Opinion: Singapore’s traffic is no worse than Halifax’s. Toronto’s could be, too

Every day the traffic problem in Toronto seems to get a little worse. Because it is getting worse – measurably, miserably worse. A recent Globe story offers some telling statistics: Torontonians spend 63 hours a year, on average, stuck in traffic. It takes 11 per cent longer on average to get to where you’re going than it did even 10 years ago, when traffic was merely intolerable.

Toronto also has the longest commute time of any city in Canada, at more than 33 minutes. All told, according to the 2023 Traffic Index, compiled by the GPS software firm TomTom, Toronto’s traffic is third worst among 387 major cities in 55 countries around the world. Third worst in the world.

Just don’t expect Toronto’s politicians to fix it. All through the years, as traffic in Toronto first slowed, then crawled, then stopped, the same non-solutions have been advanced. “Build more roads!” say the right. “Build more transit!” say the left.

Put in more bike lanes! Take out the bike lanes! Force people to carpool! Synchronize the traffic lights! In the latest addition to this canon of futility, Ontario’s Premier has proposed building a tunnel under the city’s central artery, Highway 401. Might as well. We’ve tried all the other solutions and found they didn’t work. Why not try one we know won’t work?

All of these approaches, disparate as they may seem, have a common theme. Traffic is moving too slowly. Therefore: make the traffic go faster. Sounds logical enough. The reason it doesn’t work is rooted in a phenomenon well known to traffic experts: induced demand.

There aren’t enough roads in the world for all the cars that might want to use them, if they all headed out at the same time. Road space, like anything else, is scarce, and like any other scarce thing, has to be rationed. Most things we ration by price: otherwise we’d have bread lines. How do we ration road space? By time.

The amount of time it takes to get somewhere is the “price” you pay to use the roads. Lower the price – make the traffic go faster – and what happens? Right: people drive more. Build more roads, and they are soon just as clogged with cars as before. Build more transit, and even if you can get some people to leave their cars, others take their place.

It doesn’t have to be this way. For a vision of what is possible, we take you now to another city, half a world away: Singapore. The city-state has a population of more than six million – nearly as many as the Greater Toronto Area, only packed into an island about a tenth the size.

Yet it ranks 170th on the TomTom index – about the same as Halifax (population 480,000). Where the average time it takes to travel 10 kilometres in Toronto is nearly 30 minutes, in Singapore it is under 17 minutes. The average speed at rush hour in Toronto is 18 kilometres an hour. In Singapore it is 28.

Things weren’t always so free-flowing. Fifty years ago, Singapore had traffic problems on par with most other rapidly expanding cities, particularly in its central business district (CBD). What changed? Road pricing: only for real, not the time-based parody of it. In 1975, Singapore implemented the world’s first system of congestion pricing, a ring of 28 overhead gantries around the CBD. Drivers had to buy and display paper licences costing roughly $3 a day.

In 1998 the system was expanded and upgraded: the world’s first electronic road pricing system. Since then dozens of gantries have been installed, not just around the CBD but on every major artery, with sensors that can detect the transponders in people’s cars as they pass. The price is deducted from stored-value cards in the transponders, varying with the size of the road and the time of day.

And coming soon: ERP 2.0 – the world’s first GPS-based electronic road pricing system. No more gantries: the on-board transponders will correspond with satellite-based monitors. In principle, this means you could price, not just major arteries, but every road, with prices changing dynamically, in line with congestion levels. And no, that doesn’t mean the government tracks everyone’s movements. The data are all anonymized.

Traffic is not only one of the worst of urban blights, but one of the few that could be cured literally overnight. Road pricing works. Singapore has proved it. Or forget Singapore: Toronto already has a working model of road pricing, the hugely successful Highway 407, which opened in 1997 – one year before Singapore’s. Yet here we all sit, decades later, stuck in traffic.

It’s one thing to refuse to learn from other people’s successes, but to refuse to learn from our own is criminal.