Recently the Conference Board of Canada released a study that claims that upwards to 90% of Ontario road costs are covered by drivers. The purported findings of the study were gleefully touted by all major news sources, and if one was careless enough to read appending user-comments, one could expect that they were rife with remarks of smug self-satisfaction and entitlement, and perhaps claims of moral superiority in the horrific “war on cars.” I was immediately sceptical of the findings because previous studies have estimated, on a national level, that driver-related revenues covered upwards to 64% of road costs, and I argued that even this was probably an overestimate.

Predictably, most of the media reports did not pay close attention to the ranges (often just reporting the 90% figure) and methodologies used, nor did any of them spot or comment on any of the obvious issues in the study. I figured this was typical journalistic inaccuracy and sensationalism. But then I read the press release on the Conference Board of Canada’s website. It leads off by claiming “Majority of Ontario Road Infrastructure Costs Paid by Motorists.”

This is a false statement. Continue reading →