Geoff Ghitter

Sprawling auto-dependent suburbs are fast becoming unaffordable

The Calgary Board of Education made two significant yet contradictory announcements last month. The first was that cutbacks caused by budget shortfalls would result in the loss of 400 teaching positions, among other things.

The second was that a proposed hike in school busing fees, which would have increased the cost to families by 60 per cent, was voted down by the board.

The province has made it clear there will be no new funding to cover budget shortfalls, so money once used for silly things like hiring teachers and ensuring adequate classroom resources is instead being diverted to pay for rising transportation costs. What cruel irony.

For now, busing fees will remain at $200 per child to a maximum of $400 per family. The board’s transportation budget next year is expected to exceed $37 million, the equivalent of 500 entry-level teaching positions.

But no matter who pays, the costs remain.

Taxpayers already cover most of the costs and this would not have changed even if hikes had been approved. The new fees would have boosted the cost of a one-way ride from 55 cents to 91 cents — still only about half of Calgary Transit’s $1.75 youth fare.

The biggest losers are families in neighbourhoods where schools within walking distance have been closed, so they now must bus their kids to the suburbs. Low-income families and their children are being punished the most as the cut-off for receiving assistance is a mere $26,000 for a family of four. For such families, even $25 a month makes a big difference.

Many suburban families, already stressed by added effects of rising energy prices — which in turn increase the costs of everything else from fuel to food to manufactured goods — are reaching their limits.

And all families that are confronted with busing fees, of any size, lose. This is because the “fee” is not a fee at all. It’s a targeted, regressive education tax penalizing families with kids in the system, with the poorest paying proportionally the most.

There are other less obvious costs of excessive school busing. Getting 30,000 kids to and from school at the busiest times of the day adds considerable congestion to already crowded city streets. And, of course, the kids themselves pay a huge price as they are forced to spend countless hours of their youth riding school buses. Counterproductive is a polite way to describe it.

There are many culprits responsible for this backwards state of affairs, but at its heart, it’s not a funding problem — it’s a sprawl problem.

Rising transportation costs, including school buses, are a by-product of the way we have built the city – spread over the Prairie like jam on toast. As the distance between where children live and go to school increases, so does the cost of getting them there.

We entertain the myth that suburbs provide “affordable housing.” But it only seems that way because many of their costs, school bus fees being only one example, are subsidized by taxpayers. Now that these costs can no longer be contained, another strand in that myth is unravelled.

Next column: Linking affordable housing and transportation choices

Geoff Ghitter teaches urban studies at the University of Calgary and his blog is geeessgee.blogspot.com. Noel Keough is an assistant professor in the faculty of environmental design at the university, and is co-founder of Sustainable Calgary Society. He can be reached at nkeough@ucalgary.ca.