Can’t stand Montreal traffic? You could be part of the solution

September

signifies the end of summer vacations, the start of a new school year and, for many of us living in Canada’s big cities, a return to the daily commute. Not only are school hallways flooded again, so are the roads, buses, trains and subways that allow us to get from Point A to Point B.

This also means delayed buses, traffic jams, complaints and expletives. While a good dose of venting may temporarily alleviate commuting stress, for a longer-term fix we need to become agents of change by making sure we provide our transport agencies with the data they need to initiate improvements.

Because fall is when most people are back on the roads and using public transit, it’s also the season when provincial and regional governments collect information on household travel patterns. They determine how many people are travelling where, and by what mode of transport, in our cities. This lets them know where the traffic problems are worst. It also allows them to understand travel behaviour, predict future bottlenecks, and plan how to invest their limited resources in our transport system to ensure the best outcomes.

Good user information is the key to identifying and implementing potential improvements to existing systems, to building smarter and more sustainable transportation networks. Yet getting ordinary commuters to participate in user surveys is a difficult challenge for policy-makers.

In Montreal, information being gathered through origin/designation surveys carried out by telephone will be used to evaluate the impact of three proposed new métro extensions. As well, the Agence métropolitaine de transport is conducting an origin/destination survey, as it has every five years since the 1970s, and the goal is to get around five per cent of households (roughly 70,000) in the Greater Montreal Area to respond.

The collection of data is costly in terms of time and money, but the results serve to help inform investment decisions worth billions of dollars. And those investments can save us all the continuing frustration and lost time spent in traffic messes.

So if the phone rings this fall and it’s a transit survey, don’t ignore it. Have your say by answering the questions. Your input can shape the future of our transportation networks.

Zachary Patterson is a professor in the department of geography, planning and environment and holds the Canada Research chair in transporation land-use interactions and regional sustainability at Concordia University.