary-Edmonton offers the population of Metro Vancouver in a very flat corridor. Vancouver-Seattle is pretty flat and captures over 7 million people, and will eventually be connected to Amtrak’s HSR service all down the West Coast. The main expense of HSR in flat areas will be in grade separation and land acquisition in urban areas.
Snow does not stop the northern Europeans and Chinese from operating their HSRs, or Sweden and Denmark from operating their fast commuter rail services. In fact, snow is no more of an issue than with airports and highways. Cleaning up after a blizzard can be done with periodic closures. You don’t need to de-ice trains or plow rails bare, such as runways. However, freezing rain is an issue on the wires, but that applies to everything, not just rail.
Punching through five mountain ranges in the West and the Laurentians will be expensive because doing so will require a series of long tunnels. The tunnels can be phased over a decade or more and the private sector could assume a lot of the risk with payback through a lease-back arrangement and a surcharge on tickets. This is one of the few P3 projects I could agree to, but the feds have to have a powerful (preferably majority) equity stake to maintain control over the design and long-term financing, and transparent accounting practices.
If California builds the first HSR in North America, good for them…I’m not hung up on being first. Of course HSR won’t replace the private or shared car for many trips but, rather, for those of moderate length between major cities. Imagine Toronto to Ottawa in less than 90 minutes, and another 30 to Montreal. In Cascadia, we may need 3 or 4 times the population, and evidence of prior support for Via/Amtrak, to reach a threshold for feasibility for HSR out here.
As for metro systems, of course they won’t completely replace the car, but can certainly displace the car. In 1989 Arthur Erickson said we should prepare for a regional population of 10 million. Well, since the early 80’s we have doubled, and once we double twice again we will prove his prophesy correct. Once we have 5 or 10 million in Metro Vancouver, we will need to provide the infrastructure like a big-league transit-oriented city – think Madrid, Washington DC, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur rather than Phoenix or Houston. We are fortunate that we don’t have a lot of aged rapid transit infrastructure, like Boston or New York, to sap our resources. Thus, we should continuously be adding to our rapid (and bus) transit network such that within the compact region transit becomes the preferred option for most everyone who isn’t walking or biking. We better get building!