Whenever I meet someone in my travels and we discuss New York City they always ask me, “how do you deal with the terrible traffic?”  For some reason, this always comes up as a topic of conversation.  My response is always the same, “it’s not as bad as the traffic congestion in Toronto”.  As downtown construction continues and the city continues to grow, the traffic nightmare continues to worsen.  For Example, Friday afternoon it took me twenty-five minutes to travel from the Hyatt Regency on King Street to the Gardener Expressway.  That journey is less than two miles.  In addition, on my way in to the city, exiting at Spadina, I was backed up and sitting at the exit for ten minutes.  It’s just preposterous that no one is attempting to do anything to ease the congestion.  Now it may be as a New Yorker I have very little tolerance for anything or perhaps Torontonians are just more willing to accept a bad situation.  But something needs to be done before all of these construction projects are completed or no one will be able to move at all downtown.  It will simply be gridlock all the time.  So here are my suggestions: 1)There needs to be traffic cops at all of the major congestion points ensuring traffic is flowing at all times.  At the moment, people are just all over the place and there is little order to the traffic pattern. 2)Traffic lights need to be better synchronized ensuring flowing traffic.  3)Those silly, inefficient, albeit quaint street cars need to be retired.  Those things are the very definition of traffic congestion.  And finally 4)All of the major thoroughfares need to have traffic flowing in the same direction i.e. Adelaide.  It makes absolutely no sense for Yonge to be a two-way street.  Perhaps the directions could change meaning in the AM traffic flows downtown and in the PM traffic flows uptown.  But the two-way traffic on Yonge doesn’t work.  There are enough North-South arteries that can be used in one direction that will keep traffic flowing smoothly.  New York City did that many years ago and it’s far better than it was prior to the one-way traffic pattern on all of the North-South streets.  Park Avenue is an exception but wide enough to support the two-way traffic.  So I hope someone will read this and take action as the traffic continues to grow worse every year with no relief in sight.