Complaining About Toronto Traffic is the new National Sport
Anybody who is surprised that Toronto traffic is worse than it used be is ignoring the basics.
Complaining about Toronto's traffic could be the new national sport. I say this while sitting on my balcony which offers the vantage point visible in the first photo (which I took while writing this)--a prerenially slammed Gardiner Expressway. That piece of highway is, I'm fond of telling people, terminally fucked.
One of the latest to chime in is the Globe and Mail's Marsha Lederman who, it should be said, lives in Vancouver. She does, in fact, open her article with this fact before proceeding to point out that people who don't live in a place should be cautious before complaining about said place. She goes on to point out the she was born and raised in Toronto until she left in 2007 (seven years afer I did) but whatever Marsha--you're entitled to an opinion, and in your case that means it goes into the Globe nationally. Such is life. (I also cut Marsha a lot of slack in general because of the time she spent married to her ex-husband, so that's a thing.)
Consistently though I see people ignore one basic fact when the write articles like this: population growth without infrastructure growth should be expected to land us in exactly this situation.
Let's look at Toronto's population history: in 2007, when Marsha left it was 5,216,000 people. Today it's 6,491,000. That's a 21% increase. In that time no significant roads have been built, no new thoroughfares, and the TTC has not expanded it's capacity by 21%. Not much has been done--except a pandemic of course--to discourage people from owning or driving their cars. 2% of Toronto's road space has been converted to various kinds of bike lanes, and for those of us that use them that's a huge improvement but who's kidding who--it's 2%.
So, that's a planning problem. Population growth in Canada is tightly linked to immigration, and without a corresponding lift in infrastructure we're long term screwed. We need to get people out of cars, and out of a small number of boom cities: that only happens with a significant investment in public transportation. VIA Rail is a global embarrassment; Ottawa invested in an LRT that has had so many issues preventing effective operation it's not even funny; the TTC remains highly dependent on fares rather than public funding, which means the pandemic ravaged its long term budget and planning.
I'm not an expert nor a saint on this front: I have a car and a lot of my trips are single occupant, though it doesn't move often: after 8 years I have about 87,000km on it, and a good chunk of that came from a year in my life where I drove to work (and hated every day.) I hope this is my last one though--I don't really need it personally, but I have aging relatives, not that I'm young myself.
I do know that it needs to change, and we can't ignore the basic impact that a growing population has. It's pretty basic scalable demand.
One other note, that I think is often ignored and needs to be repeated given imminent events: this is the city that Rob Ford and John Tory gave us. Rob Ford's flaws are glaringly obvious, and the fact that people keep voting for his brother is amazing too me. There's talk of a John Tory comeback and I can't believe people would vote for a guy who broke this city that badly. So many projects started, none of them completed and...here we are. Don't forget this.
This photo was taken about four hours after the one above, when I walked to Queen & Dufferin. This is Sunday evening traffic heading into Toronto on the Gardiner—why aren’t this people on a GO train?
