As gridlock grinds Toronto to a halt, here's what the city could learn from Seattle's traffic cameras
CBC Toronto’s 3-part series explores solutions to the city’s congestion crisis
"I've seen it where it's four light cycles and not one car moves an inch."
Sound familiar, Toronto?
As it happens, Officer Eric Daylong isn't describing traffic in Canada's largest city. Instead, he's talking about how blocking an intersection can impact congestion in Seattle, where he works for the police department's traffic unit.
Every day when deciding whether to issue a ticket, he reviews video of potential traffic violations captured by the American city's automated enforcement cameras. In addition to operating increasingly common red-light and speed-zone cameras, Seattle has automated enforcement for "blocking the box" and driving in a bus lane.
It's the only North American city issuing tickets for both traffic infractions that way — and it appears to be changing behaviour. Since the program launched in 2022, only up to nine per cent of vehicle owners who were issued a warning for blocking the box later received a ticket for doing it again.
"I would hate to imagine what traffic would be like in Seattle without it, especially in these busy intersections," said Daylong.
"If you're a pedestrian, they love it. If you're a cyclist, they love it — because it clears everything for them."
Now, Toronto is looking to follow Seattle's lead.
City council approved a congestion management plan in October that includes piloting automated enforcement for blocking the box, driving in dedicated bus lanes, and obstructing bike lanes, to help get Toronto moving.
To dig into how big of a difference those programs could make on congestion, CBC Toronto travelled to Seattle for a first-hand look at how its comparable programs work. This is the first part of Gridlocked: The Way Out, a three-part CBC series exploring various solutions to Toronto's costly congestion problem.
Gridlock costs the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) $44.7 billion a year in economic and social value, which includes lost productivity and reductions to commuters' quality of life, according to a December study by the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis. It was commissioned by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario and
the Ontario Road Builders' Association.
Last year, a survey from the Toronto Region Board of Trade (TRBOT) also found that the majority of 1,000 respondents consider congestion a "crisis" and have thought about moving away because of it.
CBC Toronto spoke to a variety of experts for this series, including engineers, police officers and even a psychologist. Many of them considered traffic enforcement a piece of the puzzle of eliminating congestion.
"So many intersections around here, you walk around 3:30 [p.m.] to 5:30 p.m., you can't get across — nobody can — because cars are blocking it," said Giles Gerson, president of the TRBOT, which has formed a congestion task force.
"But they can get away with it because there's no real enforcement."
How it works in Seattle
Seattle expanded its automated enforcement program to include blocking the box and driving in dedicated bus lanes to build on the success its transportation department says it had with red-light and speed cameras.
"They've been very effective at changing people's behaviour and improving safety," said Andy Merkley, civil engineering supervisor for Seattle's Vision Zero program.
Currently six intersections have cameras for block-the-box enforcement, and six locations have cameras to enforce designated bus lanes. (One intersection has cameras for both infractions.)
If a vehicle is caught blocking an intersection, or driving in a bus lane, the video is screened by the vendor of the technology and then sent to Seattle Police to confirm or dismiss the violation. For the first infraction, the vehicle owner receives a warning in the mail — but if they do it again, they receive a $75 US ticket.
Roughly 28,000 warnings and just over 2,400 tickets have been issued for blocking the box so far and about 267,000 warnings and just under 120,700 tickets for driving in a bus lane, according to data from Seattle Police.
For blocking the box, only a maximum of nine per cent of vehicle owners who received a warning were later issued a ticket. The recidivism rate is higher for driving in a bus lane, at 45 per cent from the time the program launched in spring 2022 to the end of 2024.
"The eight to nine per cent rate that we've been seeing for block-the-box cameras is pretty low across all types of cameras that we have experience with in Seattle," said Merkley.
He says his department plans to analyze the data later this year to understand all the factors contributing to those violations, but they're expecting the results to be positive.
For his part, Daylong's noticed a significant improvement when it comes to one of the city's downtown bus lanes.
"Before we had this, buses were anywhere from five to 30 minutes late trying to get to their next stop or trying to get through the string of Third Avenue," the police officer said.
"It was terrible."
Boots on the ground now, automation to come
Back in Toronto, the city is currently trying to deter drivers the old-fashioned way. Traffic agents at busy intersections prevent vehicles from blocking the box where they can, and police officers issue warnings and fines in person when they're deployed.
In September, tickets for blocking the box went up from $90 to $450 at most intersections, and this year's proposed city budget includes $3 million to quadruple the number of traffic agents on its streets to 100.
But an automated enforcement pilot is also on the way — and Toronto wants to learn from other jurisdictions like Seattle.
"There's a lot of really, really good practices they put in play that we definitely want to try and leverage," said Roger Browne, director of traffic management for the city.
"The technology they use, where they mount the cameras, all those different things."
He also said the city will start installing cameras this year to gather data to build the program, but enforcement isn't likely to start until sometime in 2026 at the earliest. The city has to get provincial approval for a few aspects of the program.
Increasing scale of enforcement
When the time comes, the head of traffic services for Toronto police says automation is going to hold people accountable.
"Really what that means is I don't need to have my police officers out on that corner," said Acting Supt. Matt Moyer.
Urban planning expert Matti Siemiatycki equates the future program to "having traffic enforcement agents at scale," given the potential to have the technology across the downtown core.
"What's remarkable is how unremarkable it is," he said, after reviewing footage from CBC Toronto on how Seattle's auto enforcement technology works.
"It's just seamless and it seems almost simple in how it's set up."
Siemiatycki believes it'll help alleviate gridlock, but that more needs to be done to tackle the overarching problem.
"Congestion is a much bigger challenge of too many cars and not enough space," said Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto.
"Overall, we need a much broader suite of solutions to actually solve congestion."
In Part 2 of Gridlocked: The Way Out, experts explain why congestion is so bad in Toronto and how implementing a combination of several solutions in tandem could make things better.
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