DON’T LIKE CONGESTION?
It turns out you may be part of the problem as cities try to manage all of the moving pieces
The federal Liberal government has spent billions of dollars over the past four years and promised billions more to get people and goods moving faster. Has it worked? This is the first of a series.
You can feel the costs of congestion adding up when inching through a lethargic red sea of brake lights at 4 p.m. on the Friday of a long weekend. It’s palpable: that frustrated, bottled-up, never-gonna-get-where-you-wanna-go feeling.
Maybe you blame the government for inadequate transit or road capacity; maybe you give the side eye to a convoy of seven-seater SUVS with zero passengers; maybe you question why that semi-truck doesn’t travel in the middle of the night.
You probably ignore two facts: you (yes, you) are part of the problem, and it’s a good problem to have. But if we follow the adage that what gets measured gets done, the problem is made even worse because no one knows the exact cost of congestion.
Yes, congestion, is a daily exercise in impatience that costs Canada’s economy billions of dollars a year in lost time, wasted fuel and delayed deliveries.
Other costs include greenhouse-gas emissions (the transportation sector accounts for 25 per cent of emissions in Canada), accidents and poorer health, since people perpetually stuck in traffic report lower life satisfaction and physical activity.
But congestion is also a sign of economic activity.
Toronto is both North America’s fastest-growing city (it expects to add more than 100,000 people per year over the next decade) and Canada’s most congested, depending on who’s measuring (Vancouver and Montreal aren’t far behind, and in some rankings are even ahead).
“A successful city is going to be a congested city,” said Eric Miller, University of Toronto civil engineering professor and director of its Transportation Research Institute.
This paradox means the goal of combating congestion will never be to erase it. But that doesn’t mean the status quo is sustainable.
“You can’t accommodate all those people and all those trips,” Miller said. “We have to be finding alternate ways.”
In most cases, the answer comes down to building mass transit in the right places so there are options to driving, though it’s important to remember that individual mobility has to be addressed in conjunction with the movement of goods, and how disruptive technologies can affect the issue.
These aren’t separate conversations. It’s critical to build capacity across all modes of transportation and to use existing infrastructure more efficiently, said Yvonne Rene de Cotret, Deloitte Canada’s National Public Sector Transportation leader and co-leader of its Future of Mobility practice.
“If we create capacity on our roads by diverting individual passenger traffic onto transit, that could create capacity on roads for handling some of the freight,” she said. “Dealing with congestion around cities is not just about making cities livable for constituents that have to live and work in the region … we’re also dealing with some of the impact the congestion has on the goods movement.”
De Cotret sees an opportunity to take action now given the “unprecedented” level of agreement across all levels of government that transportation problems must be dealt with since congestion hurts competitiveness.
Even the auto sector knows it’s not business as usual, she said, as research has shown ride sharing and car sharing make car ownership less attractive to younger people.
But instead of pitting private cars against public transit, there’s a shift toward making both private and public options part of mobility solutions.
Based on Deloitte’s global research, cities that best advance their transportation goals are ones with a clear vision and alignment between transit operators and policy-makers.
“The one thing I don’t think we as a nation can afford in our major urban centres today is to get disrupted by misalignment between government constituencies on the fact we have a problem to solve,” de Cotret said.
The problem is as political as it is personal. Canada and North America, in general, are car-centric cultures where people are accustomed to using the roads for “free,” overlooking the infrastructure and maintenance costs that are baked into taxes.
But, most of all, people value time, and driving remains the fastest way to travel for the majority of commuters, according to Statistics Canada’s 2016 census data. On average, it’s 20 minutes faster to travel by car, truck or van to work than it is to hop on public transit.
It takes an average of 24 minutes to drive to work in a private vehicle, versus a 44-minute trip on a crowded bus or subway, so it’s no wonder three-quarters of Canadian commuters grab their car keys. Sure, biking or walking is on average 10-15 minutes faster than driving in the biggest cities, but only seven per cent of people commute using active transport.
Yet we also collectively ignore how we personally slow down the road network when we get in a car.
“Motorists perceive themselves as the victims of congestion,” Transport Canada mulled in a 2006 report (based on data from 2002), the last time the federal government attempted to quantify nationwide congestion costs.
Back then, the federal agency pegged the cost of typical dayto-day congestion, unanticipated delays such as accidents or construction, incrementally wasted fuel and greenhouse-gas emissions at a combined $4.4 billion to $6.7 billion.
According to a 2008 Metrolinx report using 2006 data, the annual estimated cost to the Greater Toronto Area is about $6 billion, with that figure expected to balloon to $15 billion by 2031. In 2013, C.D. Howe Institute estimated an additional regional cost of $1.5 billion to $5 billion because congestion can prevent people from taking trips that otherwise could have resulted in collaboration or productivity.
Given the range of estimates, existing data on cumulative costs may be unsatisfying, but it’s clear that congestion costs the economy billions of dollars annually, and it’s only going to get worse as the population grows.
The number of registered vehicles of every type has ticked up over the past five years, hitting 35,108,602 in 2018, up 2.3 per cent since 2017 and 7.8 per cent since 2014, according to Statistics Canada. And commute times are getting longer. The average Canadian’s one-way commute was 26.2 minutes in 2016, up from 25.4 minutes in 2011. It’s less than a minute each way, yet it adds up to an extra eight minutes a week, or 6.5 hours per year.
Nearly 26.5 million Canadians lived in Census Metropolitan Areas as of July 2018, when the total population was a little more than 37 million. More than one-third live in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
Without room to expand highways in a major way in those three cities, governments are looking to nudge people onto transit, bikes or sidewalks, options they will choose more often if they’re more convenient and reliable.
Governments are also fighting about the costs and placement of rapid transit projects, which can take decades to build.
Despite the federal promise in the 2016 budget to spend $188 billion on infrastructure over 12 years, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has reported delays in spending, partly due to provinces decreasing investment in jointly funded projects. The $3.4 billion promised for transit in the 2016 budget merely trickled out for the first two years, though it is expected to increase in the next year.
As a result, everyone is squeezing onto transportation infrastructure that hasn’t kept up with urban growth while protracted political stalemates continue over what to build where.
Toronto’s subway extension into the northern suburbs in 2017 was the first major addition to the line in 15 years. Montreal has a number of transit projects in the works, including one that received the first loan from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which last summer announced plans to spend $1.3 billion on the city’s light rail system, but they won’t be ready for a few years at best.
Vancouver, however, is seeing what happens when you increase transit capacity: ridership increased 18.4 per cent from 2015 to 2018. As they say: if you build it, they will come.
Translink, the regional transit agency, credits continuous increases to its service hours for the growth. The highest gas prices in Canada and gridlock in a region bordered by rivers, mountains and the Pacific Ocean also factored into people’s decisions to take the bus. Now, parts of the system are overcrowded.
“It’s a good problem to have,” New Westminster Mayor Jonathan Coté said in an interview.
But congestion remains a roadblock to continued economic growth in the region, said Coté, who also chairs Translink’s mayors’ council, from the agency’s headquarters overlooking a Skytrain station.
Tomtom and INRIX, traffic research and analytics firms that use GPS data from millions of miles of road, both found that Vancouver drivers lose more than 100 hours a year to congestion.
Coté credits the federal government for renewing the interest in infrastructure spending, but his council is pushing a “cure congestion” campaign in advance of the 2019 federal election. It joins the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in asking for long-term, sustainable transit funding of $3.4 billion per year until 2038, to be allocated to cities based on ridership.
“You’re never going to be able to remove politics … this shifts from one-offs to focus on the broader goal,” Coté said.
Translink has also pursued another solution further than any other Canadian municipality: mobility pricing, also known as road pricing or congestion pricing.
Instead of tolling a single highway or bridge, mobility pricing generally charges personal vehicle drivers to enter an entire area, typically the downtown core. This has proven successful in London and Stockholm, although traffic is starting to edge up as people become more willing to pay fees for improved speeds, and more ride-sharing vehicles (Uber, Lyft) take to the streets.
Over the past 100 years, Canada has built a society of suburbs that are almost fully dependent on cars. A change of rules, such as charging people to enter the city, would penalize those who moved to the suburbs because they couldn’t afford a home otherwise, said Peter Harrison, a vice-president at CPCS Transcom Ltd., a Toronto-based transportation and infrastructure consulting firm.
Harrison sees three ways to mitigate congestion: build more capacity, change how existing capacity is allocated using technology (tolls, changing speed limits based on traffic, changing lane directions based on time of day) and, in the future, automation.
He added that governments also need to be more transparent about transit plans so the public isn’t as skeptical of big price tags. Until those plans are turned into reality, he said cities need to be on the lookout for low-cost pilot projects that could have high impact.
As an example, Harrison cited the controversial King Street pilot project in Toronto, where city officials limited car traffic to improve streetcar service. In its first year, weekday streetcar ridership increased to 84,000 from 72,000 as travel time improved by five minutes and reliability skyrocketed. Car travel times slowed by about one minute as vehicle traffic drastically fell. The city budgeted $600,000 for the pilot project and decided to make it permanent despite objections from some local businesses.
“We’re moving people more quickly and reliably,” he said. “For sure, people who liked driving along King Street would pay the price. On balance, the benefits outweighed the costs.”
A successful city is going to be a congested city ... you can’t accommodate all those people and all those trips.