City of Vancouver investigating road tolls for trips to downtown core

The City of Vancouver is moving a step closer to charging motorists a fee to drive in the downtown core.

The city has issued a request for proposals to conduct a feasibility study on a “road use fee” in the city centre.

The fee would be based on a variety of factors, including vehicle type, time of day, and traffic congestion.

It follows a report in 2018 from the regionally-focused Mobility Pricing Independent Commission, which concluded charging road tolls would be the most effective tool to reduce regional congestion, and that a “downtown cordon” would be an effective component to such a scheme.

That same report determined road pricing could generate up to $25 million per year to fund transit improvements.

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“What we want to be able to do in this phase is really kind of do that forecasting. We need to have a deeper and better understanding of traffic and all mobility trends in a post-COVID recovery for the next five years,” Dale Bracewell, Vancouver’s manager of transportation planning, said.

The city said the initiative as a first step towards a regional road pricing system, and that the focus on the downtown core makes sense given it houses the central business district and is a destination for tourism and sporting events.

“That scale and geography is actually very comparative to Stockholm, London and Singapore,” Bracewell said, referring to other cities which have implemented downtown tolls.

The proposal has not been well received by some downtown businesses and business groups.

“This is just going to push traffic outside the downtown core, and it’s going to force businesses to move outside of the downtown core,” Sunan Spriggs, who owns CityLux Boutique in Downtown Vancouver, said.

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It would be fairer to charge people based on how much they are driving, rather than where they are driving, she said.

“If this is really about reducing the carbon footprint, then we need to look at who’s actually contributing to it.”

Greater Vancouver Board of Trade CEO Bridgitte Anderson raised similar concerns, particularly amid the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Office occupancy in the downtown core is about 10 to 30 per cent, which includes many small and medium businesses that have been devastated by the impact and are trying to open now,” she said.

“They should be focused on the economic recovery and building back the downtown core and not spending resources figuring out how to keep people out.”

No bidder has yet been selected to conduct the feasibility study, and if road pricing were approved, the earliest it could be implemented would be 2026.

The City of Vancouver has set a goal of reducing carbon pollution by 50 per cent and having two-thirds of all trips into the city be by foot, bicycle or transit by 2030.