Part IV — Who pays · Chapter 15

The Pricing Question

Working chapter of Why can’t Toronto move? — the report’s summary page uses only claims that passed our receipt check. Figures below marked ⚠️ are still in the re-verification queue, labelled honestly rather than hidden. How that works: check our work.

Toronto is banned by two separate provincial statutes from pricing road use at all — and even if both were repealed tomorrow, the design everyone assumes it would take, a ring around downtown, is the wrong shape for how the region actually travels.

Every world-class transit system studied for this report relies on some form of road pricing to fund and manage demand on its network. Toronto currently has none, and getting there is not a matter of City Council finding the will — it is a matter of two statutes, passed by two different governments for two different reasons, both of which the City has no power to touch.

The first wall is the City of Toronto Act itself. Its Section 41 was written into the Act's original 2006 text, and for nearly two decades it was a conditional restriction: the City could not toll a road on its own initiative, but a provincial regulation could, in principle, permit it. That changed in 2025. A re-enactment under that year's provincial budget legislation rewrote Section 41 into an unconditional bar — the City "does not have the power to designate, operate or maintain a highway as a toll highway," full stop, "regardless of the City's purpose... including for the purpose of easing congestion" — and simultaneously repealed the regulatory escape hatch that had made the pre-2025 version merely conditional. In other words, the law got stricter in 2025, not more permissive, and any account of this barrier that treats today's absolute wording as having been true since 2006 is describing a door that used to have a keyhole as if it never did.

The second wall is separate and newer: the 2024 Get It Done Act bans tolls on any highway where the Crown is the road authority, unless a future Act of the Legislature specifically authorizes one. This provision does not touch City-owned roads directly, but it will matter enormously for the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway once their ownership transfers to the province, on a timeline currently targeting 2027 — at which point both would fall under this ban too — and it already governs any provincial highway a regional pricing scheme might want to use. Notably, it does not reach Highway 407, which remains privately operated under its 1999, 99-year lease and sits outside both statutes entirely — which is why the 407 already prices road use at scale while the public network cannot.

Both walls need the Legislature, not City Council, to come down — and the clearest precedent anywhere for how long that actually takes is New York's. Manhattan congestion pricing had been proposed and killed repeatedly since the 1970s before a 2019 state budget bill created the legal authority. Even after that legislative win, actual toll collection didn't start until January 2025 — six years later — because federal highway approval and an environmental review added years on their own, and the program was still paused, revived at a lower toll, and fighting a federal rescission attempt within its first eighteen months of operation. The lesson for Toronto isn't that reversal is impossible. It's that even once the political will exists, it is a multi-year, multi-government fight, not a single vote.

Suppose both statutes were repealed tomorrow. What should Toronto actually price? The near-universal media shorthand is a cordon — a charge to cross a line drawn around downtown, the London and Stockholm model. Toronto's own origin-destination data argues this is close to the wrong design. The 905-region share of Toronto-bound trips has held flat at roughly a quarter since the mid-1990s, even as the region's population has grown, and within that pattern the fastest-growing, least transit-competitive travel is not downtown-bound at all — it's suburb-to-suburb and within-905 trips, more than two-thirds of which are made by car once the distance passes 16 kilometres. A downtown cordon would price almost exclusively the travel market where transit is already the more workable choice, since downtown-bound trips already reach as much as half transit mode share, while leaving completely untouched the car-locked suburban market where transit's share has historically sat at one or two percent. It optimizes for the wrong margin.

A corridor or highway-segment model — pricing the Gardiner, the DVP, and specific 400-series segments rather than a downtown ring — reaches more of that structurally car-dependent travel, at the cost of being harder to administer across City- and provincially-owned roads. It is also the design Toronto has already studied in the most detail: a 2015 analysis modelled a staged rollout, from the Gardiner and DVP alone (order-of-magnitude, roughly half a billion dollars a year in decade-old dollars) up to 400-series segments once transit alternatives opened (order-of-magnitude, low billions a year) — figures now a decade stale and pre-dating the 2024 toll ban, useful for scale only. It also reframes the fairness objection that killed Toronto's last serious attempt: when the province rejected a 2016 proposal to toll the Gardiner and DVP, the stated reason was unfairness to 905 drivers with no vote on the revenue. But 905 drivers are a minority of who would actually be priced on a Toronto-highway scheme — most of the trips affected are Toronto residents on Toronto-owned roads. The real fairness problem runs the other way: a City-only scheme can't reach the 905-internal travel a genuinely regional design would need to touch to move the needle at all — and every implemented example anywhere, London, Stockholm, New York, is single-city, not regional, because multi-municipality consent has proven harder than the technical design itself.

Would Torontonians even pay it? The city has already run two live pricing experiments of its own. TTC's Downtown Premium Express ("14x") routes charged roughly double the base fare and drew a real but thin ridership of about 1,700 riders a day — not enough to cover its own cost, a roughly $1.5-million-a-year shortfall. The Union Pearson Express ran the opposite experiment: cutting its fare by more than half in March 2016, from $27.50 to $12, and ridership roughly quadrupled within months. Read together: Toronto commuters clearly have some willingness to pay for speed, but the profitable band is narrower than either extreme tested, and demand tracks the level of the premium more sensitively than a flat "pay double" model assumes. Highway evidence backs this — HOT-lane research elsewhere consistently finds willingness to pay tracks real-time congestion, not a flat schedule, which is why Ontario's own HOT-lane pilot on the QEW and Highways 403/410 caps permits rather than pricing dynamically, and why the 407 ETR, priced well above anything a Toronto proposal has modelled, has run profitably for over 25 years.

Put together, the evidence argues for a specific, non-obvious package: legal groundwork on both statutes regardless of design choice, since neither can be avoided; a corridor rather than a cordon, matched to where the car-dependent travel actually is; a moderate, dynamically-priced express premium rather than a flat double-fare; and a generous, income-tested exemption structure built in from the start, since Toronto's own history shows fairness, not feasibility, is what kills these proposals.