September 1, 2011
Toronto’s HOV lanes should become toll lanes
Like everyone else, I hate paying tolls, but my time is worth more than the toll to use the faster route. The C.D. Howe Institute is proposing converting the existing (and additional planned) high occupancy lanes on highways to toll lanes:
Car-pool lanes on Canadian highways should be converted to high-occupancy toll lanes to reduce congestion and generate revenue for municipalities, says a C.D. Howe Institute report released Wednesday.
High-occupancy toll lanes differ from high-occupancy vehicle lanes by allowing solo drivers to use them, but at a cost. The lanes require that individual drivers pay to use them, but vehicles carrying more than one passenger can drive on them for free.
“When you have bad congestion, the only way to maximize capacity of the highway is to restrict and manage access,” said Ben Dachis, author of the report. “You do that by charging people for that access.”
My commute into Toronto is pretty much at road speed until I get off the 407 ETR (a toll road) and get on the southbound 404 (a non-toll road with an HOV lane in each direction). That’s about the halfway point of my journey, but I’ll spend 75% of my travel time on the second half of my commute. The HOV lane is rarely full to capacity, and there are always “cheaters” who use the lane even though they’re alone in their vehicles (you can tell because they dart back into the regular lanes at the first hint of a police cruiser ahead).
In my own case, converting the HOV lanes on the 404 to toll would only save me 10-15 minutes, as the Don Valley Parkway does not have HOV lanes, but saving 20-25 minutes per commute would be quite worthwhile for me.
Did Google buy Motorola Mobility just for the tax advantages?
If so, it was probably a brilliant move:
I think we all know that Google’s pretty good at, um, obeying tax laws to the letter. For example, they’ve paid an entire £8m in UK corporation tax on revenues of some £6bn from 2004 to 2010.
[. . .]
However, this deal to purchase Motorola Mobility might be a coup to beat that hands down. The headline price to purchase the handset-maker and their bundle of patents is $12.5bn but that’s not what the net cost to Google might turn out to be. How about $3.8bn for that? For, along with the company and the patents, Google has also bought a series of tax losses.
For the record, it’s cheap politics to accuse a person or a corporation for paying “only” so much tax. If the politicians have set up the system to allow certain deductions or credits, then you’re insane not to take advantage of them. Like a number of headlines over the last day or so, pointing out that this or that company paid less in taxes than they paid their CEO. If the company paid more than it should, it’s depriving its shareholders of what they are rightfully due, and will likely be facing them in court.
