There was a point in a debate this week when all three frontrunning candidates for mayor admitted they plan to do nothing about traffic congestion in this city. That may seem odd, since they all talk so much about how they’ll tackle gridlock. They claim often that it’s their top priority, or close to it. But given a chance to prove it, they jumped all over each other to promise clearly that they will not.

It was on Monday, at Centennial College. Longshot mayoral candidate Ari Goldkind, who was not invited as a participant on the debate stage, asked a question from the audience, about whether Olivia Chow, John Tory, and Doug Ford (open Doug Ford's policard) would support congestion pricing or road tolls to fight gridlock.

This is a trick question, for reasons that may not immediately be obvious to most people, or most mayoral candidates. Most people don’t understand that pricing roads through either tolls or congestion charges is virtually the only thing a government can do to reduce traffic congestion at all. Building roads doesn’t work. Building public transit doesn’t work. Making traffic flow better doesn’t work. Those things can all be worth doing, and some of them can often allow many people to get where they’re going easier, more effectively, or faster. But none of them effectively reduces gridlock.

Researchers Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner called it “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion” in their 2011 University of Toronto study: if you get traffic to move faster by building more road space or fixing traffic signals or reducing road blockages, more cars will fill up that space within a decade. If you convince people to stop driving cars by building good public transit for them, more cars will take their place within a decade.

New York City, whose public transit network is the best in North America (and possibly the world) is one of the few cities on the continent that suffers worse road congestion than Toronto. Los Angeles, whose highway network is among the biggest anywhere, is another. The trails they have blazed in building transportation infrastructure demonstrate ways to do a lot of things in serving people’s needs, but they also help demonstrate that those things don’t lead to less traffic.

I spoke to Turner this spring about his research on this, and he said it’s pretty clear looking around the world that only one thing actually works to reduce the amount of traffic on the roads: charging people directly to use them. That was also the conclusion of a RAND corporation study in 2008 for the City of Los Angeles: “Many strategies provide short-term relief, but only pricing strategies . . . manage congestion in the long run.” Following that study, Los Angeles has been experimenting with toll lanes on highways, and seen somewhat faster travel times and much higher public transit use. Enough so that they’re extending their program.

Let me repeat it one more time: pricing roads is the only practical thing that will ease gridlock. (Not the only thing, exactly: the other things that can work are a tanking economy and a rapidly shrinking population. But no one implements those measures on purpose.)

So at the debate this week, Goldkind (who supports tolls in his platform) was essentially asking, “Will you do anything at all to effectively reduce congestion?”

It’s useful to consider this practical rephrasing when hearing their answers. I’ve swapped it in here in place of the word “tolls” to show how their answers sounded to me.

Tory: “The answer is no, because you see when [you effectively reduce congestion] they do other things you don’t want to talk about. They do things like, for example, push traffic into residential neighbourhoods.”

Chow: “No, I won’t [effectively reduce congestion].” She’s said before it’s because effectively reducing congestion is unfair, since we haven’t provided a good enough alternative to driving on roads through public transit yet.

Ford: “I will not be [effectively reducing congestion]. I can guarantee it.” He then accused Tory of having a secret plan to do so.

They promise a lot of things, these candidates. Some of what they promise could move people who ride transit faster, which is good. Some could allow more cars to travel on roads, which is fine, I guess, if that’s what you want to do. Some could eliminate the frustrating temporary slowdowns that come with construction road closings, which is good.

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But whatever they are talking about, it is not ending gridlock. It’s not clear to me whether they realize that, but the rest of us should.

With files from Jennifer Pagliaro. Edward Keenan writes on city issues, ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow @thekeenanwire .

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