Everyone into the pool: Blizzard
By CHRISTINA BLIZZARD
You just can’t get there from here.
Most days, you can’t get anywhere from here, it seems, in the GTA, without fuming and sweltering in traffic.
Welcome to Gridlock, Ontario. With a capital G.
It’s not just infuriating and environmentally unsustainable. According to a recent report by the Toronto Board of Trade, this city has the worst commute times of all the North American cities they studied. And it costs us $5 billion a year.
The solution, says provincial Environment Commissioner Gord Miller, is to get people out of their cars and on to transit. Or he suggests a return to an old idea — car pooling — as a way of halving the number of cars on the road.
Then there are controversial road tolls, congestion charges, even “priced highways,” as ways to discourage car use.
“Revenues collected from this should be directed to transit,” Miller said in a recent interview.