Traffic on Bathurst Street just south of Bloor Street on June 11, 2026. The new red-painted sections are transit priority lanes, forcing cars into the right lane other than when making a left turn.Jordan Chittley/The Globe and Mail
Perhaps you’ve already heard – I hesitate to call this news because that implies new information – but Toronto’s traffic was bad during the World Cup.
In a city with such a chip on its shoulder, residents – me included – will take sick pleasure in reading that our traffic was, in fact, the worst among the tournament’s 16 host cities, according to a study by Geotab Inc., an Oakville, Ont.-based, vehicle fleet analytics company.
“It’s not too much of a surprise to me because I’m going in and out of Toronto all the time,” said Mike Branch, who works in Oakville as Geotab’s vice-president of data and analytics.
Congratulations, Toronto. We are the tournament’s biggest loser.
That makes for an easy headline; the only problem is it doesn’t tell the full story. Digging deeper into Geotab’s data reveals that, in some surprising ways, Toronto did a decent job handling the influx of people. More importantly, the tournament offered a taste of a city less dependent on cars.
Geotab analyzed each city’s road network using real-world data gathered from more than six million commercial vehicles connected to the company’s network across North America. In Toronto alone, Geotab tracks tens of thousands of commercial vehicles, including heavy trucks, delivery vans and rental cars. Using that information, the company ranked each city based on vehicle idle time, congestion (traffic flow near the stadium), safety (risky driving behaviour) and resilience (how traffic volume increases and dissipates around big events).
Vancouver ranked second worst, with Mexico City rounding out the bottom three. Houston topped the rankings, followed by Arlington, Tex., and Kansas City.
The key takeaway from those winners and losers is that the top-three cities all have stadiums way out in the suburbs, while Toronto and Vancouver have stadiums in the heart of their downtown cores. Other downtown stadiums did score higher on Geotab’s ranking – owing to factors including local speed limits, population and more – but the trend is clear. City centres have more ambient congestion than suburbs.
“[Stadium location] is absolutely a big factor we ended up seeing in the data. Anything that was typically outside of the city a bit fared a little bit better, and there’s pros and cons to that,” said Branch.
One of the big cons not included in the ranking was pollution. Branch and his analytics team went back and looked at their emissions data and found a clear winner when it comes to stadium location: downtown is better.
“Travelling to a less congested but more distant stadium produces more CO2. Distance is the dominant factor; congestion and idling matter far less,” when it comes to emissions, Geotab’s analysts wrote in an e-mail.
In their example, a trip by car to Gillette Stadium in suburban Foxborough, Mass., produces 33 per cent more CO2 than a trip to Lumen Field in downtown Seattle. If you take into account the fact downtown stadiums are much easier to reach by public transit and cycling, the results become even stronger in favour of downtown stadiums.
It’s a conclusion that aligns with a case study from Hiroshima, Japan. When a soccer stadium in that city was relocated from the suburbs to downtown, researchers found it “significantly reduced both per capita and total carbon emissions,” according to an academic paper published last year.
As the Japanese study noted, Hiroshima’s well-developed public transit network was crucial. It allowed the city to reduce emissions while still filling the stadium for Sanfrecce Hiroshima’s boisterous home games. (Go La Viola!)
Public transportation in Toronto is woefully underfunded and has been for decades, but during the World Cup, the city managed to reduce vehicle activity downtown and get people to switch to more efficient modes of transportation. The city also encouraged remote work if possible, created transit priority lanes and temporarily limited road-blocking construction. As a result, Geotab noted that vehicle activity was 2.6 per cent below normal during matches.
As the city reported, “while travel times immediately around the stadium increased before and after matches, citywide traffic conditions remained generally consistent with pre-tournament conditions.”
In other words, traffic was bad, but only about as bad as it always is. Meanwhile, cycling activity was 25 to 140 per cent above normal, according to the city’s data. Pedestrian activity was up 70 to 160 per cent and the number of vehicles on the Gardiner Expressway was down 10 to 30 per cent.
The World Cup showed there are immediate ways to make getting around the city less painful, all without digging a futile $60-billion tunnel under an existing mega-highway.
Toronto didn’t collapse under the weight of World Cup traffic as experts (and every resident I know) had feared – quite the opposite. After watching Ivory Coast come tantalizingly close to upsetting Germany at Toronto Stadium, I stuck around for a beer before being promptly whisked away by a TTC streetcar packed with other soccer fans. Toronto did what every world-class city does: it got people out of their individual cars and onto bikes, sidewalks and public transit. That’s the only real cure for our traffic pain. If we can do it once for the World Cup, we can do it again.