The Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) recently released a study — Grinding to a Halt: Evaluating Canada’s Worst Bottlenecks — detailing the congestion that has become a blight on most of Canada’s large urban centres. It’s 81 pages of scientific analysis spelling out, in excruciating detail, the nightmare many of Canada’s commuters face going to, and coming from, work each and every day. The kilometres driven, the time wasted and the extra gas squandered as the result of rush-hour traffic are all laid bare.
Unsurprisingly, Toronto ranked worst in pretty much every category. Torontonians wasted more time (roughly 3.2 million hours), wasted more gas (5.7 million extra litres of fuel) and emitted an estimated 15 million extra kilograms of greenhouse gases by crawling along at sub-optimal speeds. And that’s just accounting for the delays on one single, solitary stretch of congestion — the 15.3 km of the 401 that stretch from Highway 427 to Yonge Street. Add up fuel wasted in all of Toronto’s bottlenecks — the CAA says the GTA accounts for 10 of the 20 most congested roads in the country — and you’ve needlessly consumed an extra 12.7 million litres of fuel. For those looking to quantify the wastage, that’s more than enough to fuel every single kilometre driven by every single Prius that Toyota __canada has sold since 2010.
Nor do other measurements paint a rosier picture of Southern Ontario traffic. Add up the hours wasted in the same 10 GTA traffic jams and motorists are wasting some 7.7 million hours — roughly 900 years — (almost) immobile behind the wheel. Even normalizing the overall commute — factoring out the fact that the GTA’s commutes are the longest in the nation — fails to salve Toronto’s wounds. Rush-hour motorists in the GTA can expect to spend 60 per cent more time getting home than when their route is at its maximum efficiency. By comparison, Montreal and Vancouver drivers will only see their commutes extended by 40 per cent. That’s it, then. Point proven: Toronto’s commuters are justified in claiming their drive home is the most frustrating in the land.
Or not.
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Statistics, as Aaron Levenstein, professor emeritus of business at Baruch College, once opined, really are like bikinis: What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. For instance, in that last analysis suggesting even on a per-kilometre basis, Torontonians had the worst commute in Canada, it was neither Montreal nor Vancouver that was the second worst city in the land. It was Hamilton. Now, Canada’s Steeltown may have many limitations, but Toronto- or even Montreal-like traffic isn’t one of them. The reason it fared so poorly is that when its relative paucity of roads do get plugged — local traffic augmented with wage earners commuting all the way from T.O. — on a percentage basis, it’s fairly bad. Suggesting, however, that Hamiltonians suffer worse traffic congestion than Montreal or Vancouver is total nonsense.
Indeed, to truly compare commutes, one has to look beyond the compiled statistics and look at specific data. For instance, while the 401’s congestion is definitely the most time consuming, it may not be the most tedious. By the CAA’s measure, for instance, Toronto’s own Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway are slower, and their logjams last all day. At its slowest, that 15.3-km stretch of Canada’s busiest highway averages just under 50 km/h; in comparison, drivers on the DVP often putt along at less than 40 klicks. The question, then, is which is more frustrating: to motor along at moderate speeds for a longer period of time or to crawl a shorter, but possibly more dispiriting, distance?
It’s a question Vancouverites certainly understand. While traffic in British Columbia’s biggest city is unquestionably horrific, it might surprise commuters from Surrey and Langley to find out the Lion’s Gate and Port Mann bridges don’t even make the Top 20 bottlenecks in the country. Indeed, even the notorious Granville (at SW Marine Drive) and West Georgia (between Seymour and West Pender) bottlenecks barely squeeze into Canada’s Top 10.
That’s because what the CAA is measuring is the relative difference between free-flowing motoring (called Maximum Throughput Speed) and bumper-to-bumper traffic. Because the expectations for both downtown streets are so low — the best West Georgia ever averages is about 30 km/h, says the CAA — the fact that it sometimes crawls along at less than 20 km/h is not comparatively that bad. That Vancouverites are forced off their freeways onto arterial streets to get downtown is not something easily quantified, but must nonetheless be incredibly frustrating (Torontonians complaining about the Don Valley Parking Lot should imagine what their commute might be like if they had to take Bayview Street all the way downtown).
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Finally, it’s important to put the CAA’s most headline-generating conclusion — that Toronto’s 401 traffic is bad enough to rank in the Top 10 of North American bottlenecks — into perspective. Again, it depends on how you parse the statistics. Chicago’s I90, for instance, sees its average speed diminish from a truly speedy 85 mph (135 km/h) at its peak to barely above 30 mph (48 km/h) at its worst. That’s a 40 per cent greater speed differential than the 401 suffers at its worst (roughly 100 km/h slowing down to 50). The total amount of time a Chicagoan might spend in their traffic jam might not be significantly more, but I can assure you their frustration is appreciably worse. Ditto Los Angeles’ notorious 405 and virtually any freeway in New York at 5 p.m.
Indeed, it is the CAA’s inability to quantify expectations that is the study’s only fault (otherwise, Grinding to a Halt is an absolute font of knowledge). While it details the loss in productivity — almost $200-million in Ontario alone — and even the environmental impact — a whopping 58,634 extra metric tons of carbon dioxide — due to the congestion on Canada’s busiest thoroughfares, it can’t measure the damage done to the human psyche.
Is it the duration of a traffic jam or its intensity that’s more exasperating? Is sitting at a stoplight on Granville more frustrating than poking along the 401 at 50 klicks an hour? For all its detail of kilometres driven and time wasted, Grinding to a Halt still doesn’t convey the frustration of the poor bastard stuck in traffic. Or answer the age-old question of what city’s traffic is worse.
David@davebooth.ca
@MotorMouthNP
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