Christoper Hume –
It’s come to this: Torontonians are either stuck in traffic or bitterly complaining about it. It’s not hard to understand why; by any measure, congestion in this city now ranks among the worst on the planet.
According to the Toronto Region Board of Trade, gridlock costs the Greater Toronto Area $11 billion annually. The board also reports that the average GTA driver loses 118 hours a year sitting in traffic. That’s about five full days of wasted life, of time lost waiting for traffic to move.
Regardless of the endless nonsense spouted by municipal and provincial officials, as well as planners and engineers – “experts” all — the main cause of congestion is cars, specifically, too many cars.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s insistence that bike lanes are the problem is – to put it politely — pure bunk. Even the city’s director of traffic management, Roger Browne, revealed a shocking lack of knowledge recently when he publicly blamed construction for our woes. Yes, that’s an issue, but the underlying trouble runs much deeper. The real failure begins with the refusal of politicians and bureaucrats to acknowledge that the automobile – combustion or electric – has taken us as far as it can.
The answer, of course, is more and better public transit.
As obvious as that seems, it’s anything but. Canadian culture is based on the car. The lack of transit investment over the decades – in its original form the Ontario Line was first proposed in 1910 — is a direct result of the same mindset that led to our abject vehicular dependence. Former Toronto mayor John Tory inadvertently underlined this a decade ago in a memo to his executive committee: “Transit connects people to jobs,” he wrote. “It provides a means of getting around for people who can’t afford a car.”
“Can’t afford a car.” In other words, transit in Toronto is for the poor. And who cares about the poor? Anyone who can afford to drive does so. Indeed, given the current state of the TTC, which ranges from merely disgusting to downright dangerous, Tory may have a point. But we get what we pay for.
Worse still, car culture in Toronto has reached the point of entitlement. Bad driving is not just tolerated; it is anticipated and accommodated. Even in the most historic parts of Toronto, the damage done by cars is evident. Look at the corner of King and Jarvis Streets, where drivers routinely block the intersection and stop traffic in all directions.
Faced with the congestion crisis, the city finally increased fines this year and hired traffic officers to control bad drivers at this intersection and others.
It doesn’t help that traffic engineers – a pseudo-science if ever there was one — long ago turned Jarvis (and Parliament, Sherbourne, Spadina, Bathurst, etc.) into on- and off-ramps to the Gardiner Expressway. Are these streets or highways? Both or neither? The result is confusion, frustration and, needless to say, gridlock.
In their rush to hand the city over to the automobile, post-war planners turned whole neighbourhoods into death traps. That didn’t end until Premier Bill Davis killed the Spadina Expressway in 1971. Still, any attempt to make roads available for anything other than cars and trucks is met with hostility born of deep-seated bias, as demonstrated by Ford and Tory.
It’s no surprise that two fifths of pedestrian deaths in the city occur in Scarborough, a 20th-century suburban municipality designed for cars. Scarborough’s roads are typically multi-lane highways built primarily for speed. God help the senior trying to cross the street without hiking to the nearest traffic light a mile away.
Meanwhile, in “old” Toronto, narrow roads, greater densification and streetcars help moderate the struggle between human and vehicular traffic. But as King and Jarvis reminds us, contact between past and present can be hard to reconcile. On the southwest corner, St. Lawrence Hall, the exquisite 1850 neo-classical heap, struggles to maintain its dignity, let alone its relevance, as crazed drivers sit and fume before resuming their mad dash to the Gardiner. Once the town’s most important gathering place and cultural hub, it now appears empty and lost in the chaos.
And so it goes. The automobile-based promise of the last century has gone bust. We are left tired and stressed out. Is it any wonder people would rather stay home than brave the daily slog to the office and back?
