MEASURING CONGESTION IN THE GREATER TORONTO AREA

Congestion is an important fact of life in most medium and large size urban areas. Many of North American metropolitan planning organisations and provincial/state governments do not have a good objective appreciation of the state of congestion in their jurisdiction or how it is changing over time. This is happening partly because of the difficulty in measuring congestion and the lack of analytical tools and standard measures that can accurately reflect traffic conditions for a particular corridor or area. The main objective of this paper is to examine freeway flow patterns in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) with a view to producing a method to quantify the state of highway performance and congestion in the area which would help monitor that state over time. After a brief review of literature, and a discussion of the traffic patterns in the GTA, a new simple way to estimate the state of highway network performance is introduced. GTA observations are used for demonstration. (A)