More than five kilometres of the Gardiner Expressway suffer from severe congestion that doubles travel times in Toronto during rush hour periods.
The highway is one of a dozen major downtown corridors facing at least a kilometre’s worth of congestion that’s bad enough to make a trip take one and a half to two times longer at peak times, according to a travel time analysis commissioned by the Toronto Region Board of Trade.
The new traffic data, billed as the most comprehensive portrait to date of the city’s gridlock, serves as the backbone to the board’s congestion action plan, which it released this morning.
For more than a year, the board’s task force has been digging into the problem of congestion, which it considers a top regional and economic challenge that could be costing the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) $44.7 billion a year in economic and social value.
“What we’re trying to do is push harder, faster,” said Giles Gherson, the board’s president.
“Making a significant dent in our traffic gridlock would be the single most powerful thing city hall can do to unleash our economic strength.”
Today’s report both quantifies parts of the problem — like travel time and the cost of lane closures — and offers five areas of action the task force argues can help alleviate congestion. The city is considering the report as it looks to update its own plans to fight congestion.
“We’re putting forward a new version of the congestion management plan in the spring and looking at these recommendations very closely to see how we’ll incorporate them,” said Deputy Mayor Ausma Malik.
CBC Toronto explored many of the potential solutions highlighted by the task force in a three-part series, Gridlocked: The Way Out, last month.
Here’s a look at the five key areas of action the task force is suggesting for Toronto.
1. Reduce lane closures
This year, roughly 10 per cent of all Toronto streets, or 550 kilometres of roadway, will be occupied by construction work zones at some point, according to the report.
Given existing demands on the road, the task force argues there needs to be a higher bar for lane closures and the city needs to actively manage how long they last.
The board hired infrastructure consultant Steer to assess the cost of lane closures in the city. Toronto charges a maximum of $37,000 per month to close a lane of traffic for construction, and determines the price based on lost revenue from nearby parking meters, according to the report.
But the report argues that pricing scheme grossly underestimates the actual cost. Steer’s analysis found the social and economic costs (like increased travel times, vehicle operating costs and pollution from congestion) of closing a major arterial lane amount to $1.7 million per month.
Those social and economic costs should be part of the decision making process for granting lane closures, the report argues. And closures with the greatest impact should have limits — like not allowing closures on major arterial roads during peak travel hours.
“Other cities where it’s not allowed — like New York for example — forces a discipline on the sector to figure out how they can build with a smaller footprint and it can be done,” said Gherson.
“There’s a lot of sloppiness in the way it’s been operated so far and there’s a way to really tighten it up and I think the city agrees.”
Malik says the city has been laser focused on making changes in this area and higher fees for lane closures will come into effect in April.
The action report also supports 24/7 construction where possible, as was adopted to accelerate the timeline for construction on the Gardiner.
2. Enforce the rules of the road
The next piece of the puzzle for the task force is enforcement to correct driver behaviour.
Police officers and traffic agents can’t be everywhere. So the report suggests adopting automated enforcement, with cameras catching drivers blocking intersections, double-parking and stopping in bike lanes and at bus stops.
On a quest to figure out how to fix traffic, CBC Toronto travels to Seattle to get a behind-the-scenes look at how cameras seem to be deterring drivers from blocking intersections and driving in bus lanes.
CBC Toronto got a first-hand look at what that kind of enforcement looks like in Seattle, where they use it for blocking intersections and bus lanes — and it appears to be changing driver behaviour.
Toronto is working on an automated enforcement pilot but it isn’t likely to start issuing tickets for blocking the box until sometime in 2026 at the earliest, and aspects of the program still require provincial approval.
“We think this will have a major effect,” said Gherson. “What we all need to do is ensure that the province supports the city in allowing automated enforcement.”
3. Unclog the arteries
The task force commissioned an in-depth analysis of traffic in the downtown core from Parsons engineering firm.
It found that most of the worst-congested corridors downtown are east-west arterials like the Gardiner, Bloor Street and Lakeshore Boulevard, which “no longer serve their purpose to keep traffic flowing.”
Overall, the analysis identified a dozen corridors where travel times during peak periods took at least one and a half times longer (than in free flowing traffic) across at least a kilometre of the roadway.
The report suggests identifying “major connector roads” to plan which ones will absorb traffic when another connector road is disrupted, and moving bike lanes off of those roads to keep traffic moving.
It also recommends incentivizing off-peak deliveries. One way to do that, it says, would be to reduce permit fees for night or early morning operations for businesses that receive those deliveries.
4. Clear the bottlenecks
The action plan also identifies specific problem areas for traffic flow in the city that it says could be fixed by re-engineering the road design.
Those changes include restricting turning movements on Harbour and York Streets to prevent weaving between lane conflicts and restricting lane changes on the Gardiner between York Street and Spadina Avenue for the same reason.
The task force also supports implementing traffic signals for Gardiner on-ramps at York and Spadina as a pilot project to maintain traffic flow by controlling the pace of vehicles merging onto the highway.
Baher Abdulhai, an engineering professor at the University of Toronto, demonstrates the difference between a smart highway and existing highways using funnels to represent the highways and rice kernels to represent cars.
Last month, the city’s director of traffic management, Roger Browne, told CBC Toronto it doesn’t have any plans to implement traffic signals on on-ramps because there isn’t much space for queuing vehicles off highways.
He also said it might not be within Toronto’s control, given the city uploaded oversight of the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway to the province in 2023.
5. Implement accountability mechanisms
The report advocates for a new reporting structure at the city when it comes to congestion, which would include a cross-departmental czar who would review all city business through a congestion lens.
But the action plan argues fixing congestion can’t all be up to Toronto. It impacts the entire GTHA, and so there needs to be regional coordination to fix things. The solution for that, the report says, is creating an intergovernmental table for congestion management, chaired by the province.
In the future, the report emphasized the need for increasing transit ridership, building even more rapid transit lines than those already planned and expanding water-based transportation.
Finally, the report advocated taking a look at ways to implement targeted congestion pricing once more transit alternatives, like the Ontario Line, are operational. That’s a strategy that has been deeply unpopular in Ontario despite helping ease traffic in other major cities.
The report specifically recommends discussing pricing for specific highway on-ramps or piloting “choice lanes” to create express toll options for drivers.