Quote:
Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere
Toronto traffic has gotten immensely worse in the last 5 years. Even 5 years ago it was a lot more manageable - the really miserable parts were mostly limited around Gardiner on and off ramps and richmond / adelaide through the downtown during peak rush hour.
The miserable traffic now stretches across most of the downtown for most of the day, and freeway congestion has gotten unbelievably terrible. Even in the 2014-2016ish era traffic on the freeway system pretty much disappeared midday and in the evenings - today it's all day long for a good chunk of the network and extends deep into the evening hours. It also extends much further outside of the city. It's not uncommon for the QEW to be congested from the 427 to St. Catharines 90 kilometres away in rush hour now. It's unbelievable, and a big reason I think Ford remains so popular on the provincial level. He talks the talk on highways which the other parties are completely ignorant to, even if his actual spending on the matter is actually pretty small.
The freeway congestion is mostly volume related to growth - but the downtown traffic has gotten insane mostly because of construction. The Gardiner construction and construction on the streets in the city for things like the Ontario Line and other works have made it unbelievably bad. The good news is that it will eventually end.. but it's going to be years before it's done.
The regional congestion on the freeway network has no real end in sight. MTO has plans for widening a lot of highways, but isn't getting funding for much of any of them and most of the big projects seem years and years off, even optimistically.
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I'm cautiously optimistic that congestion will improve, maybe even dramatically, over the next 10 years - especially in the dreaded east-west direction.
The problem right now is that the GTA is still car-oriented, where you'd want a car for anything except to-downtown and within-downtown trips, but there's been no investment in highway capacity for over 30 years, notwithstanding the tolled 407. Between the early 1990s and, say, 2009 it was mostly because of austerity, and since 2009 it has been mostly ideological. Ford will probably break this logjam by building both highways and transit in equal measure*.
But, more crucially, almost all of the major projects are attempting to resolve the problem of east-west travel:
For new transit:
- Ontario Line
- GO RER + new inner city stations
- Eglinton Crosstown
And on the highway side of things:
- Highway 413
- Bradford Bypass
- MTO uploading the Gardiner-DVP. Things probably won't change a lot in the first few decades, but it's good that a regionally-significant highway is in provincial hands. The City of Toronto really can't see beyond its own borders.
The rate of growth is a big variable, but once these projects are in place we could support a lot more east-west travel than what exists now.
*Cities that pay lip service to both public transit and private cars don't usually have massive periods of investment catering to one mode or the other. So, if you look at places like Madrid or Chinese cities in the early-2000s, or Canadian cities in the 1960s, there was a lot of highway and subway construction going on at the same time.
Prev
Crazy population growth without the infrastructure growth to match will do that. Road & highway capacity hasn't really grown much in the past 50 years while the population has more than doubled in the same time. Transit expansion hasn't been enough to pick up the slack as it's always been a few steps behind what's currently needed. 
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