Toronto moves closer to hiring 'chief congestion officer' to fight gridlock
On Thursday, a city committee approved a plan to hire a ‘traffic czar’
It's looking more likely that Toronto will get a "traffic czar" in the hopes of reducing congestion and gridlock.
The city's infrastructure and environment committee has approved the plan to hire for the position and it will now go to council for final approval later this month.
The "chief congestion officer" would work "across all of the divisions" in the city and provide "strategic advice" to the mayor, deputy city manager Will Johnston said at the city committee meeting Thursday.
Some of their goals would include increasing on-the-ground traffic management, implementing a strategy for traffic around special events and planning and co-ordinating city-wide construction projects, according to a city staff report.
Lyn Adamson, co-chair of ClimateFast, told the committee that to reach the city's target to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2040, the new officer should also make recommendations "relevant to the promotion of walking, cycling and transit as ways to ease congestion."
Mayor Olivia Chow described the proposed position as "a cross-department approach" to traffic management on CBC Radio's Metro Morning earlier this year.
About half of Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area residents have contemplated moving away due to traffic congestion, according to a 2024 poll. But more people are still filling up the city's roads.
The report says the goal of the position is to mitigate "ongoing pressures of growth and development."
Dominic Roszak, director of government and external relations at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, noted that the city has had 500,000 new people arrive in the past two years, with three million more projected by 2051.
"We also have FIFA next year, so this is a really critical problem right now that we need to tackle," he said.