City to jack tax on vehicle fee by $60 to boost transit service
Peter Black, Local Journalism Initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
Vehicle owners in Quebec City will be paying $60 more when they renew their registrations, a move by the city to raise money to expand urban transit service.
Mayor Bruno Marchand announced at a Sept. 11 news conference that the hike will take effect on Jan. 1, 2025, when the public transit contribution of vehicle registration will jump from $30 to $90, on top of the regular fee.
The $30 fee has been in effect since 1992; motorists in the Montreal region have been paying a special transit fee since 2011.
The measure, which the Quebec government made available to all municipalities in the province earlier this year, will affect some 300,000 vehicle owners in the Quebec City region. It is expected to raise $18.4 million in the first year, all of which, the mayor said, will be targeted to public transit improvements.
“We are waging a war on congestion,” Marchand said. “The longer we wait to develop the public transport network, the more congestion increases.”
Saying he was not happy to announce a fee increase, the mayor argued, “There is a cost associated with conges- tion. The family that has to buy a second or third car for their child who has to go to CEGEP represents an annual expense of thousands of dollars. The hours lost in traffic are time that people don’t have with their families and for themselves. Congestion has an economic cost and an impact on quality of life.”
The trade-off for the fee hike is an expansion of the Réseau de Transport de la Capitale (RTC) network with a plan rolled out over the next three years.
Each year, according to a press release, the RTC plans to add a new fast, high-frequency Metrobus-type route to serve the northern suburbs, a new peripheral sector served by Flexibus with local routes revised accordingly, extension of the àVélo bike-sharing network, and a new Parc-O- Bus lot.
Coun. Maude Mercier Larouche, RTC president and executive committee member, said, “Year after year, the same problem arises: the RTC wants to develop and improve its services, but the funding is not there. Today, we are taking steps to remedy this and are presenting you with an ambitious development plan that meets the needs of our citizens and users.”
Opposition councillors had a variety of reactions to the fee hike, a step dozens of other municipalities have already taken, with fees higher than Quebec City’s $60. Opposition Leader and Québec d’Abord Coun. Claude Villeneuve, whose party is the successor to former mayor Régis Labeaume’s Équipe Labeaume slate, convened a press conference to show plans for RTC network expansion that the Labeaume administration had drawn up – which he said were very similar to the plan Marchand unveiled.
Villeneuve told reporters, “We clearly have a mayor who is waving this plan around with his left hand and who, with his right hand, is going into the pockets of families to get more money – money that will not deliver more mobility and fluidity.”
Transition Québec Leader and Limoilou Coun. Jackie Smith, meanwhile, while sup- portive of the increased fee, offered other suggestions. In a news release, she proposed “the city offer the Opus card [transit pass] free of charge to residents of the neighbourhoods on the northern out- skirts of Quebec City who will pay the registration tax.
“The city is presenting us with an interesting project for what it will do with the money collected for the development of the public transit network in Quebec City, but I’m increasingly wary of these plans that are being dangled before us. As long as the CAQ is in power, I’m afraid that all mobility projects in Quebec City will remain imaginary projects,” said Smith.
To encourage drivers to try RTC services, the city plans to offer eight free bus tickets, a $30 value, upon request as of Jan. 1.