Toronto cracking down on 10 ‘hot spots’ of traffic gridlock

Mayor John Tory announced six congestion-fighting measures including tackling 10 of the city’s notorious bottlenecks.

Thestar.com
Jan. 6, 2016
By Tess Kalinowski

Toronto is employing technology and crunching data in Phase 2 of the mayor’s fight to get traffic moving, including the identification of 10 “hot spots” where volume, poor engineering or signals slow car movements to a crawl.

The intersections are based on data the city has held but failed to use in the past, said Mayor John Tory at one of the intersections, Yonge St. and Sheppard Ave.

Each of the 10 will get a hard look and an action plan to get traffic moving, he promised.

“It could be re-engineering the roadway itself. It could be turn restrictions. Whatever measure is most appropriate is what we’re going to be looking for as we go forward,” he said.

Half of those action plans will be underway by the summer with the remainder done by the end of the year.

Among the six new congestion-fighting measures announced Wednesday, Tory also wants to put traffic cops back in busy intersections, test out new smart signals at 20 intersections and implement new courier zones to further reduce lane blockers on city streets.

The city's SmartCommute program that encourages employers to encourage non-car based commuting will be expanded and Toronto will also develop a road safety plan to reduce injuries and fatalities among cyclists, pedestrians and those in cars.

Those will enhance the six anti-gridlock moves introduced last year, including a crackdown on illegally stopped and parked vehicles.

Tory also introduced more traffic blitzes; improved road closure reporting; the retiming of traffic signals (343 were done last year, while 353 more are planned for this year); fees for developers who block traffic lanes due to construction and expedited construction on road projects such as the Gardiner.

It’s not about prioritizing drivers, it’s about managing the city more effectively - and safely, he said.

The goal is also to eliminate traffic fatalities, including the climbing number of pedestrians - disproportionately senior citizens - dying on Toronto roads, said Tory.

Anecdotally, Tory says his anti-gridlock plan is working. But he admitted there's little hard evidence.

“It’s going to make a difference. It’s difficult to quantify and it sure is a difference that’s better than doing nothing,” he said.

But data, as well as technology, can help harness Toronto's traffic problem, said the mayor.

“The (30-year-old) technology behind our stoplights in Toronto belongs in a traffic museum,” said Tory.

Within six months, new technology that changes lights according to real-time traffic flow, will be piloted at 20 intersections, he promised.

Ontario law requires that traffic enforcement at intersections must be done by sworn police officers but Tory says he will push to put that job in the hands of non-police personnel.

The city recently hired a big data specialist, who is going through Toronto's traffic numbers and also reviewing data collected by outside sources such as TomTom, a GPS specialist, said Myles Currie of Toronto Transportation Services.

“Big data is really just coming into the forefront in the last few years with reliability," he said.

"There wasn’t a lot of reliability in the data say five years ago. The data is more reliable now and we’re starting to hire people who have those skills. Toronto’s been leading the way in big data in North America."