Stuck in traffic: how congestion tracks growth in Canada’s big cities

Traffic is the capacity problem Canadians feel every day. It is also one of the easiest to measure. TomTom, the navigation company, collects anonymized GPS data from hundreds of millions of devices and publishes an annual index of how long it takes to drive 10 kilometres in each city.

In 2025, Vancouver and Toronto were Canada’s two most congested cities, and both rank among the slowest in North America.

How we compare with G7 peers

Comparable 2025 data for other G7 cities is patchy, so we compare against two well-matched peers with verified figures: Hamburg, Germany’s second city, and Philadelphia, one of the largest US metros. Both have historic cores, ports and metro populations in the same range as our big three. All three Canadian cities are slower than Philadelphia, and Vancouver and Toronto are slower than Hamburg.

Hours lost to rush hour tell a similar story. Vancouver drivers lost 112 hours in 2025 and Toronto drivers about 100. Berlin, a city of 3.9 million and Germany’s most congested, lost 100. Hamburg lost 98.

Vancouver drivers now lose more time to traffic than drivers in Berlin, Germany’s most congested city. That is what happens when population grows faster than transit.

Why this belongs in an immigration debate

Toronto’s 10 km drive got 68 seconds slower in a single year. That is not only an immigration story: road design, remote work patterns and construction all play a part. But population growth concentrated in the Toronto and Vancouver regions adds hundreds of thousands of trips a day to networks that take a decade or more to expand.

The Ontario Line subway was announced in 2019. It is scheduled to open in the early 2030s. Population growth does not wait for tunnelling machines.

Building transit takes as long as it does in Canada partly because we make it slow: long environmental reviews, fragmented governance between cities and provinces, and high costs per kilometre compared with peer countries. Fixing that is part of the same agenda as fixing immigration.

What we’re asking for

• Include congestion and transit ridership in the capacity index for each major metro area.
• Tie federal transit funding to faster approvals and lower cost per kilometre.
• Use provincial nominee programs and settlement incentives to spread growth to cities that have room for it.