Traffic jams that are costing billions in terms of time and
diesel fuel could be reduced by building more roads, not by investing more in
public transit systems, says Brian Lee Crowley of the Macdonald-Laurier
Institute in Ottawa.
A study released in August estimated that traffic jams in Toronto increase costs by $11 billion a year.
The Ontario government policy has, however, been to shift
priorities from highway building to public transit systems, including subways
and light-rail systems for Toronto and other urban centres, including the
Waterloo Region.
Crowley points to studies that began 30 years ago at the
Texas Transportation Institute, which is located at Texas A&M University,
and have found that congestion was eased in cities that continued to invest in
highways and roads, but got worse in cities that shifted budgets away from
road-building into public transit.
This puts the lie to urban planners who have said that
building more roads and expressways makes downtown gridlock worse.
Portland, Oregon, ignored those urban planners and spent its
money on more roads and expressways; its ranking for congestion improved from 47th
to sixth in North America.
On a global scale, Crowley writes in the Globe and Mail
today that Canada ranks third in terms of longer commute times because of
congestion - i.e. traffic jams.
The average Canadian commute now takes 25 per cent longer
than necessary.
There are only five cities in North America that are worse
than Toronto.
Vancouver is now the worst in North America and third-worst
in the world.
Crowley concludes with advice for urban planners: “Remember
urban sprawl is not a problem to be solved, but part of the answer to how vast
numbers of people can live together in big cities without life grinding to a
half in traffic.”
