One of the things that I’ll often hear people say about Toronto is that we’re a car-oriented city with inadequate transit, and that’s why we simply can’t implement things like congestion pricing. Usually it’s accompanied by statements like this: “Sure, I can see how it might work in London or New York, but they have proper transit systems, and we don’t.”
But is this really fair to say?
Let’s look at some of the data from the 2022 Transportation Tomorrow Survey.
For all trips starting and ending in the City of Toronto, people driving themselves around is the dominant mode share at 45.3%. But the transit mode share is not nothing at nearly a quarter of all trips. And if you add up taking transit, walking, cycling (and other forms of micromobility), and taxiing, you get to 42% of all trips within the city. That’s a meaningful number.
Back in the spring, I wrote about a platform called Build Canada. More recently, this same group launched their first "city project" called Build Toronto (which is not to be confused with the city corporation that ultimately became CreateTO). Similar to Build Canada, they publish regular memos and advocate for policies and projects that will help build Canada's largest city.
Their most recent memo is by the CEO of A2X, Jamie McDonald, and it covers a topic that we discuss a lot on this blog: congestion pricing. Jamie talks about the drag that congestion has on the region's economy (upwards of $45 billion every year?), the numerous successes we can point to from around the world, and then lays out the following proposal:
Create a downtown congestion pricing zone
Introduce dynamic highway pricing across the GTA
