We’ve been thinking about traffic all wrong. Sitting in congestion costs local economies billions in lost productivity, and governments invest heavily in easing the gridlock. But what if we’re solving the wrong problem? Associate Professor Victor Couture joins The Executive Summary to challenge conventional wisdom on city transportation networks — and explain why accessibility and density might be worth the slowdown.
We’ve been thinking about traffic all wrong. Sitting in congestion costs local economies billions in lost productivity, and governments invest heavily in easing the gridlock. But what if we’re solving the wrong problem? Associate Professor Victor Couture joins The Executive Summary to challenge conventional wisdom on city transportation networks — and explain why accessibility and density might be worth the slowdown.
Show notes
[0:00] Not only does sitting in traffic suck, it has an economic impact, which cities and governments try to blunt through traffic mitigation strategies.
[1:38] Meet Victor Couture, an expert on urban issues such as housing, gentrification and transportation.
[3:04] In 2023, Victor and colleagues released a paper benchmarking the fastest and slowest cities in the world.
[4:20] What makes a city fast versus slow?
[6:41] Flint, Michigan, in the U.S. earns the distinction as the world’s fastest city, but it’s not a blueprint for other cities to model.
[7:22] When it comes to moving people around a city, what is the ultimate goal of a city, and why isn’t it speed?
[8:38] What is the transportation network?
[9:07] What is accessibility in terms of transportation networks?
[10:46] When is speed via cars a good option?
[11:26] How does density affect productivity?
[11:40] Reducing congestion isn’t going to magically make a city more economically vibrant or affordable.
[12:12] Toronto is a case study for the density versus traffic speed debate. Victor’s research shows that the city is, on average, getting slower despite traffic mitigation strategies.
[13:32] So what about that tunnel under highway 401?
[14:41] Should the city rip out newly installed bike lanes?
[15:44] So what is the purpose of a trip?
[16:19] “For 1,000s of years, cities have been about bringing people into closer proximity. They've been about facilitating the flows of goods, the flows of people, the flows of ideas and the purpose of urban policy makers should be to facilitate those flows and create infrastructure and create institutions that let people realize those benefits of cities, that let people meet easily. That's the goal of a transportation network.”
Megan Haynes: No one likes getting stuck in traffic. Sitting in your car, when you have some place to be. Worrying you might be late, growing frustrated that the vehicle in front of you Just. Won't. Move.
Plenty of cities around the world have to deal with congestion – and it seems to have an economic impact.
The Toronto Regional Board of trade estimates that congestion around the greater Toronto area costs businesses more than $11 billion in lost productivity per year. In New York, that’s upwards of $34 billion, according to one research firm. In 2019, the World Economic forum pegged the loss of productivity while stuck in traffic at more than $89 billion in the US.
And globally, politicians have noticed. Cities like Stockholm, New York and London have implemented congestion charges. Others are investing heavily in transit systems, smarter traffic lights and other congestion reduction strategies. Here in Ontario, to deal with Toronto’s growing traffic delays, current premier Doug Ford has suggested ripping out newly installed bike lanes, which take up lanes of traffic on some arterial roads, and building a massive tunnel under one of the major highways that traverses the city, arguing that these measures will help ease the load on our already crowded streets. Ford’s opponents meanwhile argue that we need more alternatives to car travel downtown. Bike lanes gets drivers off the road, lessening congestion for everyone else. And that tunnel? Well, plenty of research supports the idea of induced demand — that once you build it, it’s just going to fill up with cars anyways. Ultimately, Toronto has become an interesting case study on how — if at all — you can deal with the problem of cars clogging the roads.
Victor Couture: Toronto was always going to be slow. It's a large city. But over the last five, five years, we've seen speeds in Toronto really decline, especially relative to peer cities. So maybe that's a rationale for some additional investment in infrastructure.
I'm Victor Couture. I'm an associate professor of economic policy and analysis at the Rotman School of Management, most of my academic research is about urban issues like housing, gentrification, transportation, homelessness.
MH: Victor has done a number of studies on how we move about the city and how it’s tied to economic growth and success – and he has some thoughts on what it means to be a fast versus slow urban area. And considering the traffic debates happening around the world, it’s worth asking: if Toronto and other dense cities are always going to be slow…are we thinking about congestion wrong?
Welcome to the Executive Summary, I’m Megan Haynes, editor of the Rotman Insights Hub.
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MH: A quick note before we dive into congestions: We've just launched Manage This!, a new series for everyone playing manager in the middle. You'll hear tips and tricks for dealing with difficult bosses, how to say no to people in charge and even how to identify if you, yourself, are a toxic manager. Head over to the Rotman Insights Hub to learn more...and now onto the episode.
MH: Let’s preface this episode with a couple quick caveats: first, we recognize there are really passionate people on either side of the debate on how to deal with traffic into a city. And, there are plenty of reasons to explore car-free or car reduction strategies that have nothing to do with reducing congestion or getting people moving about an urban environment. But we are going to keep most of the focus on speed and travel times. So let’s dive into one of Victor’s most recent research papers. In 2023, Victor and his colleagues released a new study that benchmarked the speeds of more than 1,200 cities around the world.
VC: We did this because there was a real lack of useful data in transportation, and this was a worldwide problem. So with that data, we've been able not only to measure speed and congestion in all these cities, but also to benchmark cities against one another and really learn about what makes a city fast or slow.
MH: Using Google maps data, they looked at every city with a population of more than 300,000 — with the exception of China, which doesn’t allow Google maps.
They measured hundreds of thousands of commutes across hundreds of thousands of routes at multiple points during the day. Flint Michigan in the U.S. came out as the world’s fastest city, while Dahka, Bangladesh gets the honour as the slowest city globally.
And what’s surprising about the study is that when it comes to people moving across cities in cars, the number of cars themselves are not the most important factors.
VC: Yea, it's fairly common to conflate congestion with slow travel speed, but these are not the same thing. Congestion is just the fact that when you add cars on the road, it slows down traffic. And there are many other reasons for slow traffic. And in fact, we find that congestion is not the main reason why some cities are fast and some are slow.
MH: His research found that slow cities are almost always slow, and fast cities are almost always fast — even when you change how many cars are on the roads. Effectively, a slow city will be slow even when the streets are bare and a fast city is fast even when there’s a lot of traffic. Instead, there are two, let’s call them levers, that are more likely to determine if a city is fast or slow. The first is urban density. The more dense a city, the slower it becomes.
VC: Density brings a lot of factors that slow down traffic. Basically there are many other uses that are competing with vehicles for space. So you have pedestrians, bicycles, double-parked cars, more red lights, limited visibility from buildings close to the curb. And all of these factors will, in addition to congestion, slow down traffic at all time. And this relationship between the density and size of a city and traffic is something we find everywhere we look. We look within India, we find it. We look within Canada, we find it.
MH: The second factor is a country’s economic prosperity. The richer the country, the faster the city; and vice versa.
VC: Then in terms of why richer countries, which is the other factor aside from size that has a lot of explanatory power, in terms of why richer countries are faster, then it's really two reasons. The main one is they have a better road infrastructure. It's as simple as that, they have more of the type of large arteries that can carry a lot of traffic. Cities in richer countries are also at lower density. As people get richer, they take more space.
MH: So, a dense city in a rich country — like Toronto or Vancouver — will probably fall somewhere in the middle of the speed scale. And even though a low-density, sprawled out city like Flint gets the honour of being the fastest in the world, Victor cautions u s from trying to emulate it.
VC: Why is it fastest? It's a city that has too much infrastructure for its population size. It experienced population decline following the industrialization.
MH: After the 1980s, the city’s manufacturing jobs declined , along with its population, and it never really recovered. So while you can move about the city quickly, what good is being a fast city if you’re not an economically vibrant one?
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MH: When it comes to getting people around town, what should we be looking at then.
VC: Speed is not the ultimate outcome cities should strive for. The whole point of a city is to bring people in closer proximity from one another. So the benefit from cities is more people nearby to collaborate with, for friendship, for networking, is to have more destinations, more job, more entertainment options, more shops nearby and large cities allow that to happen even when traffic is slow.
MH: Being in close proximity to other people and businesses is really beneficial to personal and local economic prosperity.
In a dense area, you have more shops and restaurants to visit and spend money at; you’re also more likely to bump into people you already know, which helps facilitate networking and the exchange of business. And other research from Rotman faculty suggests that dense urban environments are also key in facilitating novel innovation. If you haven’t already listened to it, our "Location, Location, Innovation" episode from earlier this season covers this topic more in depth, give it a listen if you want to learn more. At the heart of a lot of these exchanges that makes up an economically healthy and productive area - is the transportation network.
VC: A transportation network is all the road infrastructure, the train tracks, the sidewalks, the entire set of infrastructure whose objective is to move people quickly, safely, reliably, comfortably.
MH: It’s the ecosystem that makes connecting with other people or things accessible. And here is the first place Victor wants to challenge our thinking about traffic and congestion. Speed shouldn’t be ultimate goal; accessibility should.
VC: What's important to keep in mind is that the objective of a transportation network is not just to be as fast as possible. That's also not the objective of a city. What matters is not how fast you can travel, it's how much time it takes to go to a destination that's called accessibility, and paradoxically, the slowest cities often have the best accessibility.
MH: He says the real goal should be to spend as little time travelling to your destination as possible. And while speed is a factor, it’s more important to think about how speed and distance work together. If everything you need or can access — those restaurants, shops and people — are in a few blocks’ radius, and most of the time you can get where you need to go relatively quickly, those few times you have to sit in traffic don’t dampen productivity or economic activity as much as we think.
VC: So yes, there is a trade off between speed and density, but typically cities fall on the right side of that trade off, meaning that as you increase density, yes, speeds declines, but distance from destination drops even more. So even though Toronto is the slowest city in Canada, it also has the best accessibility.
MH: And of course, Toronto and other large cities are facing affordability crises that are forcing people to move further from their ultimate destinations – but easing congestion isn’t going to solve that problem. And you can, and do of course, have very economically productive areas in low density neighbourhoods. And here, speed is helpful.
VC: There are many neighborhoods, especially in North America that do afford great accessibility through fast travel. Actually, most of North America, meaning United States and Canada is like that. By car, you can go to the grocery store, to restaurants, to work within 10 or 15 minutes. And there are even highly productive areas that are like that. For instance, Silicon Valley is an area where highly productive and frequent meetings happen from people driving from one place to another, so it is possible.
MH: But, generally dense urban areas do tend to be the most productive and have more variety, which is economically beneficial. That’s not to say an hour-long commute stuck in stop-start traffic isn’t miserable, but we — and politicians — tend to fixate on the idea that reducing congestion will reduce our commute times, which will, what, magically make our city more accessible? Not so much.
So what does that mean for the solution to the great car debate? When it comes to finding solutions, Victor wants us – and policy makers - to start asking very different questions.
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MH: Let’s go back to what’s happening in Toronto, and I promise listeners outside of the city we know we’re not the centre of the universe here – there are just a really interesting set of circumstances plaguing the GTA that help illustrate Victor’s points. As mentioned earlier, Victor’s research has found that on average, Toronto is getting slower.
VC: That's primarily, I expect, to population growth that's been some of the fastest in North America.
MH: The greater Toronto area saw its population increase by more than 600,000 between 2011 and the most recent census in 2021 — that’s nearly three times the size of Regina — and doesn’t include the growth that took place between 2022 to 2024, when Canada as a whole saw its population grow by more than 2.5 million people. And Stats Canada has said recent growth to the region has been record breaking. More people means more congestion and with it, more congestion reduction strategies.
For Toronto, that has come from everything like those bike lanes mentioned earlier, not one, but two subway or tunnel extensions, a rebuilding of one of the city main highway arteries, as well as a timed traffic light pilot among other initiatives. But these investments take time and add more short-term delays thanks to construction, all of which means traffic is still slow and building. Which is where Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford’s 59-kilometer expressway tunnel under highway 401 and the removal of the grade separated bike lanes come in.
At a cost of $18 billion, naysayers really aren’t too keen on the tunnel, which they say won’t fix the problem of congestion at all.
VC: There is plenty of available evidence suggesting that as soon as this tunnel is built, it will fill up, it will be congested, and the 401 will still be congested. If anything, it's the reverse. If the tunnel was not to generate additional traffic, then it is definitely not worth building it
It's $10s of billions to build a tunnel. It has an opportunity cost. Other things could be done with that money, but the idea it won't solve congestion is beside the point. It shouldn't solve congestion. It should move people to places they want to go to
MH: Essentially, new infrastructure shouldn’t be to solve the problem of congestion — again, we need to be thinking about accessibility. If the goal of a transportation network is to move people, then if people use the tunnel, it’s achieved its goal. Likewise, we need to look at bike lanes with a similarly critical lens.
VC: If the bike lane is not popular, if people are not using it, then you'd move a lot more people if you had a car lane.
MH: He warns that unlike car infrastructure, which historically gets used almost as quickly as it’s built, the usage rates for things like bike lanes are more gradual over time.
VC: So here, Toronto should pay attention to the increase in people using bike lanes, so take good measurement of how many people use those lanes, see if that number is increasing at a rate that eventually would justify having a lane of cars in be taken out basically.
MH: In the case of Toronto’s bike lanes — which were only recently built and are still being grade separate from traffic, they probably need a little bit more time to grow in popularity before a decision can be made if they’re an effective addition to our transportation network. And there might be other reasons – say reducing CO2 emissions — to keep those lanes in place.
And yes — an empty highway, lightly used bus or subway or deserted side street can be and feel amazing as you, yourself, are going along smoothly at top speeds. But from an urban policy perspective, it kind of misses the point.
VC: From a policy perspective, a trip is a trip. There are certain trips policy makers might want to discourage, like very long commutes from outside of the GTA to downtown. But ultimately, a good metric of the benefit of a transportation improvement is how many people use it.
MH: As for a city — well that’s all about connection.
VC: For 1,000s of years, cities have been about bringing people into closer proximity. They've been about facilitating the flows of goods, the flows of people, the flows of ideas and the purpose of urban policy makers should be to facilitate those flows and create infrastructure and create institutions that let people realize those benefits of cities, that let people meet easily. That's the goal of a transportation network.
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MH: This has been Rotman Executive Summary, a podcast bringing you the latest insights and innovative thinking from Canada's leading business school. Special thanks to associate professor Victor Couture.
Join us next month as we chat with professor Jia Lin Xie about why having control and autonomy at your job, might not always be the best idea for personal well being.
This episode was written and produced by Megan Haynes. It was recorded by Dan Mazzotta, and edited by Avery Moore Kloss. For more innovative thinking, head over to the Rotman Insights Hub, and subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube or Amazon. Thanks for listening!