Sometimes traffic miracles do happen
Let us all take a moment, shall we, to bear witness to the Miracle on King Street.
Just months ago, during rush hour, the transit priority corridor there was functioning more as a streetcar parking corridor. The relentless grind of Toronto traffic congestion, ever more relentlessly grinding due to overlapping construction closures on virtually every nearby avenue, meant that a streetcar on the route would often take over an hour to travel the 2.6 kilometres from Bathurst to Jarvis Street. When a Star reporter tested it in November, the trip via streetcar took 79 minutes, an average pace of about two kilometres per hour.
An able-bodied person can walk that corridor in about half an hour. Heck, a determined turtle can travel on land almost twice as fast as those red rockets were going.
By last month, the trip had been cut by 66 per cent: the travel time was one-third of what it had been, according to the city. This is welcome. It is also remarkable.
If there’s one iron rule of Toronto traffic, it is that nothing ever speeds up. Unless, it seems, you put some people in uniforms out there to wave at drivers.
This week, my esteemed colleagues Lex Harvey and Lance McMillan documented some of the miracle workers — the city apparently prefers the term “traffic agents” — who have made it happen. Those agents explained the seemingly mundane task of directing traffic in ways that get it to flow.
They mention a topic I covered in a previous column, and one that stands out in a city report on the problems that had been noted, which is getting cars to obey the transit-priority rules that basically require them to turn right at the end of every major block rather than proceeding through. A University of Toronto study documented 6,800 such infraction per day. (6,800! per! day! That’s roughly one infraction every 15 seconds.)
Those agents also mentioned something that Mayor Olivia Chow highlighted in her press conference on the success story, and something Matt Elliott recently wrote a column about more broadly in the city — stopping vehicles from “blocking the box.”
Here’s where I think the specific King Street results are kind of interesting.
Typically when we think of blocking the box and creating gridlock, we think of a car proceeding into an intersection on a green light when it cannot make it through, with the result that when the light changes, the cross traffic is entirely blocked.
My own observation of some major intersections along the King corridor before and after the traffic-agent-assisted transformation — observation inspired by a specific complaint sent to me by a streetcar driver — is that what was typically happening on King Street was slightly different. On a green light, streetcars were (usually) not proceeding into the intersection when they could not clear it — and since streetcars are so long, they need to wait for 30 metres of space to free up on the far side, which is about six family-car lengths. Meanwhile, drivers at the adjacent red light waiting to turn right would see the available space and turn on the red — often legally! — which would fill all the space.
Sometimes then when the light turned green, you’d see cars pull out and get stuck for a full cycle and wind up blocking the box too, making the problem all the worse. At least once a streetcar driver got fed up and pulled across and got a wellpublicized ticket for blocking the box.
The point here is that the presence of traffic agents who can see what’s happening and hold back right-turning traffic to ensure streetcars can get through appears to have made a massive difference.
And if the budget for miracle working traffic agents is limited, perhaps a part of the solution here after hours and at other intersections experiencing similar problems is to forbid right turns on red lights. (Elliott’s column this week talked about the complications of enforcing box-blocking with traffic cameras, but I note that turning right on a red without stopping first is already enforced by cameras — perhaps illegal rights on red where it is forbidden could be too?)
It seems like there’s a specific lesson to be drawn from the King Street Miracle about that sort of problem, and perhaps it could have broader application. But perhaps there’s a more general lesson too.
Generally, traffic congestion is a factor of volume, and very few enforcement or rule tweaks you implement are going to move the needle much, except in special circumstances. But Toronto is, at the moment, virtually all special circumstances. Between subway construction and condo construction and water main repairs and long-term road rebuilding virtually every block of downtown has some weird exceptional thing going on that’s snarling traffic.
And even across the city in places without construction oddities, you can find seemingly unexpected places where traffic bottlenecks because of factors you can observe: in some places, the whole road blocks up because of traffic waiting to turn left in a place where there is no advance green or left-turn signal phase (or very short ones); in other places, you see traffic backing up for blocks because no rights are allowed on a red and pedestrian traffic is so heavy that no rights get made on the green, either. All three lanes of Spadina get backed up for blocks and blocks at some times of the day because of traffic trying to get onto the westbound Gardiner ramp, and that jam-up leads to oodles of left-turning box blockers coming off cross streets that wind up holding up the dedicated streetcar lane traffic too.
Maybe these special cases have no solution, and we’re just stuck wishing we were travelling on turtleback instead of in a car or TTC vehicle. Maybe rather than a traffic tweak they need a miracle to improve.
But it appears that miracles can happen. We’ve all witnessed one on King Street this year.