It could take weeks for Toronto drivers to move on from the loss of the Bay Street ‘hot wheels’ ramp when trying to move off the Gardiner Expressway.

Like a tractor trailer inching down the now-jammed Jarvis Street off-ramp, traffic modeling experts say getting urban commuters to change their habits takes time and in most cases – a bit of personal frustration.

“Until people actually experience the extra delay, it’s hard to see change,” said Baher Abdulhai, a University of Toronto professor and the director of the city’s Intelligent Transportation Systems Centre.

“You get stuck once in traffic and maybe you will re-think it the next time. The experiential part is what triggers the change,” Abdulhai said.

In the lead up to the ramp closure, the city had a strong publicity campaign to get drivers ready for the change and educate them about alternatives like public transit or different travel routes.

That’s good, said fellow University of Toronto professor Matti Siemiatycki, but it won’t alleviate the pressure altogether.

“No matter how much awareness you raise, the first few months are always going to be tough,” he said.

To understand how traffic works, there are a couple of things to consider Abdulhai said.

On one hand, vehicle traffic behaves like water in a stream. When one branch of the stream is dammed, the rest of that water has to either find another route, or overflow the riverbanks.

“There will be a ripple effect across the network from the closure of this ramp,” Abdulhai said.

“The notion that if you take capacity away traffic has a magic way of disappearing, that is not the case. It has a way of finding alternatives after the initial shock, but it will never go back to normal until the new ramp opens,” he said.

Then, of course, there are the goldfish who swim in the stream. And they have remarkably short memories.

“There is a psychological dimension to this in terms of how (drivers) respond,” Siemiatycki said. “It often takes a few days for people to find new routes or remember to come up with other options.”

Further complicating the matter is that the Gardiner exit closure is only temporary.

Siemiatycki said that when cities close lanes or remove capacity permanently, it does encourage some commuters to seek alternatives like public transit.

But when drivers know that the change won’t last forever they are less willing to depart from their existing patterns.

“Because this is temporary, this might make a bit of a different psychology,” Siemiatycki said.

“People might just say, ‘I’m just going to tough this out for the eight months or whatever it is until this is finished.’”

Construction of the new $30 million replacement ramp, planned to exit onto Lower Simcoe St. is slated to wrap up in September.

Since the Yonge-York-Bay ramp was closed Monday, many morning commuters have been forced to either exit earlier at Spadina Ave. or take the Jarvis Street exit further east. Traffic back-ups along Lake Shore Boulevard have been steady from 6 a.m. onwards for three days.

Torontonians are no strangers to grid-lock. Siemiatycki compared the Gardiner exit closure to the addition of high-occupancy-vehicle lanes for the PanAm Games in 2015.

“At the beginning there were huge traffic jams and people were really upset about it. But after a while traffic tended to find a level,” he said.

With the Easter long weekend now behind us and winter over, the Gardiner exit closure also marks that start of Toronto’s second official season.

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“Construction season,” Siemiatycki said.

“It’s always difficult. We have a system that is at capacity, where we haven’t invested sufficiently in the public transit network, and we have a busy, bustling city.

“We’re really just facing an issue of a lot of people wanting to get around and infrastructure that’s aging and absolutely needs to be repaired,” he said.

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