There’s a scene from an episode of the Simpsons where Dr. Robert Terwillegar, best known as Sideshow Bob, steps on a succession of rakes that lay at his feet. Each time Bob steps on the upturned rake, the handle flies up and smacks him in the face. Each time this happens, Bob whimpers, but then continues to step on another rake. This continues for what feels like an eternity. And that itself is the joke. All Bob needs to do is stop.
Edmonton is more than a quarter century along in a Robert Terwillegar rake moment. The recent announcement that the Alberta government will invest $120M to widen Terwillegar Drive into a freeway is just another step onto just another rake. It offers a lesson in how it isn’t just city councils and planning departments that build cities. In Canada, it’s our provinces.
Opportunity cost: The Anthony Henday ring road. Credit: Mack Male/Flickr
Freeways are questionable investments for cities in the best of times. During a pandemic that’s plunging us deep into debt, it’s arguable they’re even more questionable. But let’s push that aside and consider what the United Conservative Party government choosing to invest money on another freeway over other projects means for Edmonton. It means yet another investment that leads to Edmonton (and the lesson applies to other provinces and their cities) taxpayers being latched to a development pattern that will lead to higher property taxes. Full stop. Sprawl is expensive. Freeways incentivize sprawl.
While city councils take all the heat in the process of building cities, provinces often force decisions. In choosing to inject their huge resources into projects like the Anthony Henday ring road, the Yellowhead freeway expansion and Terwillegar Drive, and by ignoring others, like transit, they shape the development patterns that make life less affordable and less enjoyable for all of us. Freeways incentivize inefficient, expensive outward development that, over time, drags a city down and forces property taxes to climb.
More concerning is the idea of agency. Once the Terwillegar announcement was made, several city types made note that Edmonton City Council had shared with the UCP government a list of potential capital projects (the whole push here is a laudable effort to create jobs in a province that has shed them during the pandemic) that could be put into commission as economic stimulus. The list is revealing. It includes LRT expansion, recreation centres, a flood mitigation project and several potential road rehabilitation projects. You can have a look here.
But the UCP government seems to have ignored the city’s list and decided on its own what Edmonton needed.
To be extremely fair, the Terwillegar freeway has long been called for and was actually first committed to, in a much different guise, by the former New Democratic Party government. Several have long called for the area to get a freeway, because its traffic levels are high. Several in the city are celebrating the announcement it will be built. And we must celebrate the fact the UCP has decided the project will include space for active transportation lanes and transit lanes. Here’s a news clip.
But, with that out of the way, and to be less charitable to freeways, please consider what Sen. Paula Simons had to say in her former guise as a columnist, as she reflected on the 26 years of capital investment and attention that it took to build the Anthony Henday ring-road around Edmonton (price: more than $4B). Link here.
“The Henday has forever reshaped our city, connecting us in new ways, redefining our city limits, but also connecting communities in new ways. It was originally billed as an industrial corridor to get heavy truck traffic out of the city, not a commuter highway. No one seems to have grasped just how dramatically it would transform urban growth, igniting huge residential building booms outside its boundaries.”
What does not happen in this scenario is an organized plan to build more affordable, more liveable, more desirable, more enjoyable cities. Provinces make decisions that, in reality, city councils will be forced to sort out and find ways to budget for. City councils make decisions that, in reality, are ignored or left to wilt on the vine by provincial governments that control them. Provinces hold the keys to the relationship. They could open it up to allow cities like Edmonton to have more tools to raise money and make their own decisions. It would be a more direct, more democratic arrangement.
But they don’t.
Each new freeway will always have its supporters, who argue that it’s badly needed. In isolation, these arguments are compelling. Taken as a whole, and looking at the development patterns that follow and the higher property taxes that inevitably come with them, these new freeways can be seen as rakes sitting at our feet.
Another one just hit our face.