Few urban experiences are less pleasant than waiting for a taxi in the middle of a Canadian winter. When temperatures dip, demand soars. Ordinary citizens begin to hijack other peoples’ taxis to avoid intolerable waits. It’s every man, woman, and child for him, her,...
Transportation
Cabbies, customers deserve better
Winnipeg's taxi business represents a textbook case of what economists call "regulatory capture" -- the Taxicab Board pays more attention to protecting cab owners' capital gains than the needs of their customers, who want more cabs, better service and lower prices. In...
Losing Canadian Travellers To American Airports
Five million Canadians cross the border each year to fly from U.S. airports and save hundreds of dollars on the cost of a single vacation. Travelling from a Canadian airport costs more in several ways, especially when you add up airport fees and taxes. The U.S. sees...
High-Speed Rail Not Best Use of Taxpayer Money on the Prairies
There is renewed discussion in Alberta about building a high-speed rail link between Calgary and Edmonton. The idea has been around in one form or another for more than 30 years, but experience elsewhere in the world suggests that a high-speed train on the Canadian...
Featured News
Coal – Not Wind – is Keeping Saskatchewan’s Lights On
While it’s not the same minute-by-minute data provided by the Alberta Electric System Operator for their grid, SaskPower has begun breaking down where its power is coming from on a daily basis. And the data from Oct. 3 and 4 showed wind generated an average of just...
57 Policy Proposals for Future Leaders to Help Make the Canadian Economy Soar
Executive Summary The various federal political parties are all promoting the policy agendas they believe will foster a sustainably high quality of life for all Canadians. It remains to be seen whether they will attain the success that they aim to achieve. In some...
The High Cost of Calgary’s Low-Cost Transit
Those figures conveniently ignore some pretty substantial light rail costs. For one thing, they count only capital costs from the first nine years of C-Train development, when the city spent $18 million per kilometer to build the initial phases. Those were the cheapest phases, of course, because they focused on the highest density routes, heavily centred around downtown—“the low hanging fruit.”
Dispelling the Myths of the CTrain: After 30 years and $2 billion, the CTrain worsened Calgary’s automobile dependency
Though presented as an inexpensive and efficient form of mass public transportation, the Calgary LRT has done little to curb automobile usage or contain the urban sprawl after 30 years and $2 billion.
30 Years of the C-Train: A Rejoinder
I've spent a good chunk of the last few months working on a study of Calgary's light rail transit (C-Train) system, which was released today by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. I've had a long standing interest in LRT systems, and spent the summer of 2009...
Media Release – The 30th Anniversary of the C-Train: A Critical Analysis of Calgary’s Light Rail Transit System
The costs of LRT are understated while its benefits are overstated. LRT is often thought of as a happy medium between buses and trains. In reality, it combines their disadvantages. Light rail transit is slow, inflexible, and expensive
The 30th Anniversary of the C-Train: A Critical Analysis of Calgary’s Light Rail Transit System
The costs of LRT are understated while its benefits are overstated. LRT is often thought of as a happy medium between buses and trains. In reality, it combines their disadvantages. Light rail transit is slow, inflexible, and expensive
What is so hard about pricing roads properly?
Smart environmentalists should have road pricing as their most urgent priority.
High-Speed Rail, Budget Buster: Virtually everywhere it has been constructed, taxpayers have lost out
If the nation is going to reduce its out-of-control spending, the first step is to stop spending money on things we do not need. Despite President Obama’s call in his State of the Union speech for linking 80 percent of the nation by high-speed rail, it is hard to imagine a more unnecessary program.
Calgary’s Taxis: With the Right Expectations, Everybody can be Happy: Calgary’s taxi system is out of step with trends in the wider world beyond it.
Any honest assessment of Calgary’s taxi market would have asked why a tiny minority of plate holders are able to earn monopoly rents of hundreds of thousands of dollars per week. A recent report which acknowledged but evaded this question showed just how powerful are the vested interests in Calgary’s taxi industry.
Rail Competition
The issue of rail competition is getting some attention by shippers. I notice that the Keystone Ag Producers are encouraging members to express their views.
A while back, Laura Rance had an article on the subject in the Winnipeg Free Press where she made a couple of good points.
We’ve all heard tales of the inefficiencies that have plagued centrally planned economies in far-off places. The compounding effects — sluggish supply chains, lower productivity, missed delivery targets and people who could be working standing around with nothing to do — eventually drag the economy so deeply into an abyss it takes a revolution to get things rolling again. It turns out, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a tinpot dictatorship or railway executives running the show; if there isn’t enough competition in the system, or regulation that compensates for that lack of competition, efficiency falls off the tracks.