Toronto's first Chief Congestion Officer is here. Now what?

Three things citizens should push for

As I’m making my way around the city, I often ask myself, where are all these people going? Work, school, shopping, events, family visits, appointments, and many other places. Congestion is a byproduct of a lively, thriving city, where everyone has lots of places to be. A positive sign that our city is growing and succeeding, but one that also creates lots of demand our limited roadways. But we can do better. And now there’s someone whose job is to figure out how.

The City of Toronto now has its first ever Chief Congestion Officer. Andrew Posluns brings more than 25 years of public sector leadership experience to the role, including overseeing the GO expansion strategy at Metrolinx, and leading the transportation plan for the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games. Lots of relevant experience coordinating and leading transportation projects, which will certainly come in handy in this new, challenging role.

What motivated the city to create this role, originally dubbed the “traffic czar”, is easy to understand if you’ve spent any time trying to move about Toronto: it takes a lot longer than we all would like. Why? The roads are over capacity. While it really does come down to geometry (not enough space for all those cars), there is no simple solution to congestion.

Many well-informed people, such as Matt Elliott (who publishes the excellent City Hall Watcher), have pointed out that there is only so much a traffic czar can do, as traffic congestion is not something that can be “solved”. This is true in the sense that there is no magical combination of actions that will make congestion disappear. So it’s important that the objectives of the Chief Congestion Officer are framed correctly. Rather than “eliminate congestion”, I suggest it should be to “move the most people most efficiently”. This shift the focus from cramming as many cars as possible through the streets to making driving, transit, cycling, and walking all work better together. To design a complete transportation system that gives people the maximum number of options, and to make those options reliable, fast, safe, and pleasant.

One reason it’s been so difficult to make progress with Toronto transportation is that there are many players with no single person responsible for the outcomes. This point is very well made in on the Challenger Cities podcast (episode 12). Transportation Services, the TTC, Metrolinx, Engineering & Construction, and City Planning are all involved in decisions that impact mobility. Each of these groups is doing their best within their own domains, but nobody is looking at the whole picture, at coordinating decisions across the board to make transportation more efficient. While the Chief Congestion Officer role does not appear to have that level of authority as it’s been designed, there is a huge opportunity to aim for that kind of across-the-board ownership of measurable outcomes.

What can we, the citizens of Toronto and beleaguered users of the transportation system do to help make our new Chief Congestion Officer more successful, and thereby improve our own experience getting from A to B? We should advocate for three things.

While there is only so much that can be done to improve congestion without reducing the number of vehicles on the roadways, smarter traffic signals will help. In his Build Toronto memo, Kurtis McBride, CEO of Canadian intelligent mobility firm Miovision, claims that upgrading all 2,500 Toronto intersections will cost $125M and reduce travel times by up to 20%. This is worth doing, especially considering that congestion costs the GTHA $44.7B annually.

Shifting trips from cars to transit and cycling will have the greatest impact on moving more people more efficiently.

We should advocate for reliable, fast, safe, and pleasant transit that just works. When it does, more people will choose transit over driving. The extremely slow average speed of the new line 6 LRT has everyone from the Premier to the Mayor on down focused on improving transit speed. But this is not a new problem, and not unique to line 6. Streetcars and buses have been plagued with reliability, speed, and bunching issues for decades. The good news is that there are many practical, immediate steps that will improve this that we can take directly from other cities who have already solved these problems. Giving transit signal priority (green lights) and better management of the spacing of the vehicles, for example. In cities like Zurich, trams get automatic priority at every intersection. In Toronto, streetcars wait at red lights while cars make left turns. The Chief Congestion Officer is the right person to finally make these changes happen.

Finally, we should advocate for a complete bike lane network. Today, there are fragments of bike lanes all over the city. While the kilometres of lanes has grown substantially, many more people will choose to cycle if they can always get from origin to destination more safely. As Farhan Thawar describes in his Build Toronto memo, we could complete the active transportation network in two years. And a well-designed network would carefully consider where to put the bike lanes, staying off of major roads whenever possible so they can be dedicated to vehicles. Most important is that the lanes form a contiguous network, not that they are on every road.

Imagine a Toronto where the streetcar arrives when the app says it will. Where you can cycle from the Danforth to the Waterfront without your route disappearing mid-trip. Where traffic lights respond to what’s actually happening on the street, not a static timing plan. That Toronto is possible. It’s what other cities have already built. Andrew Posluns now has the job of getting us there. We should hold him to it, while giving him the support and authority he’ll need to succeed.