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Drivers hits the brake lights on westbound vehicles on the 401 near Don Mills Road as they come upon rush hour gridlock. Indicators show that gridlock in Toronto has lessened in the past few years.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
With 10 days remaining in a campaign where Toronto’s notoriously clogged roads have been a central issue, the City has released figures that could shift the tone of the mayoral debate.
A key indicator the municipality uses to measure traffic congestion has actually declined in recent years, according to numbers provided to The Globe and Mail, countering some campaign rhetoric and a deepening sense in Toronto and beyond that gridlock has become one of the city’s defining features.
“The trend over the last few years is showing that congestion is decreasing,” Andrew Posluns, Toronto’s chief congestion officer, said in an e-mail.
Such a mundane statement qualifies as provocation in a metropolis that, just three years ago, had the worst traffic in North America, according to the Amsterdam-based geolocation company TomTom.
But Mr. Posluns has the data to back it up.
Like many cities worldwide, Toronto uses a measurement called Travel Time Index (TTI) to record congestion levels within city limits. The index is a ratio comparing rush-hour travel times with free-flow speeds.
A TTI of 2.00, for example, would mean that a trip takes twice as long at peak traffic as the same trip when there’s no traffic.
This July, the most recent period for which figures were provided, Toronto’s city-wide TTI was 1.587. During same month last year, the TTI was 1.698. And in July, 2024, it was 1.738.
That recent improvement is incremental, but it’s a substantial reduction from 2.324 in June, 2018, when Toronto recorded it’s highest monthly TTI out of the 11 full years of figures provided to The Globe.
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Toronto uses navigation data from a third-party vendor to calculate the indicator. The city also provided TTI figures for the downtown core dating back to 2019. They show a similar decrease of late.
It’s not an anomalous finding. Since its first-place showing as having the worst congestion among TomTom’s continentwide city rankings in 2023, Toronto clocked in at ninth place in 2025. INRIX, a traffic analytics firm, places Toronto as the 13th-worst among North American cities in the same year, with average peak speeds actually improving by 1.6 km/h since 2023.
So, things are better, but still not great.
The spreadsheets provided by the city give no explanation for why the TTI has dropped, and Mr. Posluns was unavailable for an interview. He did say by e-mail that the city has increased traffic agents on roads, reduced construction closures and adjusted transit signal priorities.
Construction is typically the biggest contributor to gridlock in the city, according to a city congestion management document, which states that, as of July, 2024, 18 per cent of Toronto road capacity was closed for construction.
That could help explain the recent decline, with major projects on the Gardiner Expressway and Eglinton Avenue wrapping up in recent years.
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Gridlock has emerged as a top voter concern in multiple polls and the leading mayoral candidates have sparred over plans to address the problem with a combination of road and transit improvements.
Mayor Olivia Chow’s campaign has touted a number of recent traffic measures. She landed a $73-million deal with the province to expedite Gardiner rehabilitation, established a Scarborough Busway, restored prepandemic service levels across much of TTC, hired 127 traffic agents and hired the first congestion czar, Mr. Posluns, the campaign said.
In another term, she’s proposing to drive up TTC usage by offering free rides after 10 weekly trips and improving transit signal priority.
A spokesman for Brad Bradford, Ms. Chow’s main challenger in the Oct. 26 election, said the candidate welcomes any progress on roads, but that small improvements are nothing to celebrate.
Mr. Bradford will be announcing further congestion plans in coming days, according to the campaign, including a seven-point strategy focusing on adaptive traffic controls, overnight construction, faster streetcar service, bike lane construction on quiet roads and AI pothole detection.
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There is a glass-half-full way to look at overall traffic in the city, which remains enervating despite recent progress.
Congestion is a sign of a successful city, said Eric Miller, a University of Toronto professor specializing in transportation engineering. “Throughout history, cities have been congested places,” he said. “The whole point of cities is to bring people together so they can get congested, so they can interact.”
Part of Toronto’s seemingly intractable problem is that the regional population has grown by 100,000-plus people a year for the past two decades without commensurate investment in roads and transit.
“If you go back to the 50s and 60s, we were building transit for the 80s,” he said. “And in the 1980s, things were looking good, so we stopped building transit even though we didn’t stop growing.”
In the 90s, then-premier Mike Harris cut off operating subsidies to local transit. “We haven’t had the money to properly maintain the TTC since then let alone grow it over time,” Dr. Miller said. “You get what you pay for, and we haven’t paid for transit.”