Odds are it will happen on one of those gray fall mornings when the kids are back at school. That’s the season traffic peaks on Toronto-area roads.

Daylight will have barely bloomed around 8:30 a.m. as suburbanites, who backed out of their driveways more than an hour earlier, inch toward downtown.

Even if there’s no sign of snow yet and it’s one of those golden days when the Don Valley is a kaleidoscope of autumn colour, it won’t be pretty the day Toronto actually comes to a standstill — choked by terminal congestion that everyone saw coming but catastrophically failed to prevent.

That day, the radio will report a truck spill at some crucial point, say on Highway 401 near Highway 400. Police will close some lanes for the cleanup, and the slowdown will become a full stop, rippling all the way north toward Barrie and east to the Don Valley Parkway. From there it will tumble south into the downtown and double back west along the Gardiner. Surface arteries will jam with commuters desperate to find a way to work or school. Overcrowded buses and streetcars will be stuck in place.

Without drastic intervention, that day is inevitable by 2031 or sooner. The region will actually stop moving — literally gridlocked — a never-ending traffic jam that the Toronto Board of Trade warns will suck the economic prosperity right out of Toronto.

Congestion is growing worse almost before our eyes as 100,000 people move to the area annually. It used to be that immigrants settled along the streetcar lines. Now they move to Brampton or Whitby and embrace the North American dream of a two-car garage.

How bad is it going to get? U of T Cities Centre director Eric Miller has computer models showing that travel times — not just for work or school but for all trips — will nearly double by 2031. Freeway speeds will drop by about 20 per cent, and it won’t be any better on the arterial roads.

His research is a grim vision of what will happen if Metrolinx’s Big Move plan doesn’t materialize. The $50 billion, 25-year plan proposes 100 specific projects ranging from 7,500 kilometres of bike lanes to 1,150 kilometres of new transit lines to interconnected transportation hubs around the region.

Its recommendations would circumvent the doom that experts have been warning of with increasing urgency for two decades.

Twenty years ago the province knew Toronto was heading to a crisis, but it failed to invest in transit. Now its Metrolinx agency has until 2013 to come up with a transit investment strategy — one that inevitably has to consider unpopular moneymakers such as retail and gas taxes or tolls.

The forecasters also plugged in some growth projections for 2021 employment and settlement patterns and ran the computerized travel-demand forecasting model again. That time, the software spit out an eye-popping image: The map showed rivers of red ink running right across the region, with solid blocks of red far into Peel, Halton and Durham.

Today, Toronto director of Transportation Planning Rod McPhail backs up that scenario, with some qualifications. Although the transit network hasn’t changed substantially, there have been some improvements, notably to GO’s Lakeshore service and the bus network throughout the region. Durham, he says, may not experience the solid block of congestion the model predicted as long as transit is supplied early on in the development of Seaton and other land in Pickering, Ajax, Whitby and Oshawa.

But overall, McPhail doesn’t believe the 2021 projection is out of whack with the looming reality. The doomsday scenario could occur any time, he says. It’s not just motorists who will be spinning their wheels, either.

“We’re at a point now where transit is bogging down. We’ve got to a point where we’ve loaded the whole system. The only way you can fix this is by cranking up the transit component,” he said.

The region’s 82-minute average commute is on track to increase by 30 per cent in about 20 years, according to Metrolinx. That means we could be spending 109 minutes a day just getting to and from work.

The trend can be reversed and commute times cut to 77 minutes, if we implement its 2008 Big Move menu of improvements.

That’s a big “if,” given the $40 billion funding shortfall standing between that solution and total gridlock.

So, is Toronto doomed?

He is among the international and Canadian experts who will be speaking at Toronto Talks Mobility, a public forum at City Hall on Wednesday. Designed as a problem-solving session, the event will be followed by a day-long conference on Thursday.

“You’re a city at risk,” concedes Hazel. “You’re going to have huge problems. You’ve got huge problems now, like the DVP and the Gardiner. It’s enormous.”

But he sees signs of hope. Hazel, who knows Toronto, points to the TTC’s plans to take up the Presto fare “smart card.” There are new bus lanes in York Region.

On a smaller scale, there’s an entrepreneurial spirit afoot. The Grinder coffee shop on Gerrard St. E., for example, mounted screens to tell customers when the next streetcar arrives. Business is up about 40 per cent.

It’s the retail model that transit agencies need to translate to their own business, said Hazel. Technology will allow riders to customize their trips and to access other services and discounts using their mobile devices. They want the same convenience in their commute.

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Transit agencies have to give people incentives to use their product, like retailers who track their customers’ desires and behaviours and sell a lifestyle. Transit operators know what time their trains and buses run, and if they’re wise they’ll get ahead of the game.

“If government doesn’t get their act together on this, … the private sector is going to do it, and you’re only going to get one half of (the potential benefit). You’re only going to get us being offered mobility services through Google or Walmart,” he said. “Then the government and cities will be struggling to keep up and they will have lost the revenue streams. They will have lost the ability to shape the city. That’s the big agenda.”

Because the TTC had to pay for the Air Miles upfront, it actually took a hit on the deal, although Smith wouldn’t say how much. That just compounds the problem with passes, which can be money-losers because the more they’re used, the less money the TTC recoups per ride.

Toronto residents need to be sold on the benefits of paying for the transit they are so hungry to ride, argues former Toronto chief planner Paul Bedford, who sits on the Metrolinx board. That’s a tough pitch — how do you convince people they’ll be better off if they pay a little more?

“It has to be personal. Somebody has to be able to see some noticeable difference,” he said.

If you’re going to persuade residents to accept congestion taxes or tolls to pay for expanded transit, you have to give them something “in a reasonable time,” said Bedford. After all, transportation is a very personal issue.

Frequent all-day GO service would be a good start, he said.

“You would never have to worry about a GO schedule again. That would make a difference to people’s quality of life.”

Making the maps

The maps tell the story of Toronto's choking gridlock better than any traffic reports or water-cooler tales from the road.

Based on computer models of traffic patterns, including employment and settlement patterns, the maps produced by the Cities Centre at the University of Toronto show the growing demand for road space in and around Toronto.

The red lines represent stop-and-go traffic. In 1996, it's clear that demand for major highways and even residential roads routinely exceeded capacity in the busy morning rush.

Projecting ahead to 2031, the red lines become thicker on the map, showing that demand for that finite road space will grow dramatically.

When Cities Centre director Eric Miller modeled traffic demands for the Toronto Star, he factored in all trips, not just those for work or school. The model also takes into account some planned road improvements.

The 2006 map shows congestion eased slightly that year. Miller says there could be a couple of reasons for that, but the most important factor was likely an increase in road space relative to the growth in trips that year. There may also have been a change in travel patterns.

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