Most are familiar with road tolls. You pay a fee to drive a highway or a series of highways and those tolls tend to go up or down depending on how far you drive on a given road. Congestion pricing tends to be more zone-based.

Although the exact systems vary by city, the goals are the same: reducing the number of drivers clogging up the roads. Singapore, which has had congestion pricing long enough to work through some of the bugs, moved to an electronic pricing system in 1998.

Singapore found that by putting higher pricing during rush hour times, it was able to more evenly distribute traffic throughout the day. As a result, travel speeds during rush hour rose 20 km/h. And when officials noticed people starting to speed in the moments before the pricing was about to rise, they introduced five-minute buffer zones and people safely slowed down.

In Stockholm, the pricing is specifically for the citys centre. People are charged when they drive in and they are charged when they drive out. The pricing system, which has been in place since 2006, is linked with a drop in traffic, an increase in public transit use, as well as decreases in traffic pollution.

Amborski remembers when Toronto toyed with introducing a toll on the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway that would have brought in roughly $200 million each year. It’s likely, he says, that different councillors would want to use that revenue in different ways and not necessarily for transit.