We Built Richmond Hill for Cars. That Doesn’t Mean We’re Finished.

York Region spends heavily on both roads and transit. But if Richmond Hill keeps building places where every trip requires a vehicle, neither system will work as well as it should.

By Staff Writer

A familiar argument comes up whenever people talk about transportation in Richmond Hill: this city was already built for cars, so we might as well accept it. Widen the roads. Add turning lanes. Keep the parking. Make peace with the fact that most people drive.
There is a practical-sounding realism to that argument. Richmond Hill is not downtown Toronto. Many residents live in subdivisions. Many daily trips involve schools, plazas, jobs, sports programs, grocery stores and family errands spread across a large suburban landscape. For many households, a car is not a luxury. It is how daily life works.
But there is a difference between recognizing reality and surrendering to it.

The real transportation question for Richmond Hill is not “cars or transit?” A place where every trip requires a vehicle will be expensive, whether that vehicle is a private car, a bus, or a future subway train.

The real transportation question for Richmond Hill is not “cars or transit?” That is too narrow. It turns the debate into a fight between drivers and riders, when the real issue is the shape of the city itself. A place where every trip requires a vehicle will be expensive, whether that vehicle is a private car, a bus, or a future subway train.
York Region’s own budget numbers make that clear. The Region is not simply starving transit while funding roads. It is spending heavily on both.

Measured against York Region’s roughly 1.29 million residents, the operating cost of roads and transit looks surprisingly close. The gross operating budget works out to about $222 per resident for roads and about $267 per resident for transit. On the tax-supported side, the road operating budget is about $147 per resident, while transit is about $174 per resident.

That might surprise people who assume roads are “normal” and transit is “subsidized.” In reality, both systems require major public spending.
But equal spending per resident does not mean equal usefulness per resident. Roads are useful almost everywhere because Richmond Hill and York Region have spent decades building around them. Transit is trying to operate inside a landscape designed mainly for cars.

That is the contradiction.
A resident may technically live near a bus route or a Viva corridor, but that does not mean transit works well for daily life. The stop may be far away. The walk may involve a wide arterial road, a long wait at an intersection, a missing sidewalk, a hostile crossing, or a route through parking lots and driveways. The bus may come too infrequently. The trip may require a transfer. The destination may be a plaza designed for cars, not people arriving on foot.
So the problem is not simply that Richmond Hill needs “more transit.” More transit helps, but it does not automatically fix a place that was never designed to support it.
This is where some transit advocacy can go wrong. If transit is treated as a poor person’s car, then the development pattern is left untouched. Keep the same subdivisions, the same separated land uses, the same big roads, the same parking lots, the same hostile crossings, and simply add buses for people who cannot or do not drive.
That is not a Strong Towns approach.

A stronger approach starts with a different question: can people safely and comfortably reach useful daily destinations without needing a car for every single trip? Can a teenager get to a part-time job, a library, a park, or a friend’s house without asking for a ride? Can a senior walk to a café, pharmacy, bus stop, or community centre without crossing a road that feels like a highway? Can a family make one or two short weekly trips by foot or bike instead of turning every errand into a drive?
If the answer is mostly no, then the transportation system is not really offering choice. It is offering expensive workarounds.

Richmond Hill’s own budget shows the local side of this. The City’s 2026 capital budget is $121.1 million, with the largest service category being the roadway system at about $33.3 million. The City’s presentation also lists more than three kilometres of new roadways or roadway improvements, new or enhanced pedestrian crossovers and traffic signals at 15 locations, and 27 lane-kilometres of road overlays or reconstructions.
Some of that work is necessary. Roads need to be maintained. Signals need to be replaced. Crossings need to be improved. Nobody serious is arguing that Richmond Hill can stop maintaining its road network.
The question is whether each new public dollar makes the city less dependent on cars over time, or more dependent.
At the regional level, York’s 10-year capital plan includes 96 new lane-kilometres of roads and 150 intersection improvements. It also includes major transit investments, including 315 electric buses, priority bus rapidway design, and continued support for the Yonge North Subway Extension. On paper, that sounds balanced: roads, transit, active transportation, growth, maintenance.

But the lived result still feels unbalanced because land use is unbalanced. Most residents can drive from almost anywhere to almost anywhere. Far fewer can walk, bike, or take transit conveniently between daily destinations.
That is why “roads versus transit” is the wrong fight. A car-dependent city can make both roads and transit underperform. Roads get congested because every trip is pushed onto the same network. Transit struggles because routes must cover long distances through spread-out places with limited all-day ridership. Walking and biking feel unsafe because the streets were designed to move vehicles first and people second.
The hidden costs go beyond the municipal budget. A car-dependent pattern also pushes costs onto households. Families pay for vehicles, insurance, fuel, repairs, tires, parking and depreciation. Young people lose independence until they can drive. Seniors lose independence when they can no longer drive. Local businesses depend on large parking areas instead of nearby foot traffic. Public land is consumed by asphalt that must be built, drained, plowed, repaired and eventually rebuilt.

Fossil fuel adds another hidden bill. Road spending looks cheaper when we count asphalt but ignore gasoline. Transportation emissions do not show up as a simple line item in York Region’s road budget, but they are part of the cost of a system where most daily trips require driving. Those costs show up through climate risk, air pollution, household fuel exposure and the infrastructure needed to support spread-out travel patterns.
This still does not mean “cars bad, transit good.” Cars will remain part of Richmond Hill. Trucks, emergency vehicles, trades, deliveries, family trips, accessibility needs and regional travel all rely on roads. The point is not to pretend cars will disappear.

The point is to stop designing every normal daily trip around them.
That starts with places, not modes. A better bus route will work better when more people live within a short, safe walk of the stop. A bike lane will matter more when it connects homes to schools, parks, shops and transit stations. A sidewalk becomes more useful when it leads somewhere other than another parking lot. Gentle density becomes a transportation policy when it puts more people near daily needs. Small commercial spaces become transportation policy when they reduce the need for longer trips. Safer crossings become economic policy when they make nearby businesses reachable by more people.

This is the practical answer to the “we already built it for cars” argument. Richmond Hill does not need to become Amsterdam tomorrow. It does not need to ban cars, punish drivers, or pretend suburban life can be transformed overnight. But it also does not need to freeze every subdivision, plaza and arterial road in its current form forever.
Cities are not museum pieces. Streets are rebuilt. Plazas are redeveloped. Intersections are redesigned. Parking rules are changed. Homes are renovated. Neighbourhoods evolve.
The choice is not revolution or surrender. The choice is whether each small decision makes Richmond Hill more car-dependent, or slightly easier to live in without a car for every trip.
That means the best transportation question for the 2026 municipal election is not simply: “Do you support transit?” Almost every candidate can say yes to that. It is also not enough to ask whether candidates want to “fix traffic,” because that often becomes shorthand for widening roads and adding capacity that quickly fills up again.

The better question is this:
Will candidates support the land-use and street-design changes that make walking, biking and transit practical?
That includes safer crossings on major roads. It includes allowing more homes near corridors and neighbourhood centres. It includes supporting small-scale mixed-use development. It includes ending rules that force excessive parking. It includes building bike routes that connect to real destinations. It includes designing streets for the speed we actually want drivers to travel, not just posting a sign and hoping for the best.
And it includes being honest with residents. We cannot keep building places where every trip requires a car, then act surprised that roads are congested, transit is expensive, and households feel squeezed.
York Region is spending heavily on roads. It is also spending heavily on transit. Richmond Hill is spending heavily to maintain and improve its local roadway system. The question is not whether these expenses exist. They do. The question is what kind of place those dollars are building.

If the answer is still a place where every errand begins with a car key, then both road and transit spending will keep disappointing us. More lanes will not fix it. More buses alone will not fix it. The solution is more basic and more local: build places where short trips can be short, where walking and biking are safe, where transit has enough nearby people and destinations to work, and where driving is a choice rather than a requirement.
Richmond Hill was built for cars. That is true.
But staying that way is also a choice.