Counting cars

After yesterday’s lively discussion about the relationship between Toronto and its suburbs, along comes this clever little story in today’s Star. It’s clever because the story is based on a city report that’s nearly a week old, but that no one wrote about. It’s the Cordon Count report, which is actually a pretty important piece of paper, since it tracks the number of cars that move in and out of both the city’s outer limits and the downtown Central Business District, or CBD.

The Cordon Count report is strong on numbers but light on analysis, and somewhat self-serving. For instance, when the report states that traffic into the city has gone up, it happily points out that such traffic increases can be correlated directly with new employment. It fails to mention the same correlation with regards to the fact that daily commutes from the city centre to the suburbs have gone up by 38% in ten years. But what the Cordon Count does show is that we really are living in a city-region that’s much bigger in our collective reality than it looms in our collective imagination.