Traffic moves along Highway 401 in Toronto on Jan. 3.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
During the Wednesday evening rush hour, I found a bench on the north side of Bloor Street, just west of the University of Toronto, and started counting cars. And bikes. And subway riders.
Bloor has one lane of motor traffic in each direction, and one bicycle lane. There’s also a subway beneath the street.
Over the course of 12 minutes, I counted 102 cars driving west, and 66 bikes. The cyclists whipped by. The cars were in stop-start traffic.
As for the Bloor subway, it runs every two to three minutes at rush hour, so during my 12 minutes of car counting, there should have been at least four westbound trains. Each train can carry 1,000 passengers. If we assume the trains were only half full – a conservative assumption at rush hour – then 2,000 people passed beneath the road. That’s about 20 times the number of cars.
Which brings me, inevitably, to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and his recent proposals to speed up traffic in the Greater Toronto Area.
He and his Transport Minister first hinted that they want to put a stop to any more bike lanes. Then he announced that he wants a new, toll-free highway, tunnelled under Highway 401, running from “beyond Brampton and Mississauga in the west to beyond Markham and Scarborough in the east.”
These pitches are politically brilliant, and dunderheaded in every other way.
The political genius lies in the fact that most of the province was designed on the assumption that everyone would drive everywhere, for everything, all the time. That’s why Ford policies to subsidize drivers – free licence-plate renewals, lower gas taxes, toll-free roads, opposition to the carbon tax – are popular. That’s why promises of more taxpayer-funded blacktop – such as Highway 413 – are popular.
Mr. Ford has his eye on an early election, and talking up the cycling menace while blue-skying Highway 401(b) is mostly about that. If his Progressive Conservatives paint themselves as the Party of the Car and the Liberals and New Democrats volunteer to paint themselves as the Enemy of the Car, well, that’s just swell. The message will be: We want to make your drive cheaper and faster. They want the opposite. Who ya gonna vote for?
I’m not running for office, so I’m at liberty to say things that might tick off some voters. Here goes.
Leaving aside how expensive it will be to double-deck the 401 – $30-billion? $50-billion? More? – there’s the tiny problem that if the number of cars on the expressway doubles, then so must the number of cars driving to and from it. We’ll next need to double-deck the intersecting Highways 427, 410, 404, 403 and 400, the Don Valley Parkway, plus major north-south arteries from Hurontario to Markham Road.
Fun fact: The 401 section through Toronto, which is up to 18 lanes wide, is already North America’s busiest highway.
We tend to think of “traffic” as being solely about cars, but it should really be seen as about moving people, by whatever means. And the best way to get more people moving more quickly, in a megalopolis like the Greater Toronto Area, is to have more and better alternatives to the car.
This isn’t about a war on the car. The more trips we enable people to take by means other than a car, the more space there is on the roads for cars.
To reduce traffic in and around Toronto, don’t sink tens of billions of dollars into double-decker highways. Aim to make that extra highway unnecessary, by making it easier for more people to make more trips on better transit.
That isn’t all about megaprojects. For example, in 2017, Toronto’s King Street was redesigned to give priority to the streetcar, along 2.6 kilometres through downtown. That streetcar was already the busiest surface transit line in the country, and by 2018, ridership had jumped to 84,000 a day.
Ridership could be higher if the Toronto Transit Commission ran more streetcars on the route, and if the city sped up travel by vigorously enforcing rules that aim to mostly keep cars off King Street. All of which would be good for drivers downtown.
The streetcar “blocking” your car is in fact doing the opposite. It can carry 130 passengers. The more people riding it, the fewer are on the road in a car.
Toronto also once had ambitious plans to speed up travel on its busiest suburban bus routes, each of which carries tens of thousands of people a day. Giving buses a dedicated lane allows them to move faster; faster service draws in more riders. More riders means more revenue at the fare box, which can help pay for more buses, which could further raise ridership and revenue.
And the more people are riding those buses, the fewer are in a car. Everybody wins.
Back to Bloor Street West, and its lessons for the 18-lane 401.
It is possible to add more lanes and more cars to Bloor, though that would mean bulldozing through neighbourhoods from Yorkville to Etobicoke. The extra traffic would, of course, also call for widening north-south streets, to carry all those extra cars travelling to and from Bloor.
There is a better way. Drivers and transit riders (and cyclists) are not at war. They’re all part of the same traffic ecosystem. The more people there are on transit, the easier life is for drivers. There’s no escaping it.