CANADA’S WORST BOTTLENECK,
The Canadian Automobile Association ( CAA) recently released a study — Grinding to a Halt: Evaluating Canada’s Worst Bottlenecks — detailing the congestion that has become a blight on most of Canada’s large urban centres. It is 81 pages of scientific analysis spelling out in excruciating detail the nightmare many of Canada’s commuters face each workday.
Unsurprisingly, Toronto ranked worst in pretty much every category. Torontonians wasted more time (roughly 3.2 million hours), wasted more gas (5.7 million extra litres of fuel) and emitted an estimated 15 million extra kilograms of greenhouse gases by crawling along at sub-optimal speeds. And that’s just accounting for the delays on one stretch of congestion: the 15.3 kilometres of Highway 401 that stretch from Highway 427 to Yonge Street. Add up fuel wasted in all of Toronto’s bottlenecks — the CAA says the GTA accounts for 10 of the 20 most congested roads in the country — and you’ve needlessly consumed an extra 12.7 million litres of fuel.
Other measurements don’t paint a rosier picture of southern Ontario traffic. Add up the hours wasted in the same 10 GTA traffic jams and motorists are wasting some 7.7 million hours — roughly 900 years — (almost) immobile behind the wheel.
Rush-hour motorists in the GTA can expect to spend 60 per cent more time getting home than when their route is at its maximum efficiency. By comparison, Montreal and Vancouver drivers will only see their commutes extended by 40 per cent. That’s it, then. Point proven: Toronto’s commuters are justified in claiming their drive home is the most frustrating in the land. Or not. Statistics, as Aaron Levenstein, professor emeritus of business at Baruch College, once opined, really are like bikinis: What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. For instance, in that last analysis suggesting even on a per-kilometre basis Torontonians had the worst commute in Canada, it was neither Montreal nor Vancouver that was the second worst city in the land. It was Hamilton. The reason it fared so poorly is that when its relative paucity of roads do get plugged on a percentage basis, it’s fairly bad. Suggesting, however, that Hamiltonians suffer worse traffic congestion than Montreal or Vancouver is total nonsense.
Indeed, to truly compare commutes, one has to look at specific data. For instance, while the 401’s congestion is definitely the most time consuming, it may not be the most tedious. By the CAA’s measure, for instance, Toronto’s own Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway are slower, and their logjams last all day. At its slowest, that 15.3-km stretch of Canada’s busiest highway averages just under 50 km an hour; in comparison, drivers on the DVP often putt along at less than 40 klicks. The question, then, is which is more frustrating: to motor along at moderate speeds for a longer period of time or to crawl a shorter, but possibly more dispiriting, distance?
It’s a question Vancouverites understand. While traffic in British Columbia’s biggest city is unquestionably horrific, it might surprise commuters from Surrey and Langley to find out the Lion’s Gate and Port Mann bridges don’t even make the Top 20 bottlenecks in the country.
That’s because what the CAA is measuring is the relative difference between free-flowing motoring (called Maximum Throughput Speed) and bumper- tobumper traffic. Because the expectations for both downtown streets are so low — the best West Georgia ever averages is about 30 km/h, says the CAA — the fact it sometimes crawls along at less than 20 km/h is, comparatively, not that bad. That Vancouverites are forced off their freeways onto arterial streets to get downtown is not something easily quantified, but must nonetheless be incredibly frustrating.
Finally, it’s important to put the CAA’s most headline-generating conclusion — that Toronto’s 401 traffic is bad enough to rank in the Top 10 of North American bottlenecks — into perspective. Again, it depends on how you parse the statistics. Chicago’s I90, for instance, sees its average speed diminish from 85 miles per hour (135 km/h) at its peak to barely above 30 mph ( 48 km/ h) at its worst. That’s a 40 per cent greater speed differential than the 401 suffers at its worst (roughly 100 km/h slowing down to 50).
It is the CAA’s inability to quantify expectations that is the study’s only fault (otherwise, Grinding to a Halt is an absolute font of knowledge). While it details the loss in productivity and even the environmental impact from the congestion on Canada’s busiest thoroughfares, it can’t measure the damage done to the human psyche. Is it the duration of a traffic jam or its intensity that’s more exasperating? Is sitting at a stoplight on Granville more frustrating than poking along the 401 at 50 km/h?
For all its detail of kilometres driven and time wasted, Grinding to a Halt still doesn’t convey the frustration of the driver stuck in traffic. Or answer the age-old question of which city’s traffic is worst.