Death by traffic: Toronto's economy and return to office plans are choking on congestion
Giles Gherson had 20 minutes to get from his office on the Toronto waterfront to a restaurant at Yonge and Dundas for a lunch meeting. Ample time, in other words, or so the chief executive of the Toronto Region Board of Trade assumed as he settled into the back of an Uber for the short trip.
Forty-five minutes later, he was still nowhere near his destination, and the car he was travelling in was stuck in traffic just a few blocks north of where he started. The clock was ticking, and in that anxiety-inducing moment, Gherson, a recreational runner, understood what he needed to do: he bailed out of the vehicle and hightailed it as fast as his feet, in black dress shoes, could carry him to the meeting.
“Getting around the city just takes so much longer than it used to,” he said. “These days, if you say to someone in Toronto, ‘Look, I am stuck in traffic, and I am going to have to walk now, or I am going to have to run,’ people get it.”
Do they ever. In bygone years, small talk among Torontonians ran to griping about the weather and the fortunes and follies of the Maple Leafs, touchstone office water-cooler topics that have lately been joined by exchanging horror stories about traffic-choked streets.
No stranger to world-class congestion at the best of times, Toronto appears to have entered its worst age, a doomsday commuter scenario brought on by a slew of infrastructure projects, including the massive, multi-billion-dollar, multi-year Ontario Line transit project. There are condo builds, and the subterranean infrastructure to support them, sewer-pipe and watermain replacements, and multiple other transit tweaks, big and small.
Billions are being lost in productivity; drivers are losing their minds, not to mention precious
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