At its meeting on October 25, 2023, Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee will consider a report titled Congestion Management Plan 2023-2026. With a familiar refrain, the report begins:

The City is facing an unprecedented amount of construction road closures creating congestion issues for motorists, cyclists and pedestrians and surface street transit. There has also been a significant demand for special events in the City post-pandemic with the needs for road closures and more comprehensive traffic management strategies to minimize the impacts. This situation emphasizes the demand for better coordination of access to the right-of-way and the need for improved traffic management overall to help mitigate the impacts of congestion while maintaining safety for all road users.

[Congestion Management Plan 2023-26 at p. 1]

It goes on to talk about “refocusing” on four key areas:

• Leveraging Technology to Better Coordinate Construction on City Streets and expanding the Construction Hub program
• Establishing a dedicated traffic management team that will work with stakeholders such as Toronto Police Services, Toronto Parking Authority, TTC, Metrolinx GO, the Office of Emergency Management and City Councillors to improve traffic management planning efforts around major events while also coordinating with ongoing construction
• Providing increased traffic management support for surface street transit for both TTC and Metrolinx GO to help mitigate the impacts of construction related route diversions
• Investigating Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology to better optimize traffic signal operations to help all modes move more efficiently and safely with less delay around the City.

[Congestion Management Plan 2023-26 at pp 1-2]

This appears modestly promising but for the fact we have heard many proposals before and, if anything, congestion becomes worse. If this is a “refocus”, one might ask what the City has been doing for the decade since the first Congestion Management Plan was adopted in 2013. In turn, that goes back to an October 2011 motion by Councillor Josh Matlow asking for “a report on the cost and feasibility of implementing a Synchronized Traffic Signal System”.

Looking back at years of reports, there is a common theme that changes are possible at the small scale with improvements of up to 10% in traffic flow at specific times and locations. However, these are one time effects in the sense that the improvement, once achieved, cannot repeated to cope with traffic growth.

Moreover, there is a finite capacity in the road system, and the major political challenge is to apportion this capacity among competing demands. Motor traffic, as the dominant use, inevitably must give up part of its share to give better service and space to others. This was a fundamental choice needed in the King Street Transit Priority Pilot scheme, and even there, the assumption was that some traffic could shift from King to parallel corridors.

[Full disclosure: I was a paid consultant on a project in 2014-15 to review the major east-west streetcar lines with a view to modifying traffic and parking rules to improve transit operations in the peak and shoulder-peak periods.]

Although Transit Priority is one topic in the report, there is no mention of the RapidTO program which appears to be stalled after the initial implementation in Scarborough on Eglinton-Kingston-Morningside. I am not counting the red lanes for the 903 Scarborough Express bus replacing the SRT as they came from a force majeure situation and would not otherwise have been implemented. Any of the RapidTO proposals will involve substantial change in allocation of road capacity, and they have not been well received in some quarters.

A related question is whether dedicated lanes can be justified in areas where TTC service is not as frequent as it once was on King Street, especially on a fully dedicated 7×24 basis.

In March 2020, the Covid lockdowns made a lot of traffic vanish, although as reported both here and elsewhere, traffic is now above pre-pandemic levels. This is particularly true in the suburbs where there are proportionately more jobs that are not suited to work-from-home arrangements, and where transit’s share of the travel market is hampered by service levels, route structure and trip distances.

The pandemic also triggered a move to accelerate construction projects both as a job creation program and to take advantage of the lower effect on traffic possible at the time. However, construction does not appear to have diminished, but the normal traffic level is back.

The basic problem of finite road capacity is made much more complex by the removal of significant chunks of that capacity for rapid transit construction, utility repairs, streetcar track maintenance (downtown), road and bridge maintenance, and curb lane occupancy permits for building construction. All of this might be “co-ordinated”, but the sheer number of affected locations and the duration of temporary capacity removal means that the road system is rarely at an optimal condition.

This also hampers schemes to reallocate capacity permanently for transit, cycling and pedestrians.

The current report includes only two recommendations:

• the reconfiguration and expansion of zones served by “construction hubs” which are supposed to provide co-ordination between all projects by various parties in different sections of the city, and
• expansion of the Traffic Agent Program (aka “Traffic Wardens”) by use of police officers and special constables.

Any other effects would come from continuation of work already approved or in progress, notably from the “Smart Signals” project which is already underway, but which is not yet fully funded.

Notable by its complete absence in this report is the recognition that some congestion cannot be easily “fixed”, and that active intervention in allocating road capacity will be necessary in the worst cases. That is dangerous political territory, especially in a City that has lived through both the Ford and Tory eras where transit did not rank first.

Moreover, there is a danger that a focus on “congestion” will reinforce the TTC’s typical behaviour of assigning all blame for poor service on external factors when their own scheduling and line management practices make a substantial contribution.

In the remainder of this article, I will review various aspects of the City’s plan and actions to date. This is mostly in the same order as sections of the report, with some consolidation to group related items.

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