Getting Around
A plain-language explainer · 8th-grade reading level · every figure below is sourced and checkable.
What’s wrong here
In 2025, 39 people died in traffic on Toronto streets. That is about half the number from 2016 — real progress — and still 39 people who did not make it home.1
Getting around also costs us time and money. One major study puts the cost of traffic congestion in the Toronto region at $44.7 billion a year, counting lost time, lost business, and health effects.2 Other studies count more narrowly and get smaller numbers, but every serious estimate is in the billions.
Transit is still climbing back from the pandemic: by 2022, TTC ridership was only about 61% of what it was in 2019, and fewer riders means less fare money to run the system.3
And the tools keep changing hands. Speed cameras near Toronto schools cut speeding by 45%.4 In November 2025, the province banned those cameras across Ontario, and offered cities a $210 million fund for speed bumps, raised crosswalks, and other physical fixes instead.5
What’s been proven to work elsewhere
Stockholm tried charging drivers a small fee to enter downtown — as a six-month test. Traffic dropped 25%. People disliked the idea before the test, then voted to keep it.6 New York started a similar charge in 2025. In its first year: 27 million fewer cars entered the zone, morning traffic moved 23% faster, and traffic deaths in the zone fell 40%.7
Oslo and Helsinki took a different route: lower speed limits and streets redesigned to be safe. In 2019, neither city had a single pedestrian or cyclist killed in traffic.8
What we could choose together
The city can act now on some things. It can give buses and streetcars their own priority lanes so they stop sitting in car traffic. It is starting fare capping in September 2026 — after 47 paid rides in a month, the rest are free.9 It can use the new provincial fund to rebuild its most dangerous streets.
Only the province can approve any charge for driving downtown — and it has already banned tolls on the two big highways it is taking over from the city.10 Only the province decides whether speed cameras come back. The province also funds One Fare, which lets you transfer between the TTC and GO or nearby city systems without paying twice — but so far it has committed that money only through 2025–26.11
Each option has real costs and real trade-offs. The point is that they are choices, not weather.
One question to ask any candidate: “What will you do in your first year to make my bus faster and my street safer — and how will I be able to check that it worked?”
Sources & receipts
- 39 traffic deaths in Toronto, 2025; about 50% below 2016.
- Congestion cost, Toronto region: $44.7B/yr (CANCEA/Toronto Region Board of Trade, social+economic scope).
- TTC ridership at 60.6% of 2019 levels by 2022 — Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, September 2024.
- School-zone speed cameras: 45% reduction in speeding — SickKids/TMU, published in Injury Prevention, 2025.
- Province banned automated speed enforcement, November 2025 (Bill 56); $210M Road Safety Initiatives Fund offered to municipalities in its place.
- Stockholm congestion-charge trial: traffic down 25%; kept after a referendum.
- New York City congestion pricing, year one: 27 million fewer vehicles entering the zone, morning speeds up 23%, zone traffic fatalities down 40%.
- Oslo and Helsinki: zero pedestrian or cyclist traffic deaths, 2019.
- TTC fare capping launches September 1, 2026 (free after 47 paid rides in a calendar month).
- Gardiner Expressway/DVP upload to the province, with a provincial ban on tolling those highways.
- One Fare (TTC/GO and nearby-system fare integration) currently funded by the province only through 2025–26.
This explainer went through an independent verification pass before publication (fact-check against primary sources, claim by claim). The internal verification record has been removed from this public page; the sourced facts and figures above are unchanged by that removal.