Despite the name of the…

Despite the name of the recent Bill 212 – “Reducing Gridlock, Saving You Time Act”, there is disappointingly little in it that will actually contribute to relieving congestion. At the same time, it is introducing needless red tape, the sort of thing this government had previously expressed a very welcome commitment to reducing.

The portions of this bill related to cycling introduce brand new red tape where previously there was none. The transportation plans that the government has published provided a compelling vision for a multimodal approach to transportation across the province, including cycling. This bill will now make it more difficult and costly for municipalities to implement the plans, especially as there’s no clear guidance or direction on the sorts of projects that will be deemed acceptable. The province could easily have taken an alternative approach of developing and implementing design standards that would help achieve your goals. Rather than just targeting Toronto, this would have helped any municipality in the province to build their communities in smart, effective ways.

I’m sure by now you’ve already been inundated with correspondence extolling the virtues of cycling and the importance of dedicated, protected lanes from a safety perspective, so I won’t go into any of that here. Instead, I want to highlight how the focus on preserving “marked lanes available for travel by motor vehicle traffic” and focusing on things that might “unduly diminish the movement of motor vehicle traffic” misses the mark in terms of actually addressing the causes of urban congestion.

A fact that is not widely recognized, even within North American transportation planning circles, is that it’s not the number of lanes that limits the capacity of urban road networks. It’s actually the number and design of intersections that’s grinding traffic to a stand still in our cities. There’s an excellent YouTube video that explains this in more detail if you’re interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqOxBZJ6c1g

If the province is going to insert itself into the minutia of urban traffic design, there is a huge opportunity here to further build on the transportation plans for Ontario that were previously released. The introduction of Transit Oriented Communities and the long overdue funding for higher order transit in the province was a great first step towards more livable cities. These initiatives will be successful because they will get cars off the road. These could be complemented with other initiatives that will help move more people along our urban rights of way, instead of just drivers:

- Better identification of what constitutes primary or secondary routes would allow for the designs of both to be better optimized. Added to this, a recognition that urban and rural road networks operate very differently would help move away from everything just being considered a “highway”.
- Changes to the building code could require that developments properly accommodate pick-ups, drop-offs and deliveries to reflect the shift towards rideshare and e-commerce we’ve seen in recent years. This would help free up valuable road space.
- Higher standards for parking operators that support dynamic space booking or require them to indicate lot capacities or at the very least when a lot is full would reduce the huge amount of traffic caused when people just circulate looking for somewhere to park.
- Broader use of Transportation Demand Management (TDM) strategies would also help manage the nature of traffic in the region, which would allow for better use of any existing or new infrastructure.

Beyond the problems we see every day with congestion, the current philosophy towards road design in cities is resulting in urban roads that are significantly overbuilt in a way that traffic can't take advantage of anyway. The wasteful use of asphalt and pavement comes with massive environmental impacts and is resulting in significant costs for municipalities as they build and then try to maintain their infrastructure. This in turn leaves them starved for funds to operate or expand their road networks.

If the province could provide better guidance to municipalities to make sure that roads are right-sized for the traffic flowing through them, relative to what the intersections can actually accommodate, this would reduce costs and increase safety while also helping to fight congestion. It will be important, however, that this guidance is not developed in isolation by the province as many of the urban traffic experts are in our municipalities across the province. This is the sort of bold action I would like to see from the provincial government, rather than more bad legislation and red tape wasting the legislature’s time and resources.