With motorists in the city feeling the crunch of construction season particularly hard this year, each ride, marathon or race places a fresh strain on the traffic system.

Every event, sometimes scheduled years in advance, is carefully looked at by the city to ensure alternative routes are free of construction if possible, according to Jacqueline White, director of transportation services for Toronto and East York. For example, the recent Becel Ride for Heart, which shut down the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway on Sunday until 2 p.m., prompted staff to pause construction on Lake Shore Blvd. to allow for better traffic flow.

What preparations are made to help alleviate gridlock?

City staff at the transportation department keeps tabs on upcoming events and construction projects, working with multiple departments as well as the TTC and Toronto police to accommodate closures. City council recently approved the Ride for Heart until 2016 and staff have already started looking at possible complications.

“We're aware of everything, as much as we possibly can be. We know the events that have been planned and we know the construction projects,” said White. “There's a big balancing act that happens.”

In some cases, if a new construction project is being planned while an event is happening, White said the contract will specifically include clauses to address the event. Other times the city will ask workers to pause for the duration of the event.

During the Ride for Heart last weekend, she said construction workers who were preparing to do overnight resurfacing on Lake Shore Blvd. were told not to make any preparations during the time of the ride. But in cases of long term construction, like the Union Station work blocking Front St., there’s little that can be done, she said.

Why bother running events on city streets?

“I think there are a lot of benefits. One, they’re charity events. Two, it is what makes our city a vital city, an exciting place to be,” said White.

Teresa Roncon, senior manager of public relations for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, says the downtown route is essential to the organization’s capstone fundraiser.

“The two top reasons that people do participate are the cause, as the first one, and secondly the unique experience of riding on traffic-free highways,” said Roncon. “The sheer number of people, 14,000, would be very difficult to move somewhere else. The more people we have the more important that is to us.”

This year the event netted roughly $6 million in donations and is the largest single-day fundraiser for the charity.

Has the city ever rejected events that would impact too heavily on traffic?

With the Ride for Heart approved until 2016 and dates scheduled, White and her staff have time to co-ordinate the one-day event with different departments in the city.

With some events, she said, there was not enough time to make such plans.

“I’m sure there’s been little events with little notice where we have said that, where somebody comes in with not a lot of notice, usually a much smaller deal where we say, ‘No we can’t, rhere's too much else going on. There’s no alternate route for people. There’s not enough notice to give people an idea of what's going on to be able to plan,’” said White.

Could the city ever become too large and congested to afford closing major arteries?

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Matti Siemiatycki, an associate professor with the University of Toronto who specializes in transportation planning, says that the increasing population of Toronto may not actually lead to more congested roads.

“I think if anything growth will have the opposite effect,” said Siemiatycki. “That growth actually creates opportunity for mass transit to work better, creates the revenue, creates the densities, creates the number of people that we can then afford to build the transit system that we want.”

But, Siemiatycki said, until that transit is built and operating, such closures can worsen congestion and highlight the need.

“We’re reaching a critical mass now where we’re not going to be able to provide service for 5 to 7 million people with just roads,” said Siemiatycki. “We’ve had the population growth and we’ve had essentially a generation of missed investment in rapid transit and we’re starting to catch up now with the Spadina subway extension, with the Eglinton crosstown, with the expansion of Union Station, but we’re really behind and that’s what you’re seeing now and that’s why everything feels so crowded and the roads feel indispensible.”

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