Rob MacIsaac hates rush hour traffic more than the average commuter. He finds the incessant stop-and-go, the jockeying for position and the gruelling bottlenecks not just frustrating but profoundly draining. His drive from his home in Burlington to his office at Bay and Lakeshore takes an hour and a half on a good day. When I met him at work one Thursday in February, he told me that his car had been sitting in its parking space beneath the building for 48 hours. He had driven in on Tuesday morning but ditched his car that night and took the GO train home instead. “The thought of lining up to get on the Gardiner was just too much to stomach,” he said. Two days later, he was still building up the nerve to drive back to Burlington.

But commuting is, in a sense, part of his job. As the chair of Metrolinx, the regional transportation authority created in 2006 by Queen’s Park, Mac­Isaac has been charged with fixing the region’s gridlock woes—a daunting task. The GTA is the fourth most congested urban area in North America, behind Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, and just ahead of the sprawlopolis of Houston. The economic cost is enormous. The total of all work hours lost because employees are stuck in traffic or waiting for a delivery to arrive, plus all the fuel burned by cars going nowhere is pegged in the range of $2.2 billion annually. And beyond keeping people from their desks, gridlock keeps them from home: the average Toronto commuter spends 79 minutes a day getting to and from work, up from 68 in 1992. Then there are the health effects: each year, traffic pollution results in 440 premature deaths and 1,700 hospitalizations. These are big, broad, complex problems, and they are all MacIsaac’s to solve, which probably explains why, even though his sparsely furnished corner office has an impressive view of the concrete river that is the Gardiner Express­way, his desk faces the door.

Though the Gardiner is one of the most notorious bottlenecks in the city—in the evening rush, cars routinely queue for the ramps from as far away as Adelaide—the rest of MacIsaac’s drive is hardly any better. The other hot spot on his route is at the Oakville Ford plant, which slows the Queen Elizabeth Way down to a crawl. Mac­Isaac says he can get around this jam by taking a Winston Churchill–403–407 detour, provided he’s paying attention. “Often I’ll miss my exit because I’m daydreaming, and then I’m stuck in the thick of it.” He’s not the kind of obsessive commuter who listens to 680 News for traffic updates and is constantly trying to shave time off his trip; he likes to slip into a lane and stay there, chilling out to music on the radio. Besides, there’s little to gain in trying to beat the rush, because these days even his shortcuts are jammed: a recent study showed that most of Mississauga’s major arterial roads, along with Highway 403, are running at full capacity and suffer from severe congestion.

For all these reasons, MacIsaac prefers GO Transit, though he doesn’t romanticize the experience. “I’m lucky because I live near the end of the line, so in the morning, I always get a seat,” he says. The trains are often standing-room-only by the time they leave Burlington; those who get on at Oakville have to stay on their feet for a long, squished, perfumy ride. “On busy days, you can feel the tension on the train.”

Although public transit is the best solution to the region’s traffic problems, it suffers from its own debilitating congestion. The Yonge subway line, the most crucial transit route in the country, is drastically overcrowded. Work will begin later this year on a computerized signal and control system that will allow more trains to run closer together on the Yonge tracks. But even if all goes according to plan, the additional service won’t kick in for another four years, which is about four years too late.

The future, whether viewed from a gridlocked highway, a subway platform, or MacIsaac’s desk, is grimmer still. Queen’s Park estimates that the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area’s population will increase by nearly 2.6 million by 2031. That will add close to a million more cars to the morning rush hour—all trying to access roads that are already chockablock. By these estimates, it’s easy to imagine the average commute time stretching beyond the two-hour mark, the economic costs of congestion doubling and the death toll rising along with emissions. As The New Yorker writer John Seabrook once put it, this is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a traffic jam.

The only way to prevent the city from grinding to a complete halt is to force people out of their cars and into any other mode of travel. And the only way to do that is to price them off the roads.