Death by traffic: Toronto’s economy and return to office plans are choking on congestion

Giles Gherson had 20 minutes to get from his office on the Toronto waterfront to a restaurant at Yonge and Dundas for a lunch meeting. Ample time, in other words, or so the chief executive of the Toronto Region Board of Trade assumed as he settled into the back of an Uber for the short trip.

Forty-five minutes later, he was still nowhere near his destination, and the car he was travelling in was stuck in traffic just a few blocks north of where he started. The clock was ticking, and in that anxiety-inducing moment, Gherson, a recreational runner, understood what he needed to do: he bailed out of the vehicle and hightailed it as fast as his feet, in black dress shoes, could carry him to the meeting.

Do they ever. In bygone years, small talk among Torontonians ran to griping about the weather and the fortunes and follies of the Maple Leafs, touchstone office water-cooler topics that have lately been joined by exchanging horror stories about traffic-choked streets.

No stranger to world-class congestion at the best of times, Toronto appears to have entered its worst age, a doomsday commuter scenario brought on by a slew of infrastructure projects, including the massive, multi-billion-dollar, multi-year Ontario Line transit project. There are condo builds, and the subterranean infrastructure to support them, sewer-pipe and watermain replacements, and multiple other transit tweaks, big and small.

Billions are being lost in productivity; drivers are losing their minds, not to mention precious time at home with their loved ones; goods are taking longer to get where they need to go; return-to-the-office plans are being rejected; and the forward-looking potential punch in the gut is that companies looking to open an office in North America may start to think twice about looking too hard at Toronto. Toronto the Good is now Toronto the Gridlocked.

Just how bad is the mess? No other major North American urban centre has more construction projects underway, according to the city, and that means there are no shortcuts, optimized routes or back-alley workarounds to circumvent the gridlock.

Perhaps even more defeating is the knowledge that there is no end to the disruptions in sight. Estimated delivery times on projects range from months to eight more years for the Ontario Line, a rough estimate roughly no one in Toronto is buying, not after the city’s Homeric experience with the Eglinton LRT, the “new” transit line in the north end that is now four years late, $3 billion (and counting) over budget and still nowhere near finished.

The city in 2014 took a stab at quantifying how much gridlock cost the Greater Toronto Area annually during a deputy mayor’s “roundtable on gridlock and traffic congestion.” The number arrived at was $6 billion, and the takeaway was something needed to be done. Nine years later, there is lots happening, and congestion has grown more hellish than ever.

“When potential investors and businesses come to us, they are now saying, ‘We want our people in the office. What does the return to the workplace look like in Toronto?’” Gherson said. “And when they get told, ‘Well, we are not really all the way there yet,’ and they ask why, one of the major reasons is the massive congestion problem.”

The University of Toronto’s School of Cities’ downtown recovery index, which measures cellphone use in the downtown core and compares it to pre-pandemic rates, pegs Toronto at 70 per cent. By comparison, Mississauga, a major suburb to the city’s west, is at 91 per cent.

There are fewer people downtown and fewer cars, according to the city, yet commute times have increased, and the smoking gun is the construction. Inrix Inc., an American-based transportation analytics company, in 2022 put a number to Toronto drivers’ tale of woe in its global “traffic scorecard.” Toronto drivers spent 118 hours stuck in traffic, which was slightly worse than what New York City drivers put up with (117 hours), but not quite as bad as Chicago (155 hours) and Boston (134 hours).

Everybody is unhappy about the gridlock … and they are unhappy for the same thing: gridlock represents a massive loss in production

Jon Love

Theories on how to mitigate the city’s traffic jam abound. Jon Love may not match your imagined image of an anti-congestion online crusader. Sitting in his office on the 37th floor of a downtown tower on a recent afternoon, he fit the bill of a conservatively dressed, diet-cola-sipping, 69-year-old private-equity real estate tycoon.

“Everybody is unhappy about the gridlock,” the founder and executive chairman of KingSett Capital Inc., said. “Office tenants, residential tenants, business owners — everybody is unhappy — and they are unhappy for the same thing: gridlock represents a massive loss in production.”

KingSett is a major landlord in Toronto, with a portfolio of properties that includes the Royal York Hotel, a hospitality icon currently operated by Accor SA’s Fairmont brand. Making deliveries at the Royal York has become an adventure in creative planning and time and money lost.

Love can’t exactly pinpoint when his patience ran out. He initially joined X, formerly known as Twitter, way back when to air his thoughts on finance, real estate and urban issues impacting his hometown and Canada at large, but he found the experience was like elbowing up to the “bar at last call,” where every well-lubricated patron gives an opinion.

So, he ditched the X mob for the professional networking site LinkedIn, and, much to his surprise, built an audience of 40,000 followers. One of his recurring topics is Toronto #gridlock, and he has some pretty good ideas on how to go about fixing the mess.

Near the top of the list is to dramatically reduce the time it takes to complete major public infrastructure projects by requiring contractors to operate two shifts a day, seven days a week, to complete them. Imagine that new transit line that was budgeted for 12 years being done in four.

As for condo developers, Love suggests Toronto should borrow a page out of New York’s building code for Manhattan. Builders there are required to do the work without the construction site taking out a street lane — as per the Toronto norm. Big jobs get contained within the footprint of a job site. This is a feat of engineering, he said, but there is no lack of brilliant engineers who could figure this stuff out.

“If we are going to have a war on congestion, then let’s have a war,” he said. “Gridlock is a cost nightmare, a growth nightmare and an environmental nightmare.”

Love has done more than most of the social-media crowd and taken his ideas straight to the source. He sent Mayor Olivia Chow an open-letter-style email in late October, sharing some thoughts around congestion management, and he intended to do some additional sharing at a meeting scheduled with Roger Browne, the city’s director of traffic management.

“I am going to say to him, ‘What can I do to help you?’”

Traffic is a major headache for most ordinary humans. But for Browne, a civil engineer turned civil servant, managing traffic is his life’s work. It is a career path he didn’t anticipate as a youngster. He always fancied becoming an astronaut before learning that he had an uncanny “knack for dirt,” a.k.a., the soil foundation underlying roads.

But when Browne meets someone for the first time, the overriding emotion expressed towards him isn’t road rage, but sympathy. After all, who in their right mind would want to be Toronto’s traffic guy?

“I am actually afraid that someone is going to try to hit me,” the 50-year-old said, with a laugh.

But the gridlock is not his fault. Toronto needed to make massive public transit investments 40 years ago, but it didn’t. About two million people have shown up in the area over the past two decades, so getting downtown or around the downtown by car still involves using a road network that was built for a city that doesn’t exist anymore.

Hence, gridlock.

The city’s guiding philosophy toward traffic management in recent years has been to only greenlight infrastructure projects deemed critical, in part to limit road closures. Congestion was already bad enough, or so the reasoning went, so when the water department came to the traffic department to talk about doing some repairs and closing off streets, Browne and company’s first question was: Can it wait?

The city’s traffic manager works from home two days a week. On the other days, he drives his black Hyundai Sonata from his home in a northeast suburb to the nearest subway station. It is a 15-minute trip, traffic permitting. On a good day, the drive plus subway ride makes for a one-hour commute. On a bad day, well, welcome to life in Toronto.

Where the traffic nerds do see some slivers of hope is in smart traffic signals optimized by artificial intelligence. Most Toronto traffic signals are not smart, but vintage 1980s. They operate on timers. Honk if this scenario sounds familiar: the light turns green, 40 seconds or so later, it turns red, and the cycle repeats itself, even when the person waiting at the red is watching precisely nobody go through the green.

The newest-generation AI-optimized traffic signals learn and react to traffic conditions in real time. They also factor in pedestrian and cyclist volumes. A smart signal will understand that if cars are beginning to pile up in, say, the left turn lane, it will flush out the lane with an advanced green; if pedestrians are jammed in so tight on a corner that they are toppling off the sidewalk, the signal will change to get those people moving.

Browne and his team are piloting the new signals at select downtown spots, hopefully starting soon, and the city has budgeted $40 million to accelerate the transition to smarter signals while setting aside an additional $45 million once “cost estimates” are “further refined.”

Alas, AI isn’t a magic bullet. Neither is the recent headline-grabbing news that the cost of operating the Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway — two major arteries leading into the downtown core — were being uploaded to the province. The move is expected to free up hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the city, but money alone isn’t going to cure what ails Toronto drivers. What really needs to change is people’s relationship with their car.

Toronto is a crown jewel city. We have got to get our mobility back

Giles Gherson

“Where we look for our inspiration is Europe,” Browne said. “The culture is dramatically different. It is far less of a car-centric culture to begin with, and transit options and solutions are so much better, and are already existing, already integrated and already linked up with major destinations, but we are on the right path.”

Someday, the never-ending Eglinton LRT construction project will end, the much-ballyhooed Ontario Line will begin whisking people downtown and the construction digs and road repairs at the root of the current congestion crisis will give way to new and hopefully less disruptive projects.

“Congestion is a symptom of a city where people want to be, and where there is economic and social activity taking place,” Matti Siemiatycki, a geography professor and director of the infrastructure institute at the U of T’s School of Cities, said.

The few times congestion has eased or even disappeared altogether has been during those times that are best not repeated: major economic downturns and a once-in-100-years global pandemic.

The trick when stuck in traffic, Siemiatycki said, is to try to remain calm and remember that while congestion is incredibly “frustrating,” the construction underway now is critically important and will ultimately transform the city — if not in time for us poor suckers, then at least for our kids.

Giles Gherson already has two adult kids, and he possesses wisdom gained through past experiences. For example, he never, ever drives downtown.

However, he does avail himself of ride-sharing services now and again, knowing it is a roll of the dice as to whether they will deliver him to his destination on time, which is added motivation for a recreational jogger to stay in shape — just in case he needs to make another run for it.

“The congestion war stories are humiliating,” he said. “Toronto is a crown jewel city. We have got to get our mobility back.”