Rush hour traffic crawls along the 401 during the evening rush hour.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Was the steam rising from the sidewalks or my brain? This I wondered as I made my way through the hot, soupy (and this past week, I understand, smoky) air of Toronto, in the summer of 2025.
The world surely does not need another piece of journalism where a reporter parachutes into a city where they do not live and makes pronouncements about the place.
That said, Toronto was my home for more than half my life before I moved to Vancouver in 2007. Growing up, we called it Toronto the Good. I propose a new moniker: Toronto the Grind.
Seriously, what the hell, Toronto? How do you stand the slog? The hot, slow, miserable existence?
I spent more than half of July there and became slightly obsessed with the state of the roads, where I spent far too much of my urban vacation attempting to get from A to B.
It wasn’t a “There’s two seasons in Toronto – winter and construction,” heh-heh kind of situation. These were severe, sanity-testing conditions, where “traffic agents,” as I later learned they are called, are deployed to busy intersections as a matter of course. (Although as several intersections’ lights flashed red one rush hour during what I assume was a power outage, there was not a traffic cop to be found.)
Should it take more than two hours to travel from the west end of Toronto to Hamilton? Is there any day or hour when a Highway 401 driver does not encounter a traffic jam?
How does a drive along Eglinton Avenue West from Oakwood Avenue to the Allen Road, which Google Maps tells me is 550 metres, take 18 minutes? Eighteen minutes! Astonishing, even in rush hour. Walking that stretch would take less than half that time. Biking it, two minutes.
Cyclists are forced to battle cars for space on city streets that are unfriendly to bikes, Marsha Lederman says.Fred Lum
Not that you would want to bike there – or through many other neighbourhoods in what should be a bicycle-friendly city (in spite of Doug Ford’s pronouncements). I witnessed cyclists risking it all with heart-palpitating regularity, including, for instance, as they dodged cars frantically searching for parking spots along Ossington Avenue so that their occupants could have the joy of sitting on a patio, taking all of this urban wonder in, while paying 13 bucks for an order of fries.
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Meanwhile, even cautious driver friends shared stories of piles of tickets they have received through the red-light and speed-camera systems, and grumbled about the 30-kilometre-per-hour speed limit on local roads. It’s part of the city’s “Vision Zero” road safety plan: a worthy endeavour, except that the roads do not feel safe. One might call it a money grab.
Using public transit to get around Toronto is not as easy as it once was because of the outdated subway system, Lederman says.Cole Burston
Why not take public transit then, you ask? Sure, if you don’t mind dealing with an antiquated subway system that has barely expanded since I was a kid, where the trains – if they are running (hey, it’s the summer, there are lots of visitors, let’s shut them down all weekend!), may crawl along at an exasperatingly slow pace, often (okay, it happened to me twice in one week) appearing to stop so that you, on the station platform, step toward the door only to have the subway jolt back into movement and continue on, freaking you out. (You’re already on high alert, concerned about random attacks at TTC stations.)
Or you follow signs directing you to a station, only to find, after travelling through the labyrinth that is the Yonge-Eglinton Centre, that the entrances are closed for construction – and appear to have been so for some time. Why not update the signage?
While we’re on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT (well, we’re not “on” it, since it’s still not running), can anyone explain why multiple structural entrances are required for even minor stops?
Maybe I sound like a hick from the boonies, but I’m a born-and-raised Torontonian now living in Vancouver who found getting around T.O. a giant hassle. Commuters – drivers, TTC riders, cyclists, pedestrians – had a look of collective misery about them. And I suspect it wasn’t just the heat (or the humidity).
Of course, Vancouver commuting also has its quirks, as new raised bench platforms (“asphalt lumps,” one CBC reporter called them) along the Granville Street Bridge illustrate. And yes, there are delays, construction and bad drivers. But it’s nothing like Toronto.
A 2023 study ranked Toronto the world’s 17th most congested city, with the average driver facing 63 hours of traffic delays annually, notes Toronto’s “Congestion Management Dashboard.” In July, 2024, it reports 18 per cent of all road capacity was temporarily closed for construction.
A separate 2024 report by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis called traffic congestion in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area a crisis that profoundly affects economic productivity and quality of life.
Why do people accept this? Shrug their shoulders and figure: well, it’s always been bad, this is the price for living in Canada’s biggest city? It shouldn’t be. Where is the leadership?