Every place has its driving particularities.

You have the “Idaho Stop,” which allows cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs and red light signals as stop signs. The “California Stop” is the same thing, but applied to cars. Then there’s the “Pittsburgh Left,” which is when the first left-turning driver in line proceeds through an intersection when the light turns green light before the oncoming straight traffic proceeds.

Not all of them are legal. Some of them are annoying and dangerous. But they are common enough to be recognized as local habits one needs to be aware of.

Now let us consider the “Toronto Stop,” in which the drivers of a line of cars proceeds into an entirely blocked intersection and then stop there, in the middle of the intersection, blocking cross traffic and pedestrian crossings, while the light facing them turns red, and often staying there, stationary, long enough that it turns green again.

The law, of course, requires the driver of a car not to proceed into an intersection until it can be certain it will pass through the other side. That doesn’t stop Toronto drivers from routinely “blocking the box.”

This is sociopathically inconsiderate, of course. Stopped out there in the middle of the road, the driver blocking the intersection gains nothing real in time (since they cannot move). Meanwhile they block an entire line of cars trying to move through on a green light. This is the very definition of “gridlock,” caused not by heavy traffic volume, but by the negligent incompetence or callous indifference of drivers.

And often, more importantly, these drivers endanger the lives of pedestrians who are forced to walk around them and into another lane of traffic that might be moving quickly, with neither the pedestrian nor the oncoming traffic having enough visibility to make it safe.

Everyone — drivers, cyclists, pedestrians — hates these drivers blocking the intersection. Yet there are so many of them.

It has become commonplace to see TTC vehicles out there blocking the intersection. Virtually every day, for instance, I see bus drivers on the Keele and Weston Rd. routes pull their buses out less than 10 feet from a bus stop into the already gridlocked intersection at Junction Rd. as the light turns yellow. There, they stop while their giant vehicles entirely block the pedestrian crossing. Virtually every day, schoolchildren have to run around the back of the bus into traffic to try to make it through the criminally short walk cycle. They cannot see the racing traffic in the other lanes. The traffic cannot see them until they dart out from behind the bus.

Then there is the “Toronto Left,” which is the increasingly common tradition of a whole line of left-turning cars proceeding with their turns in the two or three or five seconds after a light turns red, at best holding up cross traffic, at worst plowing into it.

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The temptation to do this might be fed by the oncoming drivers having taken advantage of what they no doubt consider the “Toronto Green,” which is the habit of proceeding straight through a stoplight even after it has turned red, as long as it is soon enough after the change that they saw it at some point when it was green. This, of course, not only holds up drivers waiting to turn left and risks collisions with cross traffic proceeding on their own green light, but endangers the life of any pedestrian fool enough to think the new walk signal in front of him or her might mean it should be safe to step out into the intersection.

Again, in these cases, as with the Toronto Stop, the drivers in question are almost universally despised, yet remarkably common. It seems, too, that they have been embraced as a part of local culture by our authorities. How else to interpret the apparent complete non-enforcement of the law?

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It’s not hard to see how we could end all of these dangerous and costly local practices at once. Initially, I found it satisfying to think the city — or at least some of its residents — ought to send enforcement teams out to intersections armed with cartons of eggs, to pelt any car that stops while blocking the intersection. But the risk of covering some innocent bystander with yolk is probably too high.

Besides, there’s an easier solution: red light cameras. Put cameras on every traffic light in the city. If your car is photographed inside the boundaries of the intersection more than a split second after the light turns red — whether you are stopped behind traffic in front of you, turning left, or running a light — you get a ticket.

I tend to think we’d suddenly see Toronto drivers, who have so long shown themselves oddly incapable of grasping a concept most of us learn in kindergarten, suddenly become very conscious of what red lights, yellow lights, and green lights are supposed to mean.

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