Okay, so the official title is Chief Congestion Officer.
But whatever. What's important is that the City of Toronto is apparently close to hiring a human that will become the so-called "congestion lead". This will be, in their words, a senior strategic cross-divisional leadership role that reviews programs and projects, and then works to minimize traffic congestion (this is among other things).
Translation: Construction is causing too much congestion so let's make sure we're better at managing what happens on Toronto's streets. Fine. Nobody is going to argue against being too coordinated. But there are at least two problems with the overall framing of this position.
Firstly, it is likely that this czar will go after things like construction lane closures. Maybe the city will make them harder to get and/or maybe they'll increase the occupancy fees they charge. (Reminder: Developers pay cities lots of money to occupy public streets.)
Regardless of what is done, it's important to keep in mind that there's a trade-off here. Any time you make construction more difficult, you add costs. And when construction costs are added, they have to go somewhere. Typically that means they get passed on to buyers and renters. So depending on how hard this czar goes after road closures, we could be indirectly increasing the cost of new housing.
Pick your poison.
But the even bigger problem with this new role is this: It presupposes that if only we did X, Y, and Z, we could solve traffic congestion. This is a fallacy. It's not going to happen. Of course, I'm not saying that better coordination wouldn't improve traffic flows; I'm saying that we're ignoring the root problem.
The Greater Toronto Area has a population of nearly 7 million people, and there’s simply no conceivable way we could all drive around everywhere and still have free-flowing traffic. It’s impossible — no matter how well we coordinate roadwork or how many people with whistles we plant at major intersections during rush hour.
The only way to solve this problem is to embrace a multi-modal approach to urban mobility. And so rather than a "traffic czar" narrowly focused on car congestion, what we really need is a "mobility czar" focused more broadly on moving the most number of people as efficiently as possible — across all modes of transport.
This is not the solution that many people want to hear — because it will mean a break from the status quo — but we already know that it works. Really well in fact.
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Brandon Donnelly
3 comments
Spot on. The construction lane closures, as annoying as they are, do not actually have that much impact. Transit is the key. I was in Guangzhou recently, a city of 14.8 million people, and traffic was honestly not bad at all. Not nearly as bad as Toronto. Why? They have 14 really good metro lines there, built in about 12 years. The metro is heavily used. Plus they have high taxes on cars too. Whatever they are doing, it's working.
Good on ya Brandon. And Scoldilocks is right: we need to move people, not cars. But culture is touch to change. And people don't willingly give up privilege. In the mean time I'll ride my bike past all the grumpy people one-per-pickup and wave and say "have a nice jam!".
Yes! We’re supposed to be moving PEOPLE! Not cars. That’s why in Tokyo with triple the population it’s EASIER to get around by car than in Toronto. Japan focuses on moving people which means a lot more actual choice in modes of travel.