uniteTOlove.ca

Getting Around

Published 2026-07-30 · part of the research library.

Getting around Toronto — on foot, by bike, by transit, or by car — touches nearly everyone’s day. It also costs the region real time and money, and sometimes lives: serious estimates put the cost of traffic congestion in the billions of dollars a year, and traffic crashes still kill dozens of people on Toronto’s streets annually, even though that number has fallen substantially over the past decade. Some of the levers that could change this sit with the city; others sit with the province.

Where things stand

  1. In 2025, 39 people died in traffic on Toronto’s streets. That is about half the number from 2016 — real progress — and still 39 people who did not make it home.
  2. 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. Other studies count more narrowly and get smaller numbers, but every serious estimate is in the billions.
  3. 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.
  4. School-zone speed cameras cut speeding near Toronto schools by 45%. 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. Toronto is starting fare capping in September 2026 — after 47 paid rides in a month, the rest are free that month. The province also funds “One Fare,” which lets riders transfer between the TTC and GO or nearby city transit systems without paying twice — but as of the source date, that funding was only committed through 2025-26.
  6. By the end of 2024, about 230 km (46%) of Toronto’s planned roughly 500 km city-wide cycling network was built, with 100 km of new or major-upgrade bikeways planned for 2025–2027.
  7. Two cities that tried different approaches got measurable results: Stockholm’s six-month trial of a downtown driving charge cut traffic 25% (residents voted to keep it after living with it); New York’s 2025 downtown charge saw 27 million fewer cars enter the zone in its first year, with morning traffic 23% faster and traffic deaths in the zone down 40%.

What the city controls vs. what needs the province

The city can act on directly: giving buses and streetcars their own priority lanes so they aren’t stuck in car traffic; the September 2026 fare-capping change described above; using the new provincial road-safety fund to rebuild dangerous streets; its own cycling-network build-out pace (fact 6, above).

Needs the province: approving any charge for driving downtown (the province has already banned tolls on the two major highways — the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway — it is taking over from the city); deciding whether speed cameras come back after the November 2025 ban; the funding renewal decision on One Fare past 2025-26.

One honest gap: this page’s sources don’t go deep on parking policy or on region-wide fare integration beyond the One Fare / highway-toll points above. On parking, Toronto’s own stated principle is that parking minimums should be avoided except where needed for equitable access, and provincial law already bars the city from requiring more than one parking space per unit for secondary suites. On regional fares, more than 20 transit providers across the Greater Golden Horseshoe still set their own fares, and the province’s own Financial Accountability Office estimated the One Fare discount cost about $121 million in its first full year. Both are covered in more depth in the candidate question bank linked below.

Go deeper

How this connects to the election

Several of the levers described above sit with Toronto’s city council and mayor; the province controls others directly, as noted above. A resident who wants to ask a candidate for city council or mayor what they would do about any of these levers can use the neutral, non-partisan candidate question bank for this category — every question there works identically for any candidate, any party. This page does not endorse, score, or rank any candidate or party, and does not direct a reader to any organization or campaign.

Sources & receipts

  1. Toronto's Vision Zero Annual Report 2025 (fact 1).
  2. Breaking Gridlock: Congestion Action Plan for Toronto (fact 2).
  3. 2022 TTC ridership recovery figures — Ontario Financial Accountability Office transit reporting; see the mobility & transit backgrounder above (fact 3).
  4. School-zone speed-camera effectiveness study and the province’s November 2025 camera ban & replacement fund — see the road safety backgrounder above (fact 4).
  5. Fare-capping and One Fare figures — see the fare-free transit and mobility & transit backgrounders above (fact 5).
  6. Cycling Network Plan; Cycling Network Plan (fact 6).
  7. Stockholm and New York congestion-pricing results — see the congestion & road pricing backgrounder above (fact 7).
  8. Review of Parking Requirements for New Development; Proposed Planning Act and City of Toronto Act Changes (Bill 23); Toronto Parking Authority (parking, in the honest-gap note).
  9. Fare Integration; Ontario's Public Transit Agencies: Ridership, Finances and Operating Subsidies (regional fares, in the honest-gap note).