City has ‘long way to go’ in battle with gridlock
Mayor says many drivers ‘haven’t gotten the message’ about obstructing traffic
Mayor John Tory said Monday that he believes the city is making progress in tackling gridlock, but some drivers still haven’t gotten the message about not obstructing busy downtown streets. The mayor made the comments after a four-day enforcement blitz by Toronto police last week that targeted drivers who block rush-hour routes in the city’s core.
According to police, over the course of the initiative, which focused on the area bounded by Bloor St., Front St., Parliament St. and Dufferin St., officers issued 1,467 tickets and towed 298 vehicles.
The crackdown between last Tuesday and Friday was the third such blitz police have carried out since January 2015, when Tory announced a zero-tolerance policy for blocking rush-hour routes.
Speaking to reporters at the intersection of Front and York Sts. on Monday morning, Tory said the high number of tags and tows showed that “we’re making some progress” on improving traffic conditions, “but that we’ve got a long way to go.”
Tory, who made fighting gridlock a central plank of his 2014 mayoral campaign, said “it’s obvious that some people still haven’t got the message in terms of changing their behaviours.
“People just have to know they can’t just walk into a Tim Hortons to get a cup of coffee, or can’t just go in to get their dry cleaning. It disrupts thousands of people literally when they do that, to convenience themselves for a few minutes, and we just can’t have that kind of behaviour continuing,” he said.
The mayor didn’t provide any empirical evidence that the crackdowns have helped alleviate congestion. He said the city only recently started to track traffic flow using sophisticated data and it was too soon to draw conclusions.
But he stated that stepped-up en- forcement would serve as a strong deterrent to drivers who illegally block streets.
“I think when you have your car towed away it would be unlikely, unless you’re really dumb, that you’d do that again,” Tory said.
According to the police, officers gave out fewer tickets last week than in the previous rush-hour blitz, which took place over five days last October.
During that crackdown, police issued 2,078 tickets and towed 406 vehicles.
Between January and August of this year, police gave out 54,206 tickets for rush-hour offences and towed 12,595 vehicles.
That’s fewer than the 56,494 tickets they issued over the same period in 2015, but they towed fewer cars during the first eight months of last year — a total of 11,234.
Both years saw significant increases compared with the first eight months of 2014, when police wrote 42,152 rush-hour tickets and towed 5,790 vehicles.
Although the traffic blitzes have become a feature of the first two years of Tory’s administration, the mayor asserted that in the long term, the “real solution” to Toronto’s congestion problems depends on adding capacity to the transit system and facilitating active transportation such as cycling and walking.
Before his press conference Monday, the mayor took a ride in a news helicopter to observe traffic patterns from the sky. He said that he checked in on the newly installed Bloor St. bike lane pilot project and that “traffic seemed to be moving fairly well” along the street.