It’s a familiar sight for commuters exiting the Gardiner Expressway into downtown during the morning rush hour: a sea of red tail lights as cars and trucks on two major roadways — the off-ramp at Lower Simcoe and Lake Shore Boulevard — fight for limited space as their five lanes have to merge rapidly into four at Harbour Street.
As return-to-office mandates have increased, so has congestion on Toronto’s roads, throttling the timely movement of commuters across the city. The downtown off-ramps from the Gardiner have become particularly painful pinch points, with drivers trying to leave the high-traffic expressway having to do battle daily just to get into the city.
Although the city redesigned the Lower Simcoe Street off-ramp in 2017 to ease traffic woes, the change has done little to ease congestion, taking a toll on drivers and business owners with no clear end in sight. The city updated the technology running the traffic lights in the area last month in a bid to provide relief to commuters, but experts are skeptical it will fix the problem.
City data shows congestion in Toronto is back to pre-pandemic levels, due to record levels of construction and road closures. With the return of downtown commuters, drivers say their travel time has more than doubled through these areas.
Andrew Dac makes the drive from the expressway to the off-ramp at Jarvis Street at least twice a week to visit his partner who lives on the east side of Toronto. He said navigating the dense flow of traffic often entails bumper-to-bumper standstills, dodging potholes and bottlenecked congestion through one or two lanes.
An hour of this often leaves him in a “foul mood” that is hard to shake, even after arriving at his partner’s house.
“I can't even tell you what the worst part is, because it just evolves,” said Dac.
“It's like a rash you cannot get rid of — it just keeps going from one area of your body to the other.”
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Giles Gherson, president and CEO of the Toronto Region Board of Trade, said he has heard similar from other drivers. “It’s what's happening to everybody — what should be a 25-minute commute ends up becoming an hour,” he said.
While the population of Canada, and its largest metropolitan centre, has grown significantly in recent years, Gherson said he feels the transportation infrastructure has lagged behind.
“We really didn't plan for it and now those chickens are coming home to roost,” he said.
“It's going to take a pretty significant overhaul of how we do traffic management in the city.”
Gherson has heard from drivers who would rather take transit, but feel it is currently too unreliable to risk making it part of their commute. Although current projects such as the Ontario Line, the Yonge North Subway Extension, and the Scarborough subway extension will provide more options, they will not be available for residents in the near future.
On top of the environmental and health impacts of idling traffic, Gherson said that transportation issues may dissuade people from spending time downtown — which comes at a cost to local businesses.
Roger Browne, director of traffic management for the city of Toronto, can watch the congestion ebb and flow at intersections across the city, through traffic light sensors that create graphics based on the number of cars, trucks or pedestrians at a street corner.
Browne sees the issues drivers face at the intersections of downtown off-ramps as something not to be fixed by changes to the physical landscape, but as something more advanced artificial intelligence systems controlling traffic lights can alleviate.
The city has been using artificial intelligence for almost 30 years to control the cycle of traffic lights — initially in what Browne calls a “first generation” system called Split Cycle Offset Optimization Technique (SCOOT), which runs independently of human intervention.
This is the system that managed traffic from the expressway’s off-ramps until recently, when a new design for the Simcoe ramp was approved in 2010 to prioritize reduced wait times for pedestrians and cyclists at the intersection.
In September 2022, the off-ramp intersections were moved to a new system, TransSuite, an AI system overseen by city workers, who are able to intervene and make decisions based on current traffic conditions.
However, with limited people supervising traffic systems for the whole city, Browne said, it’s become difficult to ensure all intersections get the attention needed to curb congestion when issues arise.
“There's a lot more that we can do to improve in terms of how we are managing this,” he said.
To that end, the city introduced the Sydney Co-ordinated Adaptive Traffic System, known as SCATS, at the intersections at Jarvis and Simcoe where traffic descends from the expressway in December. SCATS, Browne said, has the capacity to sense all road users — including pedestrians and cyclists — and adjust light signals to allow more vehicles to pass if there is a persistent backup, a frequent issue on downtown off-ramps.
P.S. Sriraj director of the Urban Transportation Centre at the University of Illinois Chicago, said that increasing traffic flow in an area can play a large role in stalling previously fluid roadways, particularly when merging is an issue, such as with the Lower Simcoe ramp.
Though Sriraj sees the city's use of SCATS as a move in the right direction, he warns that the new technology could just punt traffic issues farther out to intersections that have less advanced traffic signals.
“If you are not revamping the entire grid with smart signals, you may see another pinch point outside the location where you are installing the smart technology,” he said.
Sriraj said a more impactful solution would be a change in infrastructure. "It's also a resource issue," he said, adding that with more space in the area and infrastructure investments, the city could choose to separate the roads entirely to eliminate the troublesome merge point.
But Sriraj also said that a change in commuting habits could also have a positive impact. If more people took transit to work or if businesses staggered the arrival of their employees or deliveries, it could reduce some of the pressure of rush hour.
Browne expects drivers will see congestion start to ease at the downtown Gardiner off-ramps early in the new year as SCATS goes into action.
Although he can't ensure traffic goes away completely from these intersections, he’s hoping drivers find it a more consistent — and less infuriating — experience in the months to come.
“We’re never going to see cars disappear from the road,” he said. “What we could do, though, is make it far more manageable and make our management of that intersection more consistent.”
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