Group to federal candidates: Go play in traffic!

OTTAWA — Want to help fight congestion in Canadian cities and make trucking more efficient? Click here and join the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) as it tries to make traffic jams an election issue.

The national group hopes its campaign will urge people fed up with traffic tie-ups to voice their concerns to federal candidates via social-networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

A 2006 Statistics Canada report concluded that traffic jams cost Canada between $2.3-billion and $3.7-billion per year.

At the Cut My Commute web page, you can see a running total of how many hours and how many dollars are lost to congestion every second.

Also, there’s an online calculator that lets you figure out how much your own commute has cost you since the election was called.

(A todaystrucking.com reporter, who drives about 23 clicks in just over 24 minutes every morning, punched the numbers and learned his commute cost him $98 and 12 hours that he could have put to much better use. Like sleeping.)

The organizers of the Cut My Commute want webpage visitors to do the calculation and then tweet and Facebook and email federal candidates pleading with them to do something about congestion.

Mostly, they’re encouraging spending on public transportation.

The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) is on the record as favoring any moves, including more public transit, that ease urban congestion.

As CTA President David Bradley told the American Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, truckers and commuters share a lot of the same frustrations.

"All truckers want is to be able to get into and out of cities quickly, with a minimum of disruption. They want to minimize or reduce the costs of operating in congested urban areas. With the price of fuel and the limits on a driver’s hours of service, that is critical," he said.

As well, cities need strategic infrastructure investment, such as better funding for transit and roads; examining the feasibility of truck-only lanes; design roads that accommodate modern truck configurations, and clear traffic incidents more quickly would also help.