Like Toronto, all cities are obsessed with traffic. Unlike Toronto, not all cities are obsessed with cars.

Though Toronto confuses the two, the differences are significant. In some cities, cars are part of a larger mobility network that also includes public transit, bikes and pedestrians.

In Toronto, received wisdom has it that what’s good for the car is good for the city. Not only is that sort of thinking not the answer to congestion; it is the cause of congestion.

By focusing unquestioningly on vehicular traffic, we have kept other forms of transportation from reaching their potential.

The city’s impatience to remove the pedestrian scramble at Bloor and Bay is another example of how fixated we are on keeping the roads clear of everything but cars. This is exactly the wrong thing to do. Toronto’s problem, of course, is that there are too many cars on the streets.

A more enlightened approach would be to provide alternatives to driving, not make it more difficult to implement those alternatives. But from Mayor John Tory on down, civic politicians and bureaucrats are busy devising reasons to remove the scramble. They will pull out studies and statistics to justify the decision. In the end, however, their only argument is that it slows cars.

That’s absolutely true, but isn’t that the point?

There’s only so much time and space on our roads; the scramble takes a bit of both and restores it to pedestrians. That would make sense almost anywhere in the city, but especially on Bloor, one of Toronto’s premier pedestrian precincts. Certainly the street is less active now than it will be when warm weather comes in two or three months.

The reason the local Bloor-Yorkville Business Improvement Association spent $20 million redoing the streetscape of Bloor from Church to Avenue Rd. was to make it more attractive to pedestrians. Does it know something the city doesn’t?

If traffic were the measure of economic success, as the John Torys of the world believe, the BIA would have been better off adding parking spots on Bloor.

As it is, Bloor has suffered countless indignities at the hands of developers, planners and architects, few of whom have the capacity to grasp that whatever they do there is not a single project but part of a unique urban context. The lack of larger vision has left Bloor no more enticing than dozens of streets in Toronto. But because it is a place of commerce, culture and civic memory, it retains enough appeal to draw the hordes. A smart city would play to Bloor’s strengths, not weaken them even further.

Back in 2011, city council’s designated bottom-feeder, Denzil Minnan-Wong, tried to close the much busier scramble at Yonge and Dundas. Now Tory’s deputy mayor and trusted lieutenant, Minnan-Wong can be counted to do the same at Bay and Bloor.

Though closing scrambles will be popular with some drivers, these voices from the past are doing Toronto no great favour. Even they would agree, it’s smarter to embrace the future than fight it. This sort of backwards-looking decision, repeated over and over, leads to a critical mass of wasted opportunity and a city in which all residents are worse off — drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.

Despite decades of official denial, the car has taken us as far as it can. That has less to do with scrambles, on-street parking, speed limits and the like than the fact the roads are overrun with automobiles.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The task is to get people out of their cars, not to mutilate the city to accommodate them. The change must start some place and sometime; deferring the inevitable may buy short-term political gain, but the final cost grows ever greater.