Urban Form and Travel behavior in Toronto

What is it about?

The objective of this study is to examine whether the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) is moving toward or away from sustainable transportation through exploring the spatial and temporal changes of urban form and travel behavior, related policies and responses to these changesduringtheperiodbetween1986and2006.TransportationservicesandinfrastructureintheGTAareregulatedbydifferentgoverning bodies and at different scales and levels. Support for sustainable transportation initiatives has varied across governments and over time. It is important at this point to review the main initiatives taken by different governing bodies over the last several decades to achieve sustainable transportationintheGTA.ByanalyzingtheTransportationTomorrowSurveydatathroughthelasttwodecades,itcanbedeterminedwhether these initiatives have been successful in making transportation in the GTA more sustainable or, alternatively, whether more measures should be taken to achieve transportation sustainability. The major finding of this study is that, overall, the GTA is not moving in the direction of sustainable transportation, and gives credence to the idea that demand-management interventions are needed as a transport policy to make transportation systems more sustainable in this area.

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Why is it important?

The main objective of this study was to examine whether the GTA is moving toward or away from sustainable transportation. This objective was met through the analysis of data obtained from the TTS data. The data suggest that, overall, the GTA is not moving in thedirectionofsustainabletransportation,andgivescredencetothe idea that demand-management interventions are needed. In addition, two main lessons can be generalized from this study. Therearedifferencesbetweenthedowntownareaandtherestof thecityofTorontoandtherestoftheGTAregionsintermsofurban development, travel behavior patterns, and local transportation policies. The analysis showed that employment density is highest in PD1, fairly high throughout the city of Toronto, and comparatively low in the rest of the GTA. Despite the policies that encourage residentstousethetransitsystemastheirmainmodeoftransportation, the substantial decentralization of employment densities and areas from denser (PD1) to low density (the rest of the GTA regions) is a major obstacle to improving transit ridership in the GTA. Decentralizedareasaredifficulttoserveefficientlyandcosteffectivelyby urban transit. Automobiles share is increasing as the distance from the PD1 increases. Public-transit shares constitute a small portion of mode share in the rest of the city of T

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