Toronto mulls more traffic solutions while NYC cracks down with congestion pricing

As drivers in New York City acclimate to Manhattan’s new congestion pricing, which went into effect on Sunday, Toronto continues to battle its own ever-worsening traffic woes, which have some advocating for a similar step.

Thursday morning, Mayor Olivia Chow announced her team’s latest effort to fight gridlock, which is costing people their time and patience and posing a multi-billion-dollar hit to the city’s economy: a substantial increase in traffic agents to help control the flow of cars through bottlenecks and ticket motorists when needed.

While these staff have been successful in clearing up backups in messy pockets like Liberty Village — along with a few other measures, of course — there is still the question of what more might be needed to fix the metropolis’s famously jammed streets.

A congestion fee of sorts has been floated various times, including one political candidate who recently pushed for charging non-local drivers to access downtown. Ideas like limiting cars in certain areas to change how people use local roads, a strategy Paris introduced in the fall, have also been suggested for Toronto.

However, experts say that courses of action like those taken by cities like NYC and Paris aren’t necessarily easily translatable here.

Speaking about the Big Apple’s congestion pricing on Thursday, a representative from the Toronto Region Board of Trade, which founded a special congestion task force last February, notes that the GTA’s public transit would have to rival that of New York’s or London’s for such a fee to be a realistic option — which is not the case at the moment.

“It’s been proven effective in Stockholm, in London, all over the world, so there’s definitely an opportunity for it to be an effective solution here in Toronto. However, we’re not where a lot of those cities are, including New York, in terms of viable transit alternatives,” the board’s vice-president of communications and marketing, Jennifer van der Valk, tells blogTO.

“It’s been something that’s been debated on and off for decades in Toronto… we’re heading in the right direction, but today it would be hard to argue that we have the viable, connected, seamless transit experience that some of these other international cities are offering that would make congestion pricing something that is palatable and even reasonable here.”

This doesn’t mean, though, that the option should be shut down, but considered when the city is ready and in context of many factors — and alongside other initiatives.

“When the timing seems to be right, what is the best way to ensure that you put a congestion pricing solution in place? It should really lean into the value of the roads, and consider peak traffic times, dynamic pricing and why certain people are using the roads, like how many are Toronto residents versus those that are just driving through.”

And, of course, continuing to prioritize getting transit lines like the Eglinton Crosstown LRT and Ontario Line built and running are a must, along with getting other, smaller traffic-calming steps in place before something as big as limited traffic zones or congestion levies.

As Vancouver-based urban planner and TODERIAN UrbanWORKS founder Brent Toderian told blogTO on the topic of gridlock last month, Paris’s phased approach that started with of “periodic, strategic closures of key streets, then day-long closures of the entire city center, always in the context of the conversation about air quality, livability and noise” was “a very smart way of doing it.”

“They moved on to transforming street infrastructure and street priorities for urban biking, walkability and placemaking and saw success. They’ve gone step by step, had success after success, but each has built on the last.”

As we try to determine what those successes could be, the Toronto Region Board of Trade’s Congestion Task Force, now nearly one year old, will be releasing a comprehensive action plan in the coming months that van der Valk says will “identify both short and long term solutions for addressing what has become a staggering $44.7 billion problem annually.”