{"id":72039,"date":"2026-08-25T08:15:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T12:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=72039"},"modified":"2026-08-24T10:51:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T14:51:44","slug":"op-ed-can-toronto-give-itself-a-green-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2026\/08\/25\/op-ed-can-toronto-give-itself-a-green-light\/","title":{"rendered":"OP-ED: Can Toronto give itself a green light?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This op-ed launches our pre-election discussions of key issues ahead of Toronto’s October 26 municipal election. Our election issue will be published later in September.<\/em><\/p>\n

On an icy day last December, Mac Bauer, AKA the 514runner, beat the brand-new Finch LRT by 18 minutes over 10 kilometres. In a recent rematch, Mac lost to the LRT after measures were taken to speed it up. Why did it take so much public attention to get it right?<\/p>\n

On King Street, Toronto dramatically improved streetcar speed and reliability, then slowly allowed enforcement, construction and other changes to eat away at the gains. Meanwhile, the cycling network remains fragmented and undersized.<\/p>\n

Different modes, same underlying problem. People walking and cycling, transit vehicles, trucks and cars, along with deliveries, patios, parking and construction, all compete for the same limited space.<\/p>\n

Yet Toronto continues to plan, manage and debate this space in silos. Our actions, and too often our inaction, have produced expensive but underperforming infrastructure and corridors that try to meet every need but serve none well. The consequences for our economy and quality of life are real.<\/p>\n

The question is not whether Toronto should favour one mode over all others, but whether the City can make difficult choices, use its assets more effectively and be accountable for the results.<\/p>\n

One street network, many institutions<\/h2>\n

The street is one system but City Hall treats it like several. Transportation Services controls streets and signals and much of the cycling network. The TTC plans and operates transit, but generally not the streets or signals its vehicles run on. The Toronto Parking Authority manages parking and Bike Share. Planning, construction, licensing, and enforcement all shape the same space. Political responsibility is scattered among Council committees, agency boards, and individual councillors.<\/p>\n

The governance structure reinforces these silos. The TTC and the TPA each have boards focused on their own mandates, while roads, cycling, and pedestrian infrastructure run through City divisions and Council committees. Holistic oversight is absent, with no board or Council committee looking after transportation as a whole.<\/p>\n

Every part of the transportation system has its own priorities. The system itself has none.<\/p>\n

Toronto has projects and policies, but no governing transportation plan<\/h2>\n

Toronto is notoriously fond of plans. Agencies and governments have filled shelf upon shelf with plans for transit, parking, congestion, Vision Zero, and individual districts. Yet Toronto still lacks an adopted multimodal transportation plan that says where it wants to go and identifies the choices, investments, and policies needed to get there.<\/p>\n

So projects are too often planned one at a time. Without a picture of the future network, it is hard to know how one project affects another, what is missing, or whether the pieces will add up to something that actually works. Toronto risks spending billions on individually defensible projects that collectively underperform.<\/p>\n

Streetcars show what this means in practice. Their speed depends on signals, stop spacing, operating rules, street design, enforcement, and much else. FastTrackTO, the campaign to speed them up, makes an important point: each measure helps, but the real benefit comes when they work together. Toronto needs the same system-level thinking across every mode \u2014 and one plan capable of expressing it.<\/p>\n

No one is clearly accountable<\/h2>\n

Toronto has three accountability gaps and they compound each other:<\/p>\n

No politician is specifically accountable. <\/strong>Council has committees and boards producing policy for and overseeing actors such as the TTC, the TPA, and Transportation Services, but no politician has to answer for whether transportation as a whole is getting better or worse.<\/p>\n

No official owns it either.<\/strong> The TTC illustrates the problem. The City pays much of its bill and appoints its board, but the TTC both runs transit and writes much of the policy governing fares, service levels, and network priorities. No one on the City side has the clear mandate and expertise to set those objectives, fit them into a broader transportation strategy and hold the TTC to them.<\/p>\n

And no one measures the whole result. <\/strong>There is no shared scorecard connecting what Toronto says it wants, what it spends and what travellers actually experience. That makes it too difficult to tell whether things are getting better, and who is supposed to act when they aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Toronto lacks a political owner, an experienced integrator, and a common dashboard.<\/p>\n

Toronto has already started to build the answer<\/h2>\n

The good news is that Toronto is not starting from scratch. The Chief Congestion Officer already has a mandate to work across organizational boundaries, even if the office cannot direct them. The new Congestion Management Plan reaches beyond cars to surface transit, technology, and changing how people travel, and comes with a proposed $299.4 million investment.<\/p>\n

The City is also developing a Citywide Mobility Plan, while the TTC is reviewing its Service Standards and how it measures performance.<\/p>\n

The pieces are appearing, but now is the time to connect them.<\/p>\n

Here are four ways to do it.<\/p>\n

IDEA 1 \u2014 Put one politician in charge<\/h3>\n

The Mayor should put a Deputy Mayor visibly in charge of mobility and give them a new Transportation Committee to chair. Their job would not be to run the TTC or time traffic lights. It would be to guide and champion the citywide plan, force unresolved trade-offs into the open, get the right people around the same table when things conflict, and report publicly to Council, the media, and Torontonians on whether Toronto is actually getting better at moving people and goods.<\/p>\n

When it isn’t, somebody should have to explain why, and what happens next.<\/p>\n

IDEA 2 \u2014 Build one transportation team, not five<\/h3>\n

Political accountability needs a professional counterpart. Toronto should bring the people who think about transportation strategy, policy, and performance together under a single Deputy City Manager or other senior City official, instead of scattering that responsibility across divisions and agencies.<\/p>\n

There is no need to invent a new transportation bureaucracy from scratch. Much of the expertise is already grouped under Infrastructure Services, City Planning, TTC, and TPA. The missing step is to turn that collection of functions into a genuine transportation authority, led by a Deputy City Manager with responsibility for the performance of the whole system.<\/p>\n

It would also change the City’s relationship with the TTC. In cities such London and Budapest,\u00a0 there is a clearer distinction between the authority that decides what transit should provide and the operator that decides how to provide it. Toronto could do the same. The City would set fares, broad service levels, network priorities, funding, and performance standards. The TTC would get on with running transit safely, reliably, and efficiently.<\/p>\n

If the TTC were to keep its board, it could focus on meeting the CIty\u2019s targets through operational excellence. Is service reliable? Are customers receiving a great experience? Are assets being looked after? Are costs under control?<\/p>\n

IDEA 3 \u2014 Write a plan that Toronto can deliver<\/h3>\n

A citywide transportation plan should start by answering a deceptively simple question: what are Toronto’s streets and transportation networks actually supposed to achieve?<\/p>\n

Most people can probably agree on more than our age-old transportation debates suggest. Torontonians should be able to access jobs, schools, and services. Goods need to move. Streets should be safe. Trips should be reasonably reliable and affordable. People with disabilities have the same right to mobility. And transportation should not make the city dirtier, noisier, or less pleasant than necessary. There is already a strong basis for consensus around trade-offs.<\/p>\n

Toronto could then make explicit choices about the roles of transit, roads, cycling and walking networks, parking and curbs, construction, and goods movement, instead of turning each project into a culture war. Infrastructure plans would be developed in close collaboration with the federal and provincial governments, since Toronto depends on their funding. A citizens’ assembly, selected much like a jury, could help test some of the hardest trade-offs.<\/p>\n

Finally, the vision has to meet the budget. Every Council term should come with a four-year delivery plan delivered centrally and not by individual departments or agencies, saying what will actually happen, when, at what cost and with what expected result. Update it every year with the budget.<\/p>\n

A plan that does not force choices is just another plan for the shelf.<\/p>\n

IDEA 4 \u2014 Keep score, and do something with it<\/h3>\n

As the truism states, “What gets measured gets managed.”<\/p>\n

We may all feel that Toronto transportation is not working particularly well, but proving it is difficult since the measurements are as siloed as the organizations producing them. The King Street story is instructive here too. The initial gains were reported as a win. What wasn’t in place was ongoing, independently owned measurement to catch the erosion as enforcement lapsed and diversions piled up, so by the time it was visibly worse, there was no scorecard flagging it, and no one whose job it was to ask why.<\/p>\n

Better measures would ask questions travellers actually care about. How many jobs can I reach within 30 minutes? How reliably does my streetcar arrive at my stop, not just when it leaves the terminal? How many minutes does a project save for every dollar spent, and how many people benefit?<\/p>\n

Set a baseline and target, compare Toronto with peer cities, identify who owns the result and publish it. When something goes off course, explain why, say what will change, and do it.<\/p>\n

The point of measuring transportation is not to produce a dashboard but to make someone act.<\/p>\n

Toronto is in control<\/h2>\n

Queen\u2019s Park controls major transit expansion, regional integration, important legislation, and much of the money. But Toronto controls its streets, signals, and curbs, coordinates construction, regulates parking and turns, funds the TTC, and decides what it asks its agencies to report. Provincial changes may be needed for some reforms, but they are not an excuse to wait on everything else. Toronto does not need Queen\u2019s Park\u2019s permission to move a bus lane, retime a signal, or fix a curb.<\/p>\n

It just needs to get better at giving itself the green light.<\/p>\n

After a decade at Metrolinx, Antoine Belaieff now splits his time between Toronto and Europe, where he works on making public transport simpler and easier to use.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kelly Rowe is a Partner at City Action Lab with two decades of experience working with the public sector as a researcher, senior advisor, and management consultant. Kelly previously held senior roles with Canada\u2019s Minister of Infrastructure and the Chair of<\/em>
\nthe Toronto Transit Commission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Photo by Antoine Belaieff<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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