Toronto traffic doesn’t just seem worse, it is worse – and data show these major bottlenecks are to blame

The day it took contractor Graeme Cherry an hour to drive four kilometres from his home in Toronto to visit a client, he decided enough was enough. He began cutting off services to a lucrative chunk of the city.

Mr. Cherry, who runs his own contracting business, lives just a few dozen blocks from Rosedale, an upscale neighbourhood just northeast of the downtown. But he’s chosen to take it off his route.

He says gridlock from road repairs and Cafe TO, a city program allowing restaurants to expand their outdoor dining space to the roadside, was costing him more than it was worth and making him less productive.

”I want to have some work-life balance when I run a business, I want to spend time with my son when he’s home,” he said. “My sense is that traffic is never going to get better.”

It’s a familiar story in Toronto, which routinely ranks among the most congested in North America and where drivers routinely find themselves in gridlocked traffic, even when travelling a short distance within the city.

While people living in the Greater Toronto Area have long complained about gridlock, data compiled for The Globe and Mail by traffic analytics firm INRIX shows that the problem is truly getting worse, with traffic surpassing pre-pandemic levels and skyrocketing since the peak of COVID lockdowns, despite traffic volumes remaining relatively flat. Instead, bottlenecks have converged around major construction projects, suggesting that road capacity rather than demand is a bigger part of the problem.

The INRIX data show that in 2023 Torontonians spent 63 hours on average standing completely still in traffic – a 3-per-cent increase from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. That adds up to about three days a year wasted. Meanwhile, it took Greater Toronto Area residents 11 per cent longer on average to get to their destination in the first six months of 2024 compared with 10 years ago and 25 per cent longer than pandemic lows in 2020.

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The problem has fuelled a heated debate among politicians, experts and advocates about the causes of congestion, with construction cited as a key driver, and the often competing solutions, from increasing transit and bike lanes to building highways and removing bike lanes.

City council, led by Mayor Olivia Chow, who boasts about never owning a car, is now considering a congestion management plan that focuses on increasing fines and enforcement for drivers violating traffic laws, changing how construction projects are co-ordinated, and improving public transit.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been unveiling his own solutions, including a massive tunnel underneath a major highway, bike lane restrictions and other measures. He also reignited the “war on the car” complaints from his brother Rob when he was famously mayor of Toronto more than a decade ago.

INRIX transportation analyst Bob Pishue said traffic in Toronto has bounced back since the pandemic in a way it hasn’t in many cities and appears to be on an upward trajectory. “Not all urban areas have come back in terms of delay at the same rate, but Toronto has,” he said.

In 2023, residents of Montreal – Canada’s second-most populated city – spent 4 per cent less time in traffic than they did before the pandemic in 2019.

Traffic in Winnipeg, Calgary and Edmonton also hasn’t jumped back to pre-pandemic levels. Vancouver, which has half of Montreal’s population, is a notable exception – traffic there recovered at a similar rate to Toronto. But for drivers in Toronto, congestion is also among the worst it’s been in more than a decade.

INRIX found that just five bottlenecks accounted for 21 per cent of delays in Toronto compared with 16 per cent in 2019. These bottlenecks hovered almost exclusively around large construction projects, including exits along the Gardiner Expressway at Spadina Avenue, a stretch of the westbound Highway 401 express, and a swath of roadway on the Queen Elizabeth Way on the far west side, which is undergoing extension.

Congestion is worse for evening commutes than in the morning, the data show.

Evening travel times across the GTA’s most popular commutes have climbed significantly over the past 10 years, with Oshawa to Mississauga travel times rising the most at nearly 60 per cent while Oshawa to Toronto travel times rose by 40 per cent. On major routes, traffic soared by up to 59 per cent since 2014.

In the downtown core, travel times for a popular evening commute from City Hall to Riverdale, near Centennial College, shot up 37 per cent in the past 10 years. In the opposite direction, travel times climbed 26 per cent during morning commutes.

Mr. Pishue said there are now more delivery vehicles on the road, a holdover of the COVID-19 pandemic, which “hit the gas pedal” on deliveries to homes and businesses.

Construction often happens at night, another reason the evening commute has worsened.

Data from the city show that the volume of cars on the road has not increased significantly since before the pandemic, suggesting that road capacity rather than demand is a large part of the problem.

For major intersections in Toronto where the city tracks vehicles, traffic volume figures showed 39 million cars between March and June, 2024, compared with 46 million in the same period in 2019 and 23 million in 2020.

Toronto’s director of traffic management, Roger Browne, said the main issue is that major construction projects have left less room for cars. Data from the City of Toronto showed construction work is behind 47 per cent of road closings; in second place are utility repairs at 38 per cent. “The travel times are much longer because you’ve taken out a lot of the road capacity,” he said.

From a control room in his downtown office, Mr. Browne has watched as hundreds of streetlight cameras and radars feed data into a giant screen – a digital panel that on photos resembles the command centre of a spaceship.

“Where we’ve seen the biggest impacts and changes are directly correlated to major construction projects – and if it isn’t the major construction project itself, it’s the spillback,” he said, referring to traffic from road diversions. He rhymes off major streets closed off for years because of construction projects: Queen Street, Eglinton, Finch and Highway 400.

A mammoth problem for Toronto drivers right now is the Gardiner Expressway, a 60-year-old freeway that carries nearly 200,000 vehicles a day along Toronto’s waterfront between the Don Valley Expressway in the east and the Queen Elizabeth Highway toward Mississauga and Hamilton in the west.

Construction work to fix its aging roadways began last spring, resulting in an already congested highway routinely grinding to a halt, with the impact spilling over onto connecting roads.

INRIX data also show that traffic along the Gardiner creates the city’s heaviest bottlenecks, second only to the Don Valley Parkway.

Another study released earlier this year by the firm Geotab ITS showed that commercial vehicle travel times on the Gardiner increased by up to 250 per cent in the morning rush hour and 230 per cent in the afternoon rush hour since the latest round of repairs began in April. The repairs are set to end in 2026. The same report showed that the top three alternative roads – Harbour Street, Lakeshore Boulevard, and Cherry Street – saw travel times increase by 43 per cent.

“Every road connects. So the Gardiner has bottlenecks where people are trying to get on, which creates queuing on Lakeshore, which then creates queuing back up as far as Yonge Street,” Mr. Browne said.

Though these ripple effects of congestion create chaos for drivers, gridlock can also be a sign of a thriving city, said Eric Miller, a professor at the University of Toronto specializing in transportation engineering. Bustling activity and the resulting traffic are signs of economic health.

“If you look at every successful city around the world, it’s crowded, it’s congested, because people come to cities to interact,” he said. “But there’s a threshold beyond which it does become painful and perhaps detrimental.”

Toronto appears to have reached that threshold.

A July study commissioned by the Toronto Region Board of Trade showed that 42 per cent of GTA and Hamilton residents said they avoid shopping, going out for entertainment and events because of congestion while 38 per cent refrained from dining out.

Giles Gherson, the board’s chief executive officer, said the study also revealed that more than half of residents considered relocating outside the region because of traffic. The same study pegged the price of congestion in Toronto at $11-billion in lost productivity and opportunity cost per year.

As Mr. Gherson sees it, traffic is fundamentally undermining Toronto’s business competitiveness.

“It’s much harder to get international business travellers to Toronto,” he said. “International business leaders are stunned; they see a transit system much too small for [a city] of our size.”

Mr. Miller blames the city’s maintenance backlog. “We’ve deferred maintenance for very long on many of our infrastructure.”

Ms. Chow acknowledged this year that the city’s aging infrastructure has the municipal government facing a $26-billion budget shortfall in the next 10 years just to bring old infrastructure to a state of good repair.

“We have failed to give our cities the financial instruments they need to be successful,” Mr. Miller said. “Cities are dependent upon the property tax and virtually no other sources of revenue.”

The city’s new traffic plan, which was announced last month, outlines a two-year strategy to improve the management of traffic congestion through increased fines, tougher enforcement and better construction management, while also limiting the number of simultaneous entertainment events in the city.

Council adopted the plan with minor amendments on Oct. 10.

Tamer El-Diraby, an engineer who researches decision-making in construction at the University of Toronto, said that the backlog is not just a problem of funding, but mismanagement in construction investment.

“Public entities are encouraged to accept the lowest bid, but that more expensive project could include better management of traffic,” he said. “We should be willing to pay a contractor to do a better job.”

Different ministries also don’t communicate or do so only at the last moment, with the Gardiner serving as a perfect example.

Just recently, Ontario’s Minister of Transportation stepped in to give the city $73-million to accelerate construction on the Gardiner by one year in exchange for the city allowing round-the-clock work. But that happened after years of delays and chaos for commuters and locals.

Dr. El Diraby said another struggle is that short-term funding means that cities break up construction into smaller projects, which creates more interruptions.

Shoshanna Saxe, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Engineering, and a Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure, said the city’s current problems are the result of a lack of proper investment in public transit combined with significant growth.

She said expanding road capacity and accommodating vehicles is not a sustainable solution.

“It’s a decade of unfortunate urban planning coming back to bite us,” she said.

“We’re a big city, and we’re trying to get around in cars … the physics of it is not possible. You cannot move millions of people around the city reliably in personal automobiles.”

Dr. Saxe added that another problem is that the vehicles on the roads today take up more space. For example, SUVs and pickup trucks – now the most popular types of vehicles – are 20 per cent larger than sedans.

“Each individual car takes up more space, and it’s a recipe for loud, uncomfortable, slow-moving streets,” she said.

Nevertheless, commuting by car is still the primary mode of transportation for Toronto’s workers, according to 2024 census data. Roughly 71 per cent of the nearly 1.5 million Greater Toronto area workers commute by car, truck or van. At the same time, the share of people mostly working from home has fallen every year since May, 2021.

Meanwhile, the proportion of commuters mainly taking public transit was just under 23 per cent, up from 20.6 per cent a year prior.

Car commuting was less prevalent for those in racialized groups. Census data showed that Latin American and Black commuters were more than 60 per cent less likely to mainly travel to work in a car.

Efforts to create alternatives to driving, such as public transit projects and bike lanes that take up road space, often face pushback.

Premier Ford has frequently opposed bike lanes on major streets, and recently announced legislation to limit the construction of new bike lanes. Under planned legislation, cities would need to seek provincial government permission to build new bike lanes and Mr. Ford intends to remove some existing bike lanes as well.

The legislation could disrupt Toronto City Council’s own approved plan to add 100 kilometres of bike lanes across the city over three years to reduce carbon emissions and provide alternative transport options.

Major cities that expanded biking infrastructure have seen traffic decline. In Paris, where traffic congestion has fallen by 50 per cent between 2002 and 2022, bikes have become more popular than cars, with the city spending €250-million in cycling infrastructure over the next five years.

Mr. Ford has instead focused on increasing capacity, largely through new or expanded highways. Those include the planned Highway 413 through York, Peel and Halton Regions, which has drawn opposition because of environmental concerns, and Mr. Ford’s recently announced plan to spend billions to build a 55-kilometre mega-tunnel under Highway 401. If built, the tunnel would be the world’s largest road tunnel by a significant margin.

In 2009, two economists, Matthew Turner and Gilles Duranton coined “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion,” based on a study that found that increased road capacity did not relieve a city’s traffic burdens.

Their study of U.S. cities found that whenever a town expanded road capacity by 10 per cent, the amount of driving also went up by 10 per cent – if it went up by 11, then driving went up in lockstep.

While their observations were based on correlation, their immediate conclusion was clear: Expanded roadways invite more drivers and make no improvements to gridlock.

Since widening roads isn’t guaranteed to ease congestion, some researchers are focusing their efforts on better co-ordination of the existing traffic.

Mauro Vallati at the University of Huddersfield in Britain has been spearheading research in the area of smart traffic management.

The system his team created adapts traffic signals based on historical data and shifting road conditions, creating highly accurate simulations, which can then be used to optimize traffic signals on real roads. In simulated tests performed in Manchester, England, his team was able to reduce delays and congestion by approximately 20 per cent.

A more controversial solution endorsed by the likes of Mr. Turner and Mr. Duranton, is congestion pricing – charging to drive on a road when and where congestion is high.

After London began charging drivers for passing through certain parts of the city in 2003, the number of cars travelling there fell by 33 per cent in three years; the number of bus and bicycle trips increased by 25 and 49 per cent respectively.

But at the recent press conference around the city’s new traffic management plan, city officials said that congestion charges on individual motorists would not figure into potential new fees and fines to curb traffic, including charges for construction delays, blocking roads and bike lanes and more. The Premier has also ruled out road tolls, including on the proposed Highway 401 tunnel.

Any of these solutions are years away. For now, drivers are stuck in traffic.

After her aunt underwent surgery, 48-year-old Jen Logan found herself driving from her home at the edge of Pickering to downtown Toronto twice a week to check up on her. Though Ms. Logan lives next to Highway 401 – a direct route to the Don Valley Parkway and her aunt’s home downtown – she allocates at least an hour and a half for a drive that would normally take under 30 minutes on a car-free road. But there’s been times when it’s taken her as long as three hours.

“It’s become almost like a full-time job researching the traffic,” Ms. Logan said. “Just to make sure I’m preparing ahead of time, because you can’t just assume anymore with Toronto traffic. It has definitely gotten worse.”

While Mr. Cherry, the contractor in Little Italy, puts a lot of blame for the city’s congestion on construction and other things under the city’s control, he also said ultimately it’s up to drivers.

“The best cure is entirely on the citizen side,” he said.

“Better knowledge of the rules of the road, more etiquette and patience, and even a degree of lowered expectations for mobility – our planning and transit certainly are not coming to the rescue anytime soon.”