According to a Conservative Party press release of June 9, 2004, Stephen Harper "pledged to help relieve urban traffic congestion, a contributor to smog, through a transfer of gas tax revenues to provinces and municipalities to build roads and highways..." The Canadian federal government candidate appropriately links traffic with smog, since ground-level ozone, the main constituent of smog, is formed by the action of sunlight on NOx and VOCs - and it has been estimated that road vehicles are responsible for about a third of NOx emissions. [Source: Canada's 1995 Criteria Air Contaminant Emissions Inventory, quoted in Background Paper for a Post-Kyoto Transport Strategy by Richard Gilbert.] Unfortunately he is misguided in thinking that building more roads will reduce emissions.
Certainly, frequent stoppages in traffic will reduce fuel efficiency, so reducing traffic congestion will reduce the cost of travel and the emissions per kilometre of travel. But the truth is that road-building has never succeeded in reducing traffic congestion in the long term. In the unlikely event that congestion could be reduced with this strategy, the long-term effects of lower travel costs are likely to be that people will travel more, choosing to live farther from their place of work. As noted in the background paper mentioned above, a vicious cycle is set up where low-density sprawl increases car ownership and use, because for most purposes it is the only available means of transport, and this increases public pressure for more highways. I have a similar concern with the Canadian Automobile Association's recent proposal for addressing traffic congestion in the Greater Toronto Area. The other concern I have is Harper's de-linking of smog from the Kyoto agenda. While scientists and lay persons continue to debate the human contribution to global warming, there can be no doubt that measures implemented to reduce greenhouse gases, in line with Kyoto Protocol targets, will also reduce smog and related health concerns. In 1999, a Canadian National Task Force estimated that "Provincial Taxpayers in Ontario would save $320 - $476 million in health care costs if we could reach our [Kyoto] targets of Nitrogen Oxide and CO2 reductions". Canada is committed, under the Kyoto Protocol, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by the year 2012.
