“The good old days of driving downtown without hassle are over”: Meet Roger Browne, Toronto’s director of traffic management

In the past year or so, Tom Cruise, Will Ferrell and Niall Horan have all complained about Toronto traffic. What are the odds you can fix it before Taylor Swift lands at the Rogers Centre? Six concerts, nine days and a huge influx of people—we’ve spent a lot of time coordinating and have drawn a box around the Rogers Centre. The inside zone will be for ticket holders, the middle for pedestrians and the outside for ride-share vehicles only. The TTC and GO will also be ramping up service.

What is it about our city that makes traffic so eye-bleedingly bad? The number-one cause of congestion is construction, but I don’t want to cast the cranes in the sky as villains. We’re a megacity. People want to live and invest here. What we need is more transit. Unfortunately, the price of building the Ontario Line and new LRTs is even more congestion. Related: Meet the man trying to fix Toronto’s infamous gridlock

Couldn’t these giant artery-clogging projects be better spaced out? Ideally, we would not be facing today’s scenario, with five or six major projects being built at once. But the reality is that our pre-Covid planning models have become totally inaccurate. Driving habits and traffic patterns have changed dramatically, and we’re adjusting.

It feels like gridlock has become worse since the pandemic. True? More people are using cars to get around, even though they aren’t going into the office. We can’t say why that is, but I can speculate that many got used to driving and haven’t switched back. So the overall traffic volume—the number of cars, trucks and other vehicles as well as pedestrians and cyclists on the road—is currently higher than it was in 2019. But the travel time index, which measures average vehicular commute times, is actually about the same.

Tell that to someone taking the Gardiner every day. We’ve seen some improvements there. The timeline for Phase 2 repairs has gone down from three to two years. We’ve also added a left turn at Lake Shore for traffic heading north onto Spadina. That saves 10 to 12 minutes for drivers on Lake Shore and five to 10 minutes for people on the Gardiner.

What’s your own commute? I live in Markham, so I drive to the GO station and then take transit to my office, the Traffic Operation Centre in Don Mills. We control 400 cameras all over the city, along with 2,500 signals. We also coordinate with traffic agents stationed at the most challenging intersections. During Covid, we had 16 agents. Soon it will be 70. So it’s great progress.

Related: How incompetence, pandering and baffling inertia have kept Toronto stuck in traffic

How so? Toronto has seen a 96 per cent reduction in drivers blocking intersections thanks to these agents. We’ve also seen a 33 per cent reduction in delays on King in the Financial District, where violations have plummeted from 110 an hour to just four, which amounts to a 40-minute reduction on average.

Say a billion dollars lands in your lap and you get to spend every penny improving traffic. What do you do? I’d invest even further in transit. Our city has dense populations in Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke—it’s about creating as many fast and reliable alternatives as possible. If a subway line needs relief, we can talk about adding an additional line instead of just rolling out shuttle buses.

Do you worry that an answer like that will irk the GTA’s car-centric voters? I try to avoid politics. I can say that the investment being made in transit should have been made decades ago. A lot of people remember the good old days of driving downtown without hassle, but that’s no longer realistic. Nobody drives into Manhattan or Paris or London anymore. Like those cities, Toronto simply doesn’t have room to build more lanes, so we need to think in terms of striking a balance between cars and transit.

What do you make of Doug Ford’s proposed tunnel under the 401? No comment. There aren’t enough details at this point. As an engineer, I’m never going to rule out anything. When the feasibility results come back, I’ll weigh in.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.