Front Burner - Canada’s traffic is brutal. Can it be fixed?

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

As you’re probably well aware, traffic in cities across Canada is mind-numbingly bad. The geolocation firm TomTom recently ranked Toronto as having the worst traffic in North America with Vancouver, Winnipeg and Montreal also in the top ten. And as the debates about how to fix it rage on, it’s only seeming to get worse. That issue is being brought into sharp relief in Ontario right now, where a new bill would force municipalities across the province to get permission before installing any new bike lanes.So here’s a conversation with Jennifer Keesmaat. She’s the former chief planner of Toronto and one of Canada’s most renowned voices on urban issues.We’re going to talk about the solutions to traffic that don’t work and the ones that do.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, I'm Jamie Poisson. Fights over bike lanes are nothing new. Anywhere they're introduced, Vancouver, Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, they see major blowback.

Even if in the long run, they usually end up being extremely popular. But right now in Ontario, that fight is being taken to a new level by Premier Doug Ford. They take out a lane of traffic, put bike lanes in there. It's cut down to one. It's jammed like crazy. The government tabling a new bill that once passed would force municipalities across the province to get permission before installing any new bike lanes and prove they won't make traffic worse. The PCs also say it gives them the power to remove existing ones. Municipalities are pushing back on this, including Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow. So are cycling advocates who say that bike lanes not only save lives,

but aren't actually contributing to Toronto's infamous traffic problems. All of this got us thinking about gridlock, about traffic, and what actually causes it. Because all over this country, it is mind-numbingly bad. There's a decent chance that you are probably stuck in traffic as you are listening to this right now. The geolocation firm TomTom recently ranked Toronto as having the worst traffic in North America. But Vancouver, Winnipeg and Montreal are all in the top 10 too. And with many of our cities seeing their populations grow, the gridlock is probably only going to get worse. That is why today I'm going to be speaking with Jennifer Kiesmatt. She's the former chief planner of Toronto

and one of Canada's most renowned voices on urban issues. We're going to talk about the solutions to traffic that don't work and the ones that do around the world and what it would take to actually make them happen here in Canada. Imagine. Jennifer, hi. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. I'm happy to chat. So I just want to make it clear to our listeners before we launch into this that we are going to talk about traffic headaches across Canada and the world in a little bit. Not just bike lanes and not just Ontario. I promise we're not being Toronto and Ontario-centric here. But this bike lane story is the newsy bit, and it's also a touchy subject in basically every city.

So why don't we start there? And you have been quite a vocal critic of these announcements from the Ontario government that would give them veto power over municipal bike lanes, and just tell me why. Well, because we know bikes are part of the solution. Well, because we know bikes are part of the solution. And so it's a little bit of a silly game to be implying or suggesting that bikes are the root of the cause and the root of the problem when we know that the root of And this is one of the reasons why, for example, in the Toronto Official Plan, Vancouver's not that different. There's a mandate around adding more people without adding more cars. And ironically, we've actually been really good at doing that in the city of Toronto. The fact that we now have no parking requirements with new condos is precisely because newcomers coming into the city are moving into dense urban neighbourhoods and saying, hey, I'm not going to own a car. I'm going to walk. I'm going to cycle.

I'm going to take transit because this is an urban place. And those are the best ways to get around an urban place. When you listen to the case the Ontario government is making, they're saying that this is actually about reducing congestion. Grid block isn't an all-time high. It takes people a long time, much longer to get to where they need to go. And so we need to reevaluate as many of these bike lanes have been put at the expense of vehicle lanes across the city and across the province. That's an argument against bike lanes that we've heard in most cities when they first come in, Calgary, Vancouver, Bogota even. And so just tell me, what is the evidence about how bike lanes impact traffic positively or negatively? What do we know about what they actually do to traffic when you put

them in? Well, so the first thing is, I think you used making the case very liberally there because they didn't really make a case. They just literally said bike lanes cause congestion. And I think, you know, a lot of us said, okay, show us the data, show us what you're studying, show us what you're looking at and, you know, radio silence, because there is zero case to be made that bike lanes cause congestion. There's no data, there's no analysis, there's no study that would lead you to that conclusion anywhere in the world, interestingly. But on the flip side, the idea that cycling is a part of building out a more complex transportation network where people have a variety of choices and can use the

best mobility tool, whether that be transit or cycling or walking to get where they're going, well, there's actually a ton of data that demonstrates that. And those studies have now been repeated over the course of the past 20 years in Portland, Oregon, in Copenhagen, in Amsterdam, and more recently over the past five years now in Paris and New York City. And there's a really important concept that it's important to understand that is the hook behind really how transportation planning works. And the simplest way to say it is, if you build it, they will come. The more technical term that has been widely studied and is now an accepted concept is the idea of induced demand, which is essentially that what you design for is what you will create within your transportation system. So if you build

highways, you will get cars driving on highways. Amid a congestion crisis in the greater Toronto area comes a new concept from Premier Doug Ford, a tunnel underneath the Highway 401 to relieve the traffic directly above it. Wouldn't it be great, you know, if we had tunnels going both sides in the middle where we have transit? It'd be spectacular. If you build bike lanes, people will get out of their cars and will get onto their bikes. If you build excellent transit, people will use that transit system. So essentially, you get what you plan and design for. And I would argue that what we're seeing in most Canadian cities right now is we're seeing induced demand on steroids, even within the urban boundaries of a city. If all the residents of that city decided to walk cycle and take transit, but even though

they're living in a way that is not demanding a car, even if that creates road capacity, if you have a sprawling region that's growing endlessly, induced demand, those roads immediately get filled up with cars. People living in the fringes say, oh, it's easier to drive downtown, I'll drive downtown, and boom, you've got your streets filled up with cars. So think about Calgary, for example, the vast majority of new homes built in Calgary are actually outer layer suburbs. So that means a suburb on top of a suburb on top of a suburb. So what does that mean? It means, well, you don't have the density for transit, even if you built state-of-the-art transit out to those suburbs, you just don't have enough density for the transit to be a true

transportation choice. And as a result, you pretty much don't have a choice. You pretty much have to drive. So what's happening in the core of our cities is that they're really suffering from what's happening, not in our cities, but on the regional fringe. That's what's really creating this unbelievable congestion problem. might we have had there, right? This idea that people have had to move farther and farther outside of cities. Like I have a lot of friends that have had to do that, not necessarily by choice, right? Because housing in our cities are so expensive that they've had to go further out. Well, you're mixing up a few different things there. Like the choices around housing is another and critical issue. But if we look at household costs in Canada, the number one cost that the vast majority, almost all households have in Canada, is paying for housing. And their second cost is paying for transportation.

I'll use myself as a case in point here. When we were newly married and struggling to pay the mortgage every month, and we put it in a basement apartment, and that kind of helped us out a little bit. And we realized at one point that if we moved closer into the city, we wouldn't need to own a car. And so we were able, that's a choice too. And so that was a choice that we made. We said, okay, let's become a car-free household. And at that time, when our kids were little, we were a car-free household living in the core of the city because we made that choice to live without a car and to live in an urban environment. So I would say, yeah, the failure of our regional planning

is that we've been creating regionally these low density environments that are totally, you absolutely need to own a car to do anything. In fact, in many of our regional municipalities, students drive cars to high school and there's massive surface parking lots around high schools. Well, that's a failure of land use planning. It also increases housing costs because it's a very expensive way to build housing. Your sprawling infrastructure has to be subsidized and that gets put onto the property tax. So, you know, it really, this really is a challenge of how land has been planned. And when you say, well, people have no choice. Yeah, but we have a choice in

terms of how we plan our region and how we densify our city. And we need to start linking those things together in order to create both more housing options, but also more mobility options, creating the option of people having a shorter commute and the option of being able to afford to live in a place where you don't need to own a car. You know, obviously, as you've just talked about, sprawl is a huge contributor to the traffic problems in our cities. But I wonder if you think that there are other issues, too. We were talking about a few here at the office, of course, just a growing population in general, but even construction, rideshare apps, the fact that we're all getting basically everything delivered now,

how might other factors be playing a role as well? So construction is relatively minor. It's very visible on streets. So it's something that gets people very angry. And at times it can be really significant, but it's not the crux of the issue. The ride share one, though, is fascinating because there is a study out of New York City. And in this study, they determined that 30% of the trips in Manhattan were ride share cars circling around picking up their rides, picking people up. So 30% of the trips, that's significant. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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You know, obviously, as we talked about, building more roads doesn't work. Getting rid of bike lanes doesn't work. What has worked? So the real golden goose, the jewel of this conversation, real golden goose, the jewel of this conversation, combined with how we plan at a regional scale, is a congestion charge. There's a certain area that when you go into that area, you get automatically charged. And essentially what it does, particularly if there's time of day pricing and surge pricing, what it does is it acts as an incentive for people to make different choices. So, you know, and we see this on the 407 in the Ontario region where we already have a

priced highway that there are certain times of the day when you can look and you'll be like, oh yeah, I'm going to take the 407. It's the fastest route and it's going to cost me $9. There's other times, and this has happened to me because I have a project outside of the city where I've checked and it's been like, holy smokes, it's going to cost me $49. And that's the surge pricing. That means there's an accident on the 401 or whatever. And in that instance, well, I make a different choice. And so for a congestion charge to be really effective, and this is why we always have to talk about sprawl first, for congestion charge to be really effective, you have to have a series of other options in the urban landscape. So congestion

charges were first introduced in London, England, by a conservative government, by the way, because it's a conservative principle, right? It's a principle of pricing. And on the same day that the congestion charge was rolled out, the fleet of buses was doubled. And an amazing thing happened. Overnight, people got out of their cars and onto buses. And London, England, as you see it today, is a fundamentally different place than it was 20 years ago, even to the point where the investment in heritage restoration for heritage buildings has gone down significantly because the number one issue for heritage buildings was exhaust from cars. Oh, that's really interesting. But there is so much less exhaust in the core of the city because there's less cars in the core of the city. Of course, the air quality has gone up. And Mayor Siddharth Khan, about five years ago, he launched an absolutely massive and comprehensive cycling network plan for London that has once again, in addition to the congestion charge, fundamentally shifted how

Londoners get around the city. Same thing has happened in Paris, but London's really interesting because it's been so fast and because it's so recent. And I'll add that when Mayor Siddharth Khan launched this plan in London, he was absolutely vilified, not unlike what's happening in the Canadian context right now. But amazingly, it took three years and three years was the tipping point. At the three-year period, there was an election and he actually won handily. And so he converted. There was a conversion that happened among the population of people who were never cyclists to now always cyclists.

And the key to enabling that was a comprehensive cycling network. Just coming back to this idea that a lot of these proposals are deeply unpopular at first, but do become popular over time. I mean, even in Canada, right, Calgary Cycling Network or the bike lane on Vancouver's Broad Bridge. The bridge was certainly never intended or set up for people to cycle over it. Former Vancouver Press Secretary Kevin Quinlan recalls when the city first experimented with a makeshift bike lane in 1996. The pilot was cancelled just days later due to chaos and confusion on the roads. These were really controversial before they came in and now they get a ton of use. It's wide enough and there's lane on both sides,

so it's absolutely superb. I love it. The views that you get looking over the harbor, it's a really nice way to start and finish your ride. Now more than one million cyclists speed down this path every year. Vancouver officials have actually said that the Burrard Bridge is the busiest bike lane in North America. Just what other advice might you give politicians looking to try and get over that short-term hump there, right? Yes.

Well, one of it is, which is why, you know, made a little poke there that they were making the case that they caused. They're not making a case. Saying something isn't making the case. Going to studies, going to the data, you know, on Bloor Street, we created, we undertook in partnership with the University of Toronto, an economic impact study that showed that 90% of the shoppers along Bloor Street are actually transit riders, cyclists, and pedestrians. Right. And that was really important data and analysis that actually flipped the BIA from being anti-bike lanes to being pro-bike lanes. Right, because one of the arguments is that it takes away parking spots. Exactly.

You know, so you've got to get the data, do the analysis. But I will tell you that today, as I cycled to work, I saw two fascinating things, which you would never see without a protected bike lane. I saw multiple people over 80 years old cycling in the bike lane, like really elderly people biking, you know, and God willing, I'll be one of them someday. And the other thing that I saw was on the other end, I saw an unusual number of parents with children on the back of their bike, obviously biking their children to daycare, biking their children to school. So that is something you will not see without protected infrastructure, but it also will never be a choice if you don't make it a choice in the city.

And I'll just give you an example with respect to bike share in Toronto. We started out, we had 500,000 trips a year. You don't have to live in downtown Toronto to access the bike share program anymore. Touting the success of the rental program, Mayor John Tory announced today that bike share will be bringing 1,000 new bikes to other neighbourhoods, including Midtown's Young and Eglinton and out to the beaches. In 2023, 5.7 million trips. Huh. 5.7 million. It's just easy and it's not too expensive, so what can you do? And the numbers show more Torontonians agree with him. Memberships are up as new bike lanes give cyclists safer places to ride. One factor behind this growth could be e-bikes.

Imagine if those 5.7 million trips instead were in a car. you've given us all these great examples london paris is there something about the way that our political governmental system works here that might make this slightly more complex or complicated to accomplish than like compared to other places in the world? Well, honestly, the constraints that exist here are the same constraints that exist in Paris. They're the same constraints that exist in London. The only difference I'll say is that you really need bold leadership. And we are a country that likes to do things in very tiny increments. We like to build our transit in tiny increments. Whereas you have places in the world, Paris is one of them, that has a continuous program of building subways and transit infrastructure. Many Asian cities are like this. We build a little

line and then we stop. And that is the worst possible model when it comes to bikes for the reason that I just said. Cycling, you see the uptake in cycling as a true transportation choice when the network is comprehensive. It doesn't help anyone if you can only do a small part of your trip on the bike, but two-thirds of your trip, you're going to be unsafe in traffic. So you can't really do this in an incremental way. And, you know, I'll say Montreal is the North American leader and the only difference between Montreal, because Montreal is a very cold city. The only difference between Montreal and other Canadian cities, Montreal had bold leadership and built out hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of cycling infrastructure very quickly. Double Vancouver, double what Toronto did. And guess what?

It saw the uptake in cycling go absolutely through the roof. Jennifer, thank you very much for this. This is really interesting talking to you. Thank you so much for coming by. My pleasure. All right, that is all for today. Hope you all get wherever you're going soon. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.