Part I — What’s broken · Chapter 2

Why the Roads Are Full

Working chapter of Why can’t Toronto move? — the report’s summary page uses only claims that passed our receipt check. Figures below marked ⚠️ are still in the re-verification queue, labelled honestly rather than hidden. How that works: check our work.

Toronto's congestion has one root cause — a fixed road network absorbing fifty years of growth with no price ever attached to using it — working through five compounding mechanisms, and no single fix touches all of them at once.

Toronto ranks second-worst among Canadian cities for traffic, behind only Vancouver: drivers lost roughly 100 hours to rush-hour congestion in 2025, at a congestion level of 47.7% and average rush-hour speeds around 22.5 km/h. Estimates of what this costs the region each year run from $6 billion to $44.7 billion depending on what is being measured and how broadly — a spread wide enough that this book treats the figures as measuring different things, not competing for the same number. What the different measures agree on is the direction: Toronto's traffic has gotten worse, not better, over a period when the city's own transit alternative has also gotten measurably slower.

Six causes explain it, ranked from most foundational to most recent.

The foundation: growth has permanently outstripped a road network that stopped expanding. Toronto's last era of major expressway building ended in 1971, when the Spadina Expressway was cancelled after a change in provincial government — only the truncated Allen Road stub was ever built, and the city's arterial and expressway network has grown only marginally since, even as the region's population has multiplied several times over. This is a hedged claim worth stating precisely: Toronto did build some road capacity after 1971 — the Allen Road stub, the Black Creek corridor — but nothing resembling the planned inner-city expressway network, and no material new expressway capacity has been added inside Toronto's borders since. Geography compounds the shortage: Lake Ontario runs the length of the city's southern edge, so the Gardiner Expressway has no possible parallel route, and the ravines cut by the Don and Humber rivers concentrate traffic onto a handful of river crossings. A very large share of the region's car trips — from Scarborough, from Durham, from much of the 905 arc — funnel through a small number of physical pinch points that no realistic amount of political will could fully widen away.

Car-dependent land use put jobs and housing where transit cannot efficiently follow. Only about a fifth of Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area employment sits in downtown Toronto; the rest is scattered across the region, much of it in suburban business parks built around highway interchanges rather than transit stations. Census data confirms the pattern starkly: nearly three-quarters of workers commuting within the Toronto region drive, and for commuters crossing in from neighbouring regions — Oshawa, Hamilton, Barrie, Guelph — the share driving alone runs above 90%. Where transit genuinely competes with driving on travel time, people choose it; where it doesn't, as in most of these cross-boundary and suburban trips, they don't, and the region's fastest-growing municipalities are increasingly the ones least served by high-quality transit.

The absence of any price on road use. Every other tool the region has to manage travel demand — new capacity, transit, land-use change — has been foreclosed or delayed at some point over the past half-century; pricing has simply never been tried at all. A municipal vehicle registration tax was repealed in 2011. Council voted to toll the Gardiner and Don Valley Parkway in 2016; the province rejected the plan in 2017. Since then, the door has closed further, by statute rather than one-off political decision, on two separate and independent tracks. The City's own charter — the City of Toronto Act, 2006 — has included a toll-restriction clause since its original text, but until 2025 that restriction was conditional: tolling remained possible if a provincial regulation permitted it. A 2025 re-enactment made the bar unconditional and repealed the regulation-making escape hatch that had existed. Separately, the 2024 Get It Done Act barred tolls on any Crown-owned highway "unless authorized by an Act" of the Legislature — a provision that will apply directly to the Gardiner and DVP once their ownership transfers to the province in 2027. Both statutes would need the Legislature to act; neither is within City Council's own authority, which marks a genuine escalation from the pre-2024 landscape, when the City at least held the unilateral authority to propose tolling, as it did in 2016. Worth noting for scale: Ontario already runs Highway 407 as a continuously tolled private road, at rates around $0.35/km at peak — proof the province has no principled objection to road pricing as such. What's blocked, specifically, is public, City-initiated pricing on the corridors Toronto actually controls.

Slow, congestion-exposed transit fails to offer a real alternative — and that failure is self-reinforcing. Because most TTC buses and streetcars run in mixed traffic, they are exposed to the same congestion transit is supposed to be an escape from. As documented in the next chapter, average local-bus speeds have fallen from 20 km/h in 2013 to 17.2 km/h in 2024 (per TTC Board item TTC2.13), and streetcars run markedly slower still. That produces a genuine spiral rather than a static problem: congestion slows transit; slower, less reliable transit pushes riders who have a choice toward driving; those additional cars add to congestion; and that added congestion slows the transit vehicles sharing the same lanes even further. The City's own transit-priority pilots show real, if modest, gains — but on a scale far smaller than the underlying decline they're working against.

Two newer, compounding pressures round out the picture. Toronto's construction boom — more active cranes than any other city in North America, plus a historically large public transit-building program running concurrently — adds real, if temporary, disruption on top of the structural mismatch above; a Chief Congestion Officer role and a citywide road-disruption tracking system, both only stood up in the last two years, are the City's first real attempt at coordinating it. And two genuinely new categories of vehicle traffic — ride-hailing and e-commerce delivery — have grown faster than the tools to manage them: Toronto's taxi fleet remains capped near 5,000 vehicles while ride-hailing licences are effectively uncapped at 70,000–80,000, and roughly half of all ride-hailing driving time in the city is now spent without a passenger aboard.

Running underneath nearly all six causes is a finding transportation economists consider close to settled: added road capacity gets substantially reoccupied by trips that were previously suppressed, at a rate close to one-for-one. That is why no single lever — more lanes, more transit, better signals alone — has ever durably fixed a problem like Toronto's elsewhere. The cities that have made real, lasting progress paired transit investment with a genuine restraint on driving demand, usually a price. Toronto has tried nearly everything except that.