“I’ve seen it where there are four light cycles and no car moves an inch.”
Sound familiar, Toronto?
As it happens, Officer Eric Daylong doesn’t describe the traffic in Canada’s largest city. Instead, he’s talking about how blocking an intersection can affect congestion in Seattle, where he works for the police department’s traffic unit.
Every day, when deciding whether to issue a ticket, he reviews videos of potential traffic violations captured by the American city’s automated surveillance cameras. In addition to increasingly operating cameras at red lights and speed zones, Seattle has automated enforcement of “blocking the boxes” and driving in a bus lane.
It’s the only city in North America that issues tickets for both traffic violations that way, and it appears to be changing behavior. Since the program launched in 2022, only up to nine percent of vehicle owners who were issued a warning for blocking the box were subsequently fined for doing so again.
“I would hate to imagine what traffic would be like in Seattle without it, especially at these busy intersections,” Daylong said.
“If you’re a pedestrian, they love it. If you’re a cyclist, they love it, because it makes everything clearer for them.”
In a quest to find out how to fix traffic, CBC Toronto travels to Seattle to look behind the scenes at how cameras appear to deter drivers from blocking intersections and driving in bus lanes.
Now, Toronto is looking to follow Seattle’s lead.
City council approved a congestion management plan in October that includes testing automated box-lock enforcement, driving in dedicated bus lanes and blocking bike lanes, to help keep Toronto moving.
To delve into the big difference those programs could make in congestion, CBC Toronto traveled to Seattle to see firsthand how their comparable programs work. This is the first part of Gridlocked: The Way Out, a three-part CBC series exploring various solutions to Toronto’s costly congestion problem.
Stagnation costs the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) $44.7 billion a year in economic and social value, including lost productivity and reductions in commuters’ quality of life, according to a December study by the Canadian Center for Economic Analysis. It was commissioned by the Ontario Civil and Residential Construction Alliance and
the Ontario Road Builders Association.
Last year, a Toronto Region Board of Trade (TRBOT) survey also found that a majority of 1,000 respondents consider congestion a “crisis” and have thought about moving because of it.
CBC Toronto spoke to a variety of experts for this series, including engineers, police officers and even a psychologist. Many of them considered traffic enforcement to be one piece of the puzzle in eliminating congestion.
“So many intersections around here, you walk around 3:30 [p.m.] “At 5:30 p.m., you can’t cross, no one can, because the cars are blocking the way,” said Giles Gerson, president of TRBOT, which has formed a congestion task force.
“But they can get away with it because there is no real enforcement of the law.”
How it works in Seattle
Seattle expanded its automated enforcement program to include box blocking and driving in dedicated bus lanes to build on the success its transportation department says it has had with red lights and speed cameras.
“They’ve been very effective in changing people’s behavior and improving safety,” said Andy Merkley, civil engineering supervisor for Seattle’s Vision Zero program.
Currently, six intersections have cameras to enforce the box lock law and six locations have cameras to enforce designated bus lanes. (One intersection has cameras for both violations.)
If a vehicle is caught blocking an intersection or driving in a bus lane, the technology provider projects the video and then sends it to Seattle police to confirm or rule out the violation. For the first violation, the vehicle owner receives a warning by mail, but if he does it again, he receives a fine of US$75.
So far, approximately 28,000 warnings and just over 2,400 tickets have been issued for blocking the box and about 267,000 warnings and just under 120,700 tickets have been issued for driving in a bus lane, according to Seattle police data.
For blocking the box, only a maximum of nine percent of vehicle owners who received a warning subsequently received a fine. The recidivism rate is highest when driving in a bus lane, at 45 percent from the time the program launched in spring 2022 through the end of 2024.
“The eight to nine percent rate we’ve been seeing for block cameras is pretty low across all the types of cameras we have experience with in Seattle,” Merkley said.
He says his department plans to analyze the data later this year to understand all the factors contributing to those violations, but they hope the results will be positive.
For its part, Daylong’s noticed a significant improvement when it came to one of the city center bus lanes.
“Before we had this, buses would be anywhere from five to 30 minutes late trying to get to their next stop or trying to cross the Third Avenue chain,” the police officer said.
“It was terrible.”
Boots on the ground now, automation to come
Back in Toronto, the city is trying to deter drivers the old-fashioned way. Traffic officers at busy intersections block vehicles from blocking where they can, and police officers issue warnings and tickets in person when deployed.
In September, fines for blocking the box increased from $90 to $450 at most intersections, and this year’s proposed city budget includes $3 million to quadruple the number of traffic officers on its streets to 100.
But an automated enforcement pilot is also underway, and Toronto wants to learn from other jurisdictions like Seattle.
“There are many, very good practices that they put in place that we definitely want to try to take advantage of,” said Roger Browne, the city’s traffic management director.
“The technology they use, where they mount the cameras, all those different things.”
He also said the city will begin installing cameras this year to collect data to develop the program, but that enforcement is not likely to begin until 2026 at the earliest. The city must obtain provincial approval for some aspects of the program.
Increasing scale of law enforcement
When the time comes, the head of Toronto police traffic services says automation will hold people accountable.
“Really, what that means is I don’t need to have my police officers on that corner,” the acting superintendent said. Matt Moyer.
Urban planning expert Matti Siemiatycki equates the future program with “having traffic control officers on a large scale,” given the potential of having the technology throughout the city center.
“What’s notable is how unremarkable it is,” he said, after reviewing CBC Toronto footage of how Seattle’s self-control technology works.
“It’s simple and seems almost simple in its setup.”
Siemiatycki believes it will help ease the stagnation, but that more needs to be done to address the overall problem.
“Congestion is a much bigger challenge because there are too many cars and not enough space,” said Siemiatycki, director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto.
“Overall, we need a much broader set of solutions to really solve congestion.”
TOMORROW: In Part 2 of Gridlocked: The Way Out, experts explain why congestion is so bad in Toronto and how implementing a combination of several solutions together could improve things.
