1 day Ago By Chris Selley
Toronto is cracking down on one of the most visible and infuriating of its urban blights: Drivers who “block the box,” entering intersections they have no hope of clearing before the light changes, obstructing vehicles — including buses and streetcars packed with commuters — trying to proceed in the crossways direction. Then drivers going the other way do it. Over and over and over again, every rush hour.
If Toronto traffic were your friend, you would organize an urgent intervention. What had been a $90 fine for box-blocking will become a $450 fine , and that’s a very reasonable intervention. No doubt there is somewhere in the world where drivers are worse about blocking intersections than in Toronto, but I’ve never been to that place.
Nor would ending the scourge of box-blocking make a massive dent in Toronto’s bigger traffic woes : There are simply too many cars, not enough roads, an endless supply of interminable and long-overdue construction projects, and sub-zero willingness to implement congestion charges or road pricing that might actually reduce volume. To my mind, cracking down on box-blocking is really more about laying down a very basic marker of civilized human behaviour. And it ought to be about the municipal government demonstrating some baseline level of problem-solving competence.
On the latter point, alas, the quintupled fine probably won’t accomplish anything at all on its own. One reason police hardly ever ticket people for blocking the box — fewer than one a day in Toronto, on average — is that, under current laws, enforcement would only further snarl traffic: Police have to pull offending motorists over, hear their life stories and pleas for mercy, and then write them a ticket. There are two obvious, dead-simple solutions, both of which would require sign-off from the provincial government: Allow police to simply wander around blocked intersections photographing offenders’ behaviour and licence plates; or, much cheaper, allow enforcement via cameras, just as already occurs in Toronto for speeding or running a red light.
In either scenario the car’s owner, rather than necessarily the driver, gets the bill in the mail. I would say it would be a great money-maker, apart from all the other benefits, except I think it would actually solve the problem in about two months: A $450 ticket doesn’t slide off most people’s backs. New York City solved box-blocking, just as it solved double-parking beforehand, using this basic shock-and-awe approach (though it has backslid at times since).
Toronto has requested camera enforcement, and officials sound optimistic that Queen’s Park will sign off. After all, why would it approve camera-enforcement for speeding and red lights, but not box-blocking? We shall see. But Toronto should have requested this, and Queen’s Park should have approved it, 20 years ago at least.
When it comes to governments demonstrating competence, this is among the lowest-hanging of low-hanging fruit. Indeed, it’s often at the municipal level where governments can best demonstrate the benefits of, well, governance: Emptying trash cans, cleaning the sidewalks, towing illegally parked cars, running public transit according to some kind of schedule, cutting the grass, cleaning public washrooms, arresting yobbos, helping people in crisis. There’s no question that a perception of widespread official ineptitude can have a corrosive effect on public life Toronto can’t, or won’t, do any of those kinds of things with any reliability.
Broken trash cans overflow. After years of pre-pandemic improvement, public transit is again leaderless — and it shows. The city is filthy.
You’re lucky if public washrooms are open, let alone clean. Police officers drive by all manner of mayhem and pathos in their cruisers without giving a second glance. The more people see government failing in these most basic endeavours, the more I suspect they lose faith in government as a basic concept.
I’m not too fussed about that really, because I think Canadians have too much faith in government as a basic concept to begin with. But there’s no question that a perception of widespread official ineptitude can have a corrosive effect on public life. It reduces our collective expectations for things that only governments, realistically, can do: massive infrastructure projects, foreign policy, military procurement, immigration, criminal justice, housing policy (all of which our governments are getting pretty reliably wrong).
Sometimes “doing” it means just getting the hell out of the way. Sometimes it requires doing incredibly simple things like approving traffic-monitoring cameras. Often, though, it’s extremely complicated and requires expertise, diligence and principle.
That this is too often lacking is not surprising at all, living in a city where garbage cans overflow, buses and streetcars run in bunched-up pairs, trios and quartets, and politicians of all stripes sometimes seem almost ideologically averse to simple solutions. National Post [email protected] Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers.
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