The Toronto Region Board of Trade is asking Torontonians for help in its quest to improve the city’s traffic flow. With a new region-wide campaign, the board is trying to gain public approval of proposed dedicated revenue tools that would expand its transportation infrastructure.
The campaign, which launched this week, consists of print creative as well as out-of-home and radio-based components. Billboards, posters and newspaper ads will run from Toronto to Hamilton – a route highly populated by daily commuters.
The campaign, which will run until May, was developed by the Toronto-based Agency 59.
The board said the Toronto region loses approximately $6 billion per year in lost productivity due to traffic congestion, and estimates this number will increase to $15 billion by 2031. In March, the board made its initial revenue proposal, which could drum up an annual $2 billion toward Metrolinx’s 25-year, $50 billion transportation plan known as The Big Move. Metrolinx, a provincial government agency formerly called the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, must present its funding strategy by June 1 (and is itself working with Toronto agencies Winkreative and KBS on its own marketing initiatives).
In a release, the board’s president and CEO, Carol Wilding, said that the city’s congestion problem has negatively affected the quality of living for Torontonians. “Congestion in the Toronto region is not just a fact of life, it is changing how we live our lives,” she said.
On the campaign’s website, LetsBreakTheGridlock.com, visitors can “give politicians the green light to advance revenue tools” by clicking on a virtual traffic light to show their support of the initiative.
In the release, Wilding added that “the green traffic light is an icon that extends beyond an advertisement, to reinforce the message ‘we want to get traffic and transit moving.'”
