Rethinking Urban Transportation: Lessons from Toronto

Abstract

Toronto is widely perceived to have developed efficient solutions to transportation during periods of rapid population growth, attributed largely to significant investment in public transit and effective means of managing growth in an orderly manner. Relative to comparably sized cities elsewhere in North America, the downtown has flourished and urban sprawl appears to have been contained within reasonable limits. Yet, despite a high degree of centralized planning and policies that favor transit over road improvements, on a regionwide basis, both modal split and transit ridership have actually declined, road congestion has reached serious levels in outlying regions, and the central area is losing its dominance as the location of new employment creation. This experience suggests a need to rethink the advisability of continued preoccupation with rail-dominated (subway, light rail transit, and high-technology transit), centrally oriented, capital-intensive transit improvements at the expense of lower-cost (and lower political profile) operational enhancements of surface transit, more effective means of dealing with road congestion, and greater reliance on business principles in the provision of transit service. In particular, there is a need to rethink government policies that favor capital over operational improvements, cost-based subsidy formulae that reward high costs rather than performance, intergovernmental transfers that obfuscate real costs perceived at the local decision-making level, and evaluation procedures that rely on alleged social and environmental advantages wherever reasonable ridership estimates fail to justify the selection of a preconceived preferred technology in assessing the true viability of new projects.