Richmond Hill driven to solve commuter culture crisis

Thestar.com
Sheila Wang
Sept. 20, 2018

As the Town of Richmond Hill gears up for next month’s election, town staff and experts shed light on one of the town’s pressing issues — the long-standing traffic woes.

It is not easy for people to get around in Richmond Hill, with the construction work on the main roads, increased use of residential roads and traffic congestion during rush hours.

“Richmond Hill, like other suburban municipalities, has considerable traffic challenges,” said Patrick Lee, Richmond Hill’s director of policy planning. “There are only so many arterial roads, there are plenty of cars and lots of commuters heading to multiple directions.”

The main problem lies in people’s reliance on cars, Lee said. More than 70 per cent of Richmond Hill residents travel out of town to work every day, and a majority of them spent at least 30 minutes on the road according to the 2016 census profile.

While the town has been working to widen roads to address congestion, Lee said the room for capacity improvement in Richmond Hill is “fairly limited” due to the lack of roads.

“But in some way that may be a good thing, potentially to get people to utilize transit or active form of transit such as walking and cycling. The lack of roads might be a blessing in disguise in the long term.”

The key is to get people out of their cars to start using public transit, Lee added.

“They’ve already done a lot more than other cities I think,” said Charles Chung, traffic analyst with Trans-Plan, a Toronto-based traffic planning and transportation consulting service provider.

Richmond Hill’s push for public transit use has had a notable impact. While private vehicles have remained the major means of transportation for Richmond Hill’s commuters, statistics show that public transit usage has steadily increased among Richmond Hill residents, from 13.2 per cent in 2006 to 15.2 per cent in 2016. The proportion of car drivers has also dropped slightly.

But the traffic problem is not going away overnight.