Toronto is spending thousands of dollars every week to place men and women with whistles on street corners as gridlock in the city reaches breaking point.
A long-running municipal program puts city-trained staff and Toronto police officers at intersections to keep wayward drivers in line, in an attempt to quell congestion.
The yellow-vest-clad workers are being used at especially snarled corners, on transit priority routes and near major construction projects.
Recent data from the City of Toronto shows they’re yielding remarkable results.
On King Street, where drivers are supposed to follow strict rules to encourage only local traffic, streetcar travel times have ballooned in recent years.
When the route is unrefereed, a streetcar can take up to 65 minutes to travel along the downtown portion of the street. With traffic agents on hand, that time drops to just 20 minutes, a city hall study found.
But while the program is saving hours for drivers and transit riders, it is costing taxpayers thousands of dollars every week.
Figures shared with Global News by the City of Toronto show the program cost almost $110,000 to run for just two weeks in mid-January.
Managing intersections including King Street, Spadina Avenue and Gardiner Expressway on-ramps for the five days between Jan. 15 and Jan. 19 set city hall back by $60,857.50. The next week, from Jan. 22 to Jan. 26, the city was left with a bill of $49,060.
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Over those two weeks, traffic agents were deployed at the following intersections:
- King & Yonge
- King & Bay
- King & Jarvis
- King & Church
- King & University
- King & York
- Eglinton & Allen
- Yonge & Harbour
- York & Harbour
- Mt. Pleasant & Roehampton
- Front & Bay
- Front & University
- York & Bremner
- York & Lakeshore
- Spadina & Bremner
- Spadina & Gardiner
- Jarvis & Lakeshore
- Black & McDonald
Traffic agents are a permanent part of the city’s budget, acting as a rotating resource through Toronto’s crowded intersections. The program is staffed by city-trained staff, supplemented by Toronto Police Service special constables.
Toronto’s director of traffic management said the tough job of managing intersections means a high turnover of staff, with many going on to become full-time police officers.
“It’s a gruelling job,” Roger Browne told Global News. “Our traffic agents, they’ll work for a year or two years, every single day being out in traffic. And they start looking for (other) employment.”
Browne said the agents are a key weapon in the city’s congestion arsenal. The effectiveness of the human touch in enforcing rules is a major part of their appeal.
“It’s kind of like an immediate, as you say band aid, fix to be able to get traffic agents there until such time as we can make additional traffic signal modifications,” Browne said.
The city does not have set locations for the agents, instead moving them around as gridlock kicks in or construction begins. Some “congestion hotspots” in the downtown see agents taking control more often than not.
The area agents are the most helpful is stopping drivers from heading through a green light late and finding themselves stuck in the middle of an intersection, blocking the next round of cars from moving.
“Above all else, traffic agents basically help mitigate the whole block-the-box situation,” Browne said. “Motorists get frustrated, they’re queued up in traffic, sometimes it’s a bad judgment call, they get a green light and they roll through.”
Rose Becker, who lives near the Spadina Avenue and Bremner Boulevard intersection traffic agents are regularly deployed to, said drivers blocking the box creates a dangerous jungle for pedestrians.
“It worries me every day,” she told Global News, adding there is a “human cost” to pedestrians trying to cross the road. “It’s an accident waiting to happen.”
Becker and her neighbours have been especially concerned about their local intersections for years, with drivers piling into the area during rush-hour to get onto the Gardiner Expressway.
With congestion snarled for hours every day, Becker said traffic agents do an important job and add to public safety, but aggressive ticketing of drivers, cameras and more accountability are needed too.
“My corner isn’t different to so many other areas in downtown,” she said. “Pedestrian safety has not been acknowledged.”
David Ramautor, who worked with Becker on traffic studies and advocacy in the area, said the program is a “band aid” solution.
“Is there a silver bullet? Absolutely not,” he said, arguing the money spent on agents could also be put toward infrastructure changes, including pedestrian bridges.
So desperate is the city’s traffic problem that even those at city hall usually quick to criticize Mayor Olivia Chow and her spending agree that the thousands of dollars every week on traffic agents are worth it.
“Congestion costs our economy more than $11 billion a year,” Coun. Brad Bradford, who ran against Chow in the 2023 mayoral race, told Global News.
“While I would prefer to see a more sustainable solution, the use of traffic agents provides good value-for-money in terms of cutting down people’s commute times to make it home from work faster.”
Editors note: A previous version of this story understated the cost of traffic agents. The total cost for traffic agents during two weeks in January was almost $110,000.
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