🔭 PLATFORM VIEW: Josh Matlow’s Road Safety Plan

🔗 LINK: votematlow.ca/traffic-safety

🔧 DOABLE? Yes.

💰 COSTED? Yes.

✨ OVERALL: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4 out of five)

One of the obvious indications that the city is not yet firing on all cylinders when it comes to Road Safety and the “Vision Zero” effort is that the annual capital spend on road safety is way behind the annual operating spend.

It’s not even close. Operating spending for 2023 is $49.3 million, while capital spending is $23 million — less than half as much.

This is bad because capital projects are how you make real progress on road safety. Red light cameras, photo radar and crossing guards are all good and useful things — and all funded by the operating budget — but what actually makes long-lasting change are road reconfigurations.

The idea isn’t to catch drivers behaving badly on our streets. It’s to change our streets so that bad behaviour is discouraged by design.

So yeah, capital should be higher than operating, especially when you consider that much of the city’s vaunted “Road Safety Plan” spending in the operating budget is the crossing guard program, which predates the Road Safety Plan but was lumped in after the plan was developed.

Between 2017 and 2022, the crossing guard program accounted for 65% of operating budget spending on road safety, and 31% of total Road Safety spending, capital and operating.

I’m not against crossing guards at all. I love my local crossing guards. But the goal should absolutely be that our streets — especially near schools! — are designed to be so safe that crossing guards are a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, to ensure safety. Especially considering they’re only on duty for limited hours.

This is a long-winded introduction to get to the point of saying that I quite like that Josh Matlow has a plan to flip the script and spend more on capital than operating.

“By 2025, the new annual budget would be $108.45 million, made up of $56 million in capital expenses and $52.5 million in operating expenses,” the plan says. That’s a 6% growth in operating spending and a whopping 143% growth in capital.

It’s a split that makes a lot more sense.

It’s funded via Matlow’s “City Works Fund” — a 2% tax levy that’s similar to Tory’s “City Building Fund” but with the potential to earmark the levy toward operating needs, in addition to capital.

I’m hoping the Matlow camp provides a full budget soon with a list of all the things they’ve proposed to fund with this levy, but generally, I think it’s a sensible strategy.

PLATFORM VIEW is a daily(ish) feature by City Hall Watcher on Substack Notes. Got a request for a candidate policy proposal I should review? Let me know.