Dear Editor,
Matthew Claxton was right in the first paragraph of his column [Painful Truth: To get to a public transit utopia, stop subsidizing parking, langleyadvancetimes.com, Oct. 4] that there was a lot of talk this election about transit, CO2 emissions, carbon taxes, etc.
But if he wanted to address these issues, I think he turned off onto the wrong road by focusing on parking. Although I agree with his second concluding point that we need to massively increase transit service in our South Fraser region, I was shocked that he made no mention whatsoever of the need to move our private vehicles from gasoline-powered to electric.
That move would be the most effective road to follow if we want to reduce CO2 emissions.
Claxton ended by asking if we could come up with a better plan than his, which advocated (a) reducing the number of parking spaces in our region, (b) massively increasing transit services, and (b) taxing all privately owned vehicles in order to slash the number of such vehicles in our region by half.
Well, my better plan would be (1) to increase transit as he suggests, (2) help people move to electric cars, and (3) let #1 and #2 on their own lead to a significant decrease in the number of privately owned gasoline-powered vehicles.
I think that’s the best plan to “slash CO2 emissions.”
Geoff Dean, Surrey
