Once you leave the north east coast of the US you can live 30 miles away from the city and get DT in less than 30 minutes in rush hour (nix LA). It is incredibly easy to transfer from each bus/train and get from a city north of SLC to one South of it. I’m living near Salt Lake until the end of this month and I can tell you, traffic flows and public transportation is run by the state not each individual city. 330 million people live in the US and the majority live in modern/newer cities with proper planning. I get that European cities have suburbs as well, but you can not compare NA and Europe with Toronto. You can’t base policy on something that we don’t understand. Whether you use regression analysis, monte carlo simulation or the leaf reading, there is no real understanding on how this works, how they interact together, and the net effect on the rest of the road network. of demand ratio) increases toward 1 over time, but other roadways also see benefits in time/GDP as this happens. The elasticity of demand starts at less than 0.5, meaning that travel time reduces by a unit of 1 while the number of cars increases by a number much lower, leading to a non zero sum increase in GDP (time is GDP). Secondly, what are the GDP benefits of reducing gridlock? Substantial.

The induced demand studies ignore the reduction of traffic on other arteries and focus only on the quick filling of new capacity. Studies on roadways citing induced demand admit that new highway lanes are filled by people diverting their previous routes, reducing congestion elsewhere. The reason that induced demand is a troubled concept is because you aren’t actually inducing demand, you are realizing latent demand – demand that was always there. I hate to tell you A Grant, but its important to understand the whole economic relationship. I set the “causes” up to match with the videos I shot, but if you can think of true “root causes” of traffic congestion, please share in the comments section below. I didn’t set out to do this as a blog feature, but rather I just started to film things that bothered me, and after a week and and a bit, I had these four videos. These videos were shot with safety in mind. I was actually born with three hands, and I can drive with both feet. A bottleneck is created, and traffic results.Īnd hey – wasn’t John Tory going to ticket these guys 24/7? Richmond Street drives me insane, since the left and right lanes are always stopped with delivery vans and buses.Įvery day on Richmond Street, Fed-Ex, UPS, Shred-It, and any delivery van in the city will pull over, park illegally, and turn a 4-lane road into three lanes. What good is a four-lane road when it’s down to two lanes? Or sometimes, they just stop in the street, and clog traffic.ģ) Delivery Trucks, Buses, & Anybody Doing Anything I’ve long maintained that streetcars are a ridiculous form of public transit, since they’re stuck in ONE lane of the road, and can’t move left or right.Ī bus would be able to move to the right, pick up people, and let cars pass on the left.īut a streetcar simply allows people to walk THROUGH the lane of traffic, to the streetcar, while cars stop around it. I’m going to take hell for this one, but so be it. Here are four videos I shot, and four root causes of Toronto traffic.Ĭonstruction has to be the #1 cause of traffic congestion in the downtown core every year, without a doubt.īut while I understand that we, as a city, need random holes dug in city streets while eight guys stand around watching, smoking cigarettes, and getting paid, I do think there’s a lot of times where construction equipment is left behind when it need not be. Only then would we be able to come up with a “Top 30” list of causes of Toronto traffic. I wish I had a video camera stuck to my head, to record everything I see and do. But until I quit my job to make iPhone videos all day, we’ll have to settle for these… There are other reasons, no doubt about it. Here are four videos that I’ve shot in the last couple weeks, which outline four of the major reasons why Toronto seems to be one giant traffic jam. I drive a LOT in downtown Toronto traffic, so I decided to start filming some examples of why gridlock plagues our city, as I head east, west, north, and south on a daily basis.

Anti gridlock ticket points