The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Will Toronto's Traffic Disaster Be Fixed?

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Getting around Ontario's capital city is a nightmare. How can Toronto dig itself out of this mess? And why does it matter for the rest of the province? Jennifer McKelvie, Deputy Mayor and Toronto City Councillor for Scarborough–Rouge Park; Giles Gherson, President and CEO of the Toronto Region Board of Trade; Baher Abdulhai, Professor in the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering at the University of Toronto; and Lanrick Bennett Jr., Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's School of Cities join Steve Paikin to discuss construction, bike lanes and a potential underground tunnel.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Getting around Ontario's capital city is a nightmare. Ask drivers trying to get out of Liberty Village, or people trying to navigate Queen Street, where the Ontario line is being built. In fact, no matter where you are in this city, the consensus seems to be that traffic stinks. How can Toronto dig itself out of this mess? And why does it matter for the rest of the province?

Let's ask Jennifer McKelvey, she's the deputy mayor and Toronto city councillor for Scarborough Rouge Park. Giles Gerson, president, CEO of the Toronto Region Board of Trade. Bahar Abdullahi, professor in the Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering at the University of Toronto. And Lanric Bennett Jr., who's got the best title. He is an urbanist in residence at the University of Toronto's School of Cities. And it is great to have you four here with us at TVO tonight for what you might call

a timely conversation about things. And just to get things started, I'm going to ask our director Sheldon Osmond to bring up a few tweets. Because I don't know if you noticed, but traffic sometimes makes it on social media. Here's Andrew Fung, Canadian actor. He posted this in June of this year, saying, after battling Toronto traffic to make my flight to Calgary,

I hopped onto Deerfoot Trail to drive to my parents' house. The lanes were open, traffic was flowing, and it was during rush hour. I just smiled and giggled as I drove. You don't know what you got till it's gone. They paved paradise. Here's, okay okay remind me, is it Nile Horn?

Nile Horn. Irish singer who got stuck in traffic on his way to his own concert, Much Music reposted his video and wrote, when the traffic in Toronto is that bad, that Nile Horn needs to walk to Scotiabank Arena. We're not done here, let's do another. Actor Will Ferrell and co-star Harper Steel, they were on the red carpet at TIFF,

they've got that new documentary out, and they were asked about traffic, and Will Ferrell said, it took us 30 minutes to go a block. Not done yet. Dean Blundell, former Canadian radio host, showed this photo from inside a car surrounded by traffic going zero kilometers per hour and wrote, don't move to Toronto. That's pretty

categorical. Here's another one, infamous saying shared by Made in Canada's ex account. Fun fact, Toronto is an hour away from Toronto with a nice image of traffic. Tom Cruise also had some not so nice things to say about the traffic when he came here for TIFF. Okay Deputy Mayor, this capital city is getting quite the reputation and I guess I want to know is there anything truly that can be done about this or are we just screwed? Well firstly I have to think about why we're here and how we got here and we have under invested for so long in the city and we have amazing investments that are happening unfortunately all at

once. We have 200 cranes in the sky building housing that's much needed sometimes they use the lane of traffic we have over 30 billion dollars in transit being constructed that's a good thing and the City of Toronto spends about a billion dollars in construction fixing our roads our sewers and all that important infrastructure every year but we need to manage it better. We know we need to manage it better. We are trying hard. We're taking congestion seriously.

And next week we're going to debate our congestion management plan at City Council that is looking at all those great things that we have underway to get Toronto moving. That's really the question, if I can follow up. There is a lot going here. The city's on steroids in terms of being built right now, but can we be managing how we're doing all this better in your view? Oh, absolutely.

First of all, we need to understand the causes of congestion before we start thinking about how to fix them. So there are three basic causes of congestion. The obvious one is that you have too many cars that don't fit in the road. Take the Gardner, for instance, capacity 6,000 vehicles per hour. If you throw at, for instance, capacity 6,000 vehicles per hour.

If you throw at it 7,000 or 8,000 vehicles per hour, it will not move. The second less obvious cause is when you try to push your luck with traffic, capacity itself drops. So the Gardner will no longer be operating at 6,000 vehicles per hour. It will drop to 5,000, which doubles the congestion.

And then the third cause is events, such as construction and incidents and so on. Each one of these causes has different approach to solving it. Which would, I mean, can we be doing this better? I guess Giles is the main question. Yeah, I think, and I think the deputy mayor put it very well in terms of,

we sort of sat on our hands for a long time. This region grew by 2.5 million people in the last 20 years. We have 1.1 million more cars on the road. And we didn't really build very much at all. We lived off the fat of the land for a long time. And now, thank heavens, we're doing a lot of building of infrastructure. But it's going to take another six or seven or eight years

till we see even the build out of the Ontario line, which will be a game changer, I think. We're seeing the electrification of gold, again, it'll take another bunch of years. That's another game changer. So there are solutions on the way. But I still think it's going to take a whole bunch of different solutions. Like it's a very layered problem. And I think we have and I think we have to look at each aspect of it. The city started to do that actually with the traffic management plan update that was released a week or so ago. They're making significant steps. I think they need to go a lot farther and a lot faster.

But I'll give you one example. The way people are driving is the Wild West on the roads of Toronto now. People are so frustrated that you've got all kinds of people breaking every traffic rule in the book, running red lights, parking illegally during rush hour. And I think there needs to be a much greater focus on enforcement and probably electronic enforcement like you have in the UK, like you have in Washington, BC, because you can't have policemen everywhere. But even curbing, so I'm just picking one element of this, it's part of the tapestry of the problem,

is I think much better enforcement so that drivers are more disciplined. That's just one element. There are many others. I think you look at our major arteries, arterial roads, they become very, very clogged. And the reason is we've put too many things into those arterial roads.

Now you've got often one lane each way on roads that were designed to bring people in and out of the city. very clogged and the reason is we've put too many things into those arterial roads. Now you've got often one lane each way on roads that were designed to bring people in and out of the city and across. Yeah we'll come back to this. I want to sort of tap into your experience on this because you what moved here maybe 25 years ago almost? Oh geez. Let's go 20.

20 years ago. Okay. And give us a comparison. What was it like when you were here 20 years ago when you first got here compared to today? Right, so 20 years ago I was car dependent. I moved from Mississauga, I would come and go on the Gardner to the west side of Mississauga within 25 minutes.

It was nice, manageable, you could do it. That doesn't happen anymore. I've got a, I've got a, my mom is in her mid-70s right now. She is more or less given up on driving to the city, but she wants to see her grandchildren and doesn't need to see me. Needs to make sure that, you know, her grandchildren see her on a weekly basis.

And she's taking the GO train from Mississauga. She'll take a bus down to Clarkson, hop on the GO, come downtown, we'll pick her up at Maine, and she's spending the entire weekend with us. It's a complete game-changing scenario where car dependency has kind of brought us to a near just impossible way of moving, we've got to start looking at options

that don't necessarily put us in cars. I'm not trying to make trouble here with this question, but you've heard this expression before that sometimes this city feels like it's having a war on the car. Do you buy that? No, not at all. A good city relies on all modes of transportation coming together so that people can get where they need

to go effectively, efficiently, with the mode of their choice. And I think one of the things we need to remember in the city is not all trips are also from car to car, like from beginning to end, or from bike to bike, or from walking to walking. People use multiple modes, sometimes in one trip. In my community in Scarborough East, you might drive to the GO Train and then take the GO Train downtown and then walk up. from walking to walking. People use multiple modes, sometimes in one trip. In my community in Scarborough East,

you might drive to the GO Train and then take the GO Train downtown and then walk up. So we have to have all modes of transit available, efficient and working well, and we have plans for all of them. We've got some video from you. We're gonna play this now, okay? This is the, we asked the question,

could artificial intelligence improve, for example, rush hour, and you gave us this video. So, Sh if you would you want to play this let's do it. So what happens during rush hour every day we simply rush so this is us and this is how we get on the freeway as you see this is the congestion that you go through. This is what gets you frustrated, delayed, and punching each other. So now what? What do we do to make things better? Well, the solution, as I mentioned, is to slow down, pace yourself. This is the smart highway now. So what I'm going to do is pour the rice slowly, slowly, slowly.

Everybody is going through. No one is stuck in congestion. Nobody's screaming. Nobody's kicking. Nobody's punching. That's beautiful. That really explains it very nicely. But I guess the question is, you have to teach people how to behave differently,

and is that possible? It is possible, but not just people. It's the infrastructure itself needs to be controlled. Like we need smart traffic lights. We need smart metering that paces traffic onto the freeway in a calculated manner so it doesn't come to a halt. So using technology resolve about half of the congestion. But it doesn't resolve entirely the congestion

because demand keeps increasing and the infrastructure doesn't increase at the same rate. So we cannot double-deck freeways and dig tunnels and so on. We need to move people to sustainable transportation and that is fast transit. So we need as fast as possible transit. Go Transit for instance is a very nice alternative to congestion on the Gardner and the QW. But where is the transit alternative to the 401? None. So this is where we need more capacity, more infrastructure, but in the form of decent transit as opposed to more traffic lanes. Okay but that's a ten-year solution. Deputy Mayor, I'm wondering if it's

possible and I'm sure we've all seen these elsewhere, where there's a stoplight at the entrance to a highway and you've got to wait until it goes green before you go on. We don't do that in Toronto. Should we be doing that? Well, our congestion management plan is really looking at how to use the existing road network we have more efficiently.

And so we are testing smart signals and we've employed those and we're rolling those out. We are looking at making sure people behave better in the intersections themselves. So we do that. Well, we increased the fines, 450 bucks. So you will be fined if you go into that intersection you can't get all the way through.

We're increasing the fine for stopping during rush hour where you're not supposed to. And we're testing technologies around automated enforcement. So we need people to follow the rules of the road to ensure that everybody can get to where we need to go. And to help with that follow the rules of the road to ensure that everybody can get to where we need to go and to help with that we also have the traffic agent program which has been hugely successful. We have 30 traffic agents out there right now directing traffic in the busiest intersections. We

want to add 50 more next year but they can't be everywhere all the time which is why we need the province to give us the ability to use that automated enforcement technology as well. One of the things that I remember London doing many years ago when Red Ken was the mayor there they brought in congestion pricing and it really worked and then New York thought about doing it and they stopped dead right yeah yeah they thought about it and they were close to doing it and then they pulled the plug on it because politically it's a tough sell. Should we do that here? I think you need an alternative.

I don't think you can. And I remember when Kathleen Wynne was premier of Ontario and Mayor Tory at the time suggested tolling the, which is similar, right, tolling the Don Valley and the Gardner to basically hold back the number of vehicles coming into downtown, which is similar to congestion pricing. And the premier at the time said there's no alternative you can't really force people to pay more if there's no alternative. London has a phenomenal network of transit so does New York City and that was the disappointment about the decision was made in New York because they were going to raise 700

million dollars a year for transit improvements. They chickened out. And you know I think politicians and know, we have one here, I mean, are always very concerned about raising costs and prices. And they should be. But if you've got alternatives, I think you can get away with that. I think this might be something Toronto might want to look at for 2035. And by the way, look at New York. It took 10 years to plan their congestion pricing system.

So if it's something that is going to be in the menu of solutions, we should start thinking about it now. How would you react to a congestion fee being charged for your mom to come in from Mississauga to downtown Toronto? You know what? I would be completely fine with it.

And you brought up the war on cars. It's done. We've already proven the fact that single-occupancy vehicles are not the way to continue to move people forward, coming into Toronto, going through Toronto. So any way that we can give options where, again, car dependency is not your first and foremost way of getting into the city, getting through the city,

it only makes the entire trip that much better. If you have to drive, and as much as I am a cycling advocate, if you have to drive, drive. I am not here to tell you that you need to get out of your car. What my job is is to help create other options for people to be able to say, instead of me driving, maybe I will drive to a GO station and take the GO down. Maybe I will be able to bike down to the subway and hop on there. As a person that uses a bike for almost 90% of my traveling,

taking the subway or taking the GO, that's my superpower. That gets me that much further into wherever it is that I need to go. You ever driving on the Gardner or the DVP? It's been months since I've had to. I was going to say, do you know what percentage of the cars are occupied by one person? I mean the vast, vast majority. Yeah, it's really bad.

Okay, I'm going to make you sit to the end before I ask you about congestion pricing. So let me get our friend from civil and mineral engineering at U of T to weigh in on that. Good idea, congestion pricing? It's inevitable. It has to be because demand keeps increasing and the infrastructure doesn't increase and it's very constrained by money, space, even if you have the money and so on. So congestion pricing is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Does it actually deter people from using those roads?

Absolutely. If it's also time dependent, meaning that you pay more during the peak and less off peak, then it would flatten the peak and push people to use time more efficiently. I know that's the theory, but that actually happens? Yes, it can happen. Okay. Is it within the realm of possibility that Toronto would consider this? I don't think so. Because? Well, we're looking at a parking fee and that could be applied, but we've been clear that

if we implement any fees or levies around parking that it has to take into account higher order transit. And we have areas of the city that are completely starved of higher-order transit, particularly throughout the suburbs. And until we make those investments, until we have alternates available, there's not a big desire to tell the mom living out in Malvern that she's got to pay a congestion fee, when that's her only way to get around. She doesn't have higher-order transit to get her kid to daycare, then to get to work, then to get to the grocery store and to get home. So I think we have to be really careful

that we're implementing this in a fair way and it does consider what other alternatives are there like higher-order transit and we're waiting for all those big projects to come online. Higher-order transit meaning LRT, subways, that kind of stuff. That's right, like until we have the Eglinton LRT open, till we have shovels in the ground in the Eglinton East LRT connection until we open all these big transit projects I don't think there's gonna be much appetite around. And even after Ontario Line is built I think there needs to be an Ontario Line 2.0. There's still gonna be large swaths of the region that are underserved by

transit and people are gonna jump in their cars and so and that's just the reality. What you don't want is to deter people from wanting to live in Toronto because they say I get in my car and I'm sitting here for hours you're telling me to get on a subway that is not you know it's not near me we've done we did a poll with Ipsos in the summer you know 86% of hold off hold up yeah I got all that right here I'm gonna get to that I go we made fancy graphics with all those information. Yeah, yeah. Okay, Sheldon, you want to bring this up right here?

Ipsos conducted a poll for the Toronto Region Board of Trade this past summer. And here we go, Giles, you'll be delighted to know, 86% of respondents in the GTHA, Greater Toronto Hamilton area, agree there is a traffic and congestion crisis in the region. That's the word people use, crisis. 85% believe that traffic and congestion negatively affect the local economy. 68% of residents attribute the cause of traffic and congestion to excessive construction or mismanagement thereof. 57% believe it's an overabundance of cars and trucks on the road. Due to traffic and congestion, 53% of

residents have considered relocating outside the region. Due to traffic and congestion 53% of residents have considered relocating outside the region and I bet at this table we all know people who've moved out of Toronto because they just can't deal with it anymore. Three-quarters of GTHA residents support 24-hour road and public transit construction that will work towards easing traffic and congestion. Okay lots to unpack here. There is this notion, I'll pull this number out here, 68% of residents blaming excessive construction or mismanagement. That's what they think. Is that true?

I think that's again, it's part of the problem. You know, you've got concentrated construction on arterial roads. You might have five or six projects on your route into downtown that used to take you 35 minutes and now takes you closer to an hour. So you feel that. You've got roads taken out of, lanes taken out of service. And so you've got a bunching up of cars, so bottlenecks. You've got in the downtown core now,

you've got not only private construction, building of office towers and condos, but also obviously the infrastructure that we're talking about, the Ontario line. So a lot of concentrated construction. I think what people are saying, though, is they think there could be better sequencing of construction projects, better planning of construction projects, and more rapid completion of construction

projects. And all of those things, I think, are realistic solutions. Let me go to the Deputy Mayor on that. 24 hour a day, either construction or road work or whatever. You guys going to do that? Well, I think it depends on the situation and where you are

and how close the nearest receptor is, right? So noise can have a big impact on communities, so we have to mitigate that. But what we are doing is we're launching a new strategic capital coordination office. And that office is looking at how we can better schedule our own City of Toronto projects and how we can manage those schedules better So they're not overlapping or they're not on parallel routes It's also going to ensure that we're working better with developers who may take road lanes for occupancies for buildings

Work better with the province who has a lot of transit projects that are happening right now. There are a lot of people that are using our space in the City of Toronto. We want to make sure that they're all coordinating better together and through partnership that's what this office will do. But also ensure we have better communication with the public, better traffic management plans that are accompanied with these projects and something else we're launching is a new special events advisory team so that we can look at how if we layer on top of that, our wonderful events and festivals, we want them to happen,

but maybe we need to start looking about shifting when they are, what time they might start, what type they might end, and looking at it with a bit of a traffic lens as well. You saw in this poll, Lanric, that more than half the people who live in this region have thought about moving out of this region because they just can't deal with it anymore.

Do you know people who feel that way? I know a few people that are feeling that way, and they're not just moving to Mississauga, they're moving out to Milton, they're moving out to King City, they're gone, they're out of the province. Elephant. Yeah, yeah. It is definitely a tough sell to try and fight the congestion that we're going through and any way that the city can help to mitigate and manage how that is put forth on all four that want to try and figure out how we utilize

this very small resource of a street and what that mix of uses can be so that more people can move. And I know I keep on, you know, coming back to moving cars is not the sole want. We need to be moving people and we need to be doing that as efficiently and as equitably as we can. To that end, let me put a nice little non-controversial issue on the table here. Bike lanes. Hey. OK, Bahir, start us off on this. Should Queens Park bring in legislation mandating

where bike lanes can or cannot be? It should be looked at very closely, because bottom line, as you said correctly, we want to push people through a corridor not necessarily cars. So if I'm giving real estate or like lanes to any mode whether it's transit or cars or bikes I need to know that it's used to maximize people's throughput. So if I build a bike lane for instance and it's used by a few people then that's very inefficient. for instance, and it's used by a few people, then that's very inefficient. But if the demand is there, that it's much more efficient for people to bike as opposed to, for instance, to drive, then I would

absolutely instate this. So it all depends on how many people are you pushing in the corridor. You have limited right of way and everybody's competing for it. The street cars want it, traffic cars, regular cars want it, bikers want it. So we need to think of pushing people through as opposed to vehicles. The idea though, Lenrik, has been, it's a bit like Field of Dreams, you know, if you build it, they will come. Is that in fact happening? It is happening and you can almost throw it into the reverse when it comes to induced demand. When you build more lanes of car streets, more people start to use their cars. So right now where we are, where we are putting street cars, where public transit we've got, we've got

streets for cars, we've got infrastructure for for bikes, you build that out and I can almost guarantee you that if it's safe, if it's effective, if I'm able to get from point A to point B, you're going to have more people take advantage of hopping onto a bike. Now this is not to say that we're going to have people biking from Burlington all the way down to Toronto. But when you are in the city and when you have those options to take your bike and be able to go to a GO station, be able to go to the subway station,

be able to even drive to one of those places, but then maybe end your trip with a bike after taking the subway, all of that mix needs to be expanded so that the option again and I know I'm gonna sound like a broken record we need to get away from it just being car dependency. Let me put this to the Deputy Mayor you've heard the criticism it's actually not so much that people don't like bike lanes they don't like them some people don't like them where they are. They shouldn't be on

major arterial roads they should be away from there so that the traffic can flow better. Is the city reevaluating where it's putting bike lanes? So we have a comprehensive cycling plan. Over the last few years, we've put in 115 kilometers, and there are plans over the next three years for 100 kilometers. It depends on the road width and how much space you have available.

So in my community, we have a wonderful project that's underway. It is expanding Port Union Road. We're gonna have two lanes of traffic in both directions because we don't have that right now. Sidewalks on both sides, believe it or not, we don't have that either. And it'll have protected bike lanes that are off the road. Wonderful project. Big right-of-way that was available. Throughout the city that's not always the case and in some cases we have narrow right-of-ways we know the volume is there for cycling we see them

coming down I look out my window on Bay Street so I see all the cyclists that are down there and so the demand is there and we need to make sure that cyclists are safe. We have sadly had six deaths this year in the cycling community it is tragic we need to invest in bike lanes we need to make sure that people can get where they need to go safely and some of the routes are also accompanied by Other options including higher-order transit. There is a subway underneath as well. So we evaluate always where can we best do these if they could be? Through side streets. I think city is open to that as well We are open to whatever we can do to make sure people can get safely where they need to go.

And again, safe is the important word there. Does the Board of Trade like where the bike lanes are now? I think it's what Bahar said. It's the data. You know, I don't know if the city really has a good sense of if they even modeled the impact of putting bike lanes on major arteries. But I would say that when you look at a number of them, you don't see as much bicycle traffic as you would expect to see, given that you have open bike lanes. And then you see huge lineups of cars.

So I think there needs to be a real re-evaluation of where they are from a data perspective. If the data supports it, absolutely. But at the end of the day, the real question is, what are our arterial roads for? Why did we have them? And are they being used in that way or not? And I think what we've done is we've restricted them

significantly. Large stretches now of our key arterial roads are one way each way. And you've got massive traffic jams. And again, the impact is not just on people, it's on businesses and the economy of the city. So that's a real concern of ours. OK.

We've got about four minutes left here, which is enough time to talk about the most grandiose idea that has come down the pipe in quite some time. It goes through your constituency, doesn't it? It does. OK. You want to tunnel under the 401 in Scarborough? Look, I am open to a feasibility study. I was a scientist before I became a politician.

I will look at feasibility. I will look at data-based evidence. So I'm interested to see what they come up with there. Is it likely? I don't think so. Are there things we can do right now in the short term? Absolutely yes. A lot of talk about the 407.

It is hugely costly. When I take it, it's like $20 a pop. It costs a lot of money. If we can't buy it back, can we reduce it? Can we subsidize it in some way? The Premier did say yesterday at his news conference he was open to repatriating it. Right. So let's look at that and give that serious consideration. There are projects that we can fund right now. Steeles Avenue needs to be widened. That will help with connections outside Durham and into York as well.

There are a lot of projects that are ready to go that can improve our road network that we'd love to have the funding for. And of course then there's transit. Just build out that transit and get those projects done. And again we have the Eglinton East LRT. We are wrapping up the environmental assessment on that. That's a 4.5 billion dollar project. I would love to see some of the money go to that. So I will reserve judgment until I see the feasibility study, but I think that it is definitely tunnel vision.

Oh, was that a pun? How about a tunnel under the 401 that would have not just cars, but bikes and public transit? Because that's what Doug Ford's talked about so far. The 401 corridor definitely needs more capacity but it needs higher order transit capacity not car lanes capacity and not in a tunnel because it's very expensive. A billion dollars a kilometer? At best. That's like if an end-to-end tunnel now when you connect it to all the north-south arterials and they have

interchanges and it's going to be a lot more than that. So if we have hundred billion dollars to spend then if we can put a very nice modern rail transit right above the median of the 401 and connect it to everything else at a fraction of the cost. Even you can think about high-speed rail. The technology, the specific technology can be discussed, but we want transit that moves. On GO Transit, for instance, it plays a major role in the GTA, but it's too slow.

So it needs to be electrified, needs to accelerate and decelerate, kind of like a subway, as opposed to a gigantic locomotive train that takes a sweet time to move. OK, let me make sure I get time in for these guys. Lenrick, your view of a tunnel under the 401? I cannot imagine a bike lane being brought into a tunnel. Listen, we have, I think I'm going

to follow the deputy mayor on this. Do the assessment as best as possible, but I cannot see us spending that sheer amount of money on Tunneling through the 401. There's a few people from Missouri here But you guys came out quite bullish on this idea when the premier first made the announcement you're sticking with that Well, no what we said was what what the deputy mayor said we want to see the feasibility study I think our view is we need to think about today. We have a huge congestion problem We need to think about 2040 and 2050 there was a time when this was a city of planning, right?

We built the second deck on the on the on the Bloor-Danforth viaduct in 1905 for a subway that was built in 1965 we planned ahead and I think what the premier was trying to say was we need to think about big projects for the future. All the things that we're talking about are all going to be useful, but we're going to have an even more significant problem in our hands in coming years. We have to plan for it.

Yeah. I'm not buying the feasibility thing. Like we can't build anything from an engineering perspective, but the desirability, do you want to build this thing? Even if you can physically do that, because you're cementing people and their cars. You're supporting an unsustainable trend. It's like seeing a child who's hungry and giving them candy as opposed to dinner, right?

So this is like we do not want a traffic tunnel. We want a fast rail above the 401. Have I got time enough left to ask the Deputy Mayor if it's a fine line between a visionary brilliant idea and complete craziness? Do we have time for that? Oh, boy. Well, firstly, look, the Bloor Viaduct,

my great grandfather was a construction worker on that project. Great project, great example of vision. I think we do have vision in the City of Toronto. It's around transit. It's around public transit. It's around all these massive projects that we have underway that we need to get going on. And I will continue to follow this closely, but I think like most Toronto residents, we're going to reserve judgment. That's the Deputy Mayor for the City of Toronto, one of four incidentally, Jennifer McKelvie, City Councillor Scarborough Rouge Park and we are also happy to have had Bajer Abdelhai

from the University of Toronto and on the other side of the table Giles Gerson from the Toronto Region Board of Trade and Lenrick Bennett Jr. Urbanist in Residence at U of T School of Cities. Thanks everybody for your wisdom around this table here tonight. Thank you. A pleasure.