The Toronto headache that won’t go away
Vital Signs report indicates city’s traffic woes continue
It’s the problem that keeps on nagging, the bruise that seems to ache forever.
So it won’t surprise anyone that traffic congestion is still a major issue in this city, as underlined in the Toronto Foundation’s Vital Signs Report 2015, published earlier this week.
As much as $6 billion gets wasted every year in lost productivity as Torontonians are stuck in traffic or trying to navigate their way through a transit system that’s crowded and underdeveloped for a city this big.
The report highlights transporta- tion as “one of the key weaknesses in Toronto’s labour attractiveness,” as argued by the Toronto Region Board of Trade, which also indicates the city has the longest average roundtrip commute times — 66 minutes — of any North American city except New York.
By a different measure, the traffic index from Dutch firm TomTom, Toronto is the 47th most-congested city in the world, eighth-most in North America and second-most in Canada, after Vancouver. To put that in perspective, commuters in Istanbul, ranked as the world’s most congested city, are delayed on average110 hours a year. Torontonians are delayed 87 hours a year.
“Obviously, we have a lot of congestion. We’re very frustrated with it. It has clearly been growing worse,” said Eric Miller, a professor with the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute.
He blames the intense politicization of transit issues under the Rob Ford administration — “Subways, subways, subways” — as well as decades of dithering on public transit decisions and an ingrained mindset that the sprawling city should be designed to accommodate the car.
“The crux of it is not enough money, so that encourages people to fight over the money, and we’re dealing with a highly politicized process,” he said. “It has an ideological spin on it. LRT (light rail transit) versus subway is an ideological act of faith or belief. It’s totally irrational.”
Toronto, as the report notes, is in the “rare” position among the world’s top cities of having both long commutes and a low percentage of people who don’t drive to work. According to the 2011National Housing Survey, 47.2 per cent of Torontonians walked, biked or took transit to work, up from 44.2 per cent in comparison to the 2006 census.
TTC ridership rose 1.8 per cent in 2014 to 534.8 million, while GO Transit use jumped from 65.6 million in 2013 to 68.2 million last year.
The Vital Signs report points to programs that address congestion such as Washington state’s Commute Trip Reduction program, which requires big employers to give workers incentives to carpool. It also highlights StudentMoveTO, an initiative that collects data on how students travel to and from University of Toronto, York University and Ryerson University.