As noted in Chapter 1, throughout the U.S. and Canada, as well as most of the industrialised world, the time has long passed since public transportation can be considered as a profitable operation that provides a return on investment. All Canadian transit operators, for example, rely on subsidies to cover some of their operating and maintenance costs and all of their capital requirements. Such subsidies are essentially justified, from the standpoint of elected officials at the municipal level and in a few cases at the provincial level, who must approve budgets, on grounds of direct transportation benefits and broader co-benefits that are generated by the provision of urban transit service to the communities at large. Decisions to subsidise urban transit basically imply that various monetary and non-monetary benefits, in aggregate, are perceived to outweigh public monetary costs. Nevertheless, most Canadian municipalities today are unable to find the funding (particularly capital) required to maintain existing transit services, let alone expand transit systems and levels of service, solely from property taxes. As a result, in almost every municipality, there is a growing lobby for financial assistance from senior levels of government to assist in meeting the transit needs of the future. Recognising these challenges along with the opportunities provided by urban transit for achieving improved economic, social and environmental conditions in Canadian cities, the federal government has singled out urban transit as a new area of federal government interest, stating in the most recent Speech from the Throne that it will "co-operate with provincial and municipal partners to help improve public transit infrastructure". Largely on this basis, Transport Canada has initiated three consultant studies that focus, respectively, on developing and national ivsion for urban transit, an analysis of the current state of urban transit in Canada, and development of a benefit-cost framework for assessing investment in urban transit. This report deals with the development of a national vision for urban transit, drawing on domestic and international experience and on new proposals by the report's authors, as well as limited stakeholder consultation. This report is available in pdf format (at August 2002) on Transport Canada's web site at http://www.tc.gc.ca/programs/Environment/UrbanTransportation/transitstu… (Author/publisher)
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