Eyes on the roads
Inside Toronto’s traffic nerve centre, staff are using new technology to ease the city’s ever-worsening gridlock
On a weekday afternoon, in a building near Thorncliffe Park, several people sit in a dark room, watching the images displayed on the dozens of TV screens that line the walls.
The atmosphere is calm — only the sounds of typing and beeping of radios break the quiet. The hush inside the room is a far cry from what’s being shown on the monitors: close-ups of some of Toronto’s gnarliest intersections.
The10 or so people in the room are technicians and engineers tasked with tackling Toronto’s traffic jams.
With endless construction — including hugely disruptive closures on the west side of the Gardiner Expressway and at Queen and Yonge streets — causing crushing gridlock downtown at almost all hours of the day, many drivers have reached their limits.
In its attempts to ease the pain, the city is trying to keep vehicles moving on a micro level by deploying traffic agents at clogged intersections such as King Street and University Avenue. Last Wednesday, the Star visited Toronto’s traffic operations centre in North York to see how the city is keeping traffic moving on a macro, system-wide level. It’s not an easy task.
“You really have to be strategic about what you implement, and where and how and when,” said Roger Browne, Toronto’s director of traffic management.
Among other things, the traffic engineers at the operations centre have the ability to adjust the timing of Toronto’s roughly 2,500 traffic signals based on real-time conditions — adding a little extra green time here or there to keep road users moving.
Staffed 24 hours a day, the main control room is lined with screens focused on some of the city’s most crucial (and troublesome) intersections.
On a map speckled in coloured dots, engineers can zoom in on any intersection in the city and see how crowded it is. Pedestrians are red dots, cyclists are green, cars are blue, buses are pink.
The engineers are assisted by technology. Roughly 200 of Toronto’s traffic signals are equipped with smart technology, which enables the signals to change based on realtime traffic conditions. Toronto is also launching a pilot project to add artificial intelligence cameras and sensors to five downtown intersections.
For example, smart signals on the Queensway have been increasing green light times to accommodate higher volumes of eastbound traffic, Browne said.
On Wednesday, all eyes were on the west end of the Gardiner and the surrounding arteries. Since April 15, a stretch of the Gardiner between Dufferin Street and Strachan Avenue has been reduced to just two lanes as part of a multi-year rehabilitation plan for the aging highway. The closure has caused further traffic chaos in Toronto’s west end, jamming not just the highway itself but also parallel routes.
Even at 3:30 p.m., things were getting clogged at British Columbia Road and Lake Shore Boulevard — a “hot spot” for engineers to observe the knock-on effects of the Gardiner construction, Browne said.
At one point, an engineer spotted a two-car collision on the Gardiner near Jameson Avenue, heading eastbound. She radioed in the incident to Toronto’s road operations.
Beyond tackling gridlock, the engineers are responsible for feeding information to police and the media.
They can also change the signs on highways to inform the public of delays or accidents.
Changing signal timing is the main tool the city can deploy to ease congestion, and traffic engineers make some 6,000 signal changes throughout the year. Browne said the city expects to change the timing of roughly 60 signals in the coming months to accommodate extensive closures on King Street as a water main and streetcar tracks are replaced.
To help with Gardiner spillover traffic, the city recently extended green light times on Lake Shore from 160 to 176 seconds. Browne said that has helped expedite traffic along the busy route. Even when the Gardiner is jammed, traffic on Lake Shore past Jameson is still relatively free-flowing, Browne said, encouraging drivers to make use of this alternative, as well as the Queensway.
There’s only so much the city can tweak. Even the slightest change can cause knock-on effects across the whole grid.
“It’s a bit of a balancing act,” Browne said.