Traffic in the GTA is increasingly taxing our environment, our patience, and our quality of life. Unless we want to travel further down a precarious road, we have to re-shape our approach to transportation.

We can already see some disturbing signs. In peak periods, roads and public transit can be very congested. And that's before we try to absorb 2.6 million more people and 1.6 million more jobs into the GTA! The biggest challenge is outside the City, where public transit and other options are more difficult to develop. Unless we change the pattern of where we live and how we travel, we will need 19 more lanes of expressways by 2021.

The City is in a good position to rise to this challenge. We are the most densely built-up part of the GTA and have a strong culture of using public transit, biking and walking. We can keep moving forward by learning from the world's best solutions. The Campaign for Next Generation Transportation will weave together four elements: moving people, moving goods, moving less and moving minds.

Moving people will mean tackling the entire door-to-door trip through packages of options that people can easily choose from and create. The City of Toronto has already bought, and will now be working on modernizing Union Station. The TTC is studying ways of increasing the number of people that the subway platforms can handle, and improving passenger connections to other transit services at the station. GO Transit has a 20-year plan that will meet the need for more rail service while easing the pressure on regional road systems.

Right now, the TTC has no approved rapid transit expansion plans beyond finishing the Sheppard Avenue subway line to Don Mills. Instead, its capital spending priority is maintaining the existing subway system and replacing vehicles. But given that the City will be experiencing a big growth in people and jobs, it's a good time to look at our need to expand rapid transit. Nevertheless, building more rapid transit would have to justify its cost before being considered as an element of the Official Plan.

Another possibility is introducing alternative transit services such as mini-buses, vans or shared taxis, into areas of the City that are difficult to serve by conventional transit. These are typically low-density residential neighbourhoods and employment areas where there aren't enough transit riders to justify frequent, fixed-route bus service.

We also have to think about giving surface transit priority. This would include giving public transit vehicles the right-of-way at intersections by banning cars and trucks from making left-hand turns on streetcar routes.

Integrating transit between GO Rail, subway stations and adjacent municipal and regional transit systems would help make public transit more competitive with private cars. Increasing cycling and pedestrian comfort would also encourage alternatives to the car. At the same time, we have to improve the safety and accessibility of our transportation system.

We have to make better use of our roads. In one sense, we already have the roads that we need. The problem is that most of the cars on them are three-quarters empty. In the past, we've relied on the "carrot" approach to encourage better use of public transit. We may need to consider less popular methods such as congestion pricing and higher taxes for fuel or parking.

We also have to find better ways of moving goods. We need to consider how to increase our road capacity for trucks along with steps such as priority lanes, and off-street loading and parking facilities.

Where possible, we have to move less, by coordinating land use planning, urban design and transportation policy so that instead of sprawling into the regional suburbs, we live in more high-density centres where we can live closer to work, and move more easily and build infrastructure more cheaply through public transit.