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Full article here at the Financial Post.

A simple post of a article hat highlights the similar  road issues Toronto has and possible methods to pay for the repair and replacement of our crumbing roads.

…all excerpts below from the article, much more in the complete article.

The sheer size of those needs, combined with a diminishing capacity to pay for it with public money, may speed up private sector involvement in the province unlike anything seen before in Canada.

“We believe this year is going to be a game-changer,” said Vincent Joli-Coeur, vice-chairman of National Bank Financial, which has participated in several major infrastructure financings including the bond sale for Montreal’s $2.6-billion CHUM hospital redevelopment. “In the past, we used to be able to spend years discussing new ways of [project procurement and funding]. Now it’s imminent.”

The only question is just how creative Quebec will get with its funding solutions. Mr. Joli-Coeur believes necessity will push the province to bring in private investors such as pension plans to fund things that were previously unthinkable, including public transit development.

“Public transit, in our view as financiers, is the next frontier,” he said. “It’s never been financed in the private sector in Canada.”

Ontario, too, wants to undertake a massive public transit expansion in the Toronto-Hamilton area. To pay for it, a government-appointed advisory panel in December recommended raising existing gasoline taxes as much as 10¢ per litre to 24.7¢ and weighing an increase in the province’s harmonized sales tax. The panel also discussed increasing corporate taxes and using a mechanism known as “land value capture,” which would collect part of the increase in the value of land located near new transit lines.

Most of those solutions wouldn’t fly in Quebec without drawing significant public protest. Quebec motorists already pay 22.2¢ per-litre in gas tax, and with salaries barely budging year-over-year, people won’t want to pay much more. Meanwhile, the government already increased its provincial sales tax in both 2011 and 2012.

“Most of the revenue tools [being contemplated] by Ontario to finance public transit will have a hard time being sold in Quebec,” Mr. Joli-Coeur said. “The conventional ways of doing things … has to change.”

Take Hong Kong. The city’s Mass Transit Railway Corp. (MTR) carries five million passengers every weekday over 218 kilometres of rail lines, offering its customers things other transit systems only dream of: 3-G and free wi-fi telecommunications service for passengers, public computers, library book drops, elevators down to track-level, and first-class cars on longer routes. It’s one of the few transit agencies anywhere that actually makes money.

“If the infrastructure is not self-sustaining, it cannot rely on public funding always being there,” MTR chief executive Jay Walder told an audience last year at Harvard University. “At some point politics simply diverts the money elsewhere.”

The thinking in all of these mechanisms is that expanding transit boosts the value of property near the transit lines, and that those who benefit from that should contribute to the cost. The tricky part, however, lies in how to go about it. Tax businesses too much and you risk scaring them away. Ask too little and you don’t generate enough money to fund your projects.

“The development community are not adverse to participating in the cost of certain transportation investments because they know that they are the beneficiary,” said Blake Hutcheson, chief executive of Oxford Properties, the real estate investment arm of pension fund manager OMERS. “The difficulty is how do you get at that, how do you quantify it?”

Oxford Properties is involved in a separate real-estate/transit development project in Manhattan called Hudson Yards.