For years, Canadians have been warned about their country's declining labour productivity. According to the Bank of Canada, it's a 'break-the-glass emergency' that requires immediate attention. But what about our other productivity crisis — the one of personal, rather than national, proportions?
Modern life has become full of tiny frustrations and complications that steal our attention and creativity a few minutes at a time, leaving us all less productive. Consider online bill payment. Originally a simple and time-saving process, it now can't begin without a series of verification hassles such as two-factor authentication, CAPTCHA tests and other mandatory online security procedures.
In the postal era, you sat down once a month with a stack of bills, your cheque book and a roll of stamps and paid all your bills in one sitting. No need to click on every square with a bicycle or race upstairs to get your verification code before time expires. Today, the process gets longer and more complicated with each new security feature added.
The same holds true for other modern time-killers, such as customer surveys, online alerts, useless chatbots and 'customer service' phone centres that never seem to answer their phones. Putting a price on these micro-productivity losses may be more difficult than toting up Canada's national labour productivity crisis. But the lost time is every bit as significant.
Traffic Congestion as a Micro-Productivity Drain
Traffic congestion is one place where data on personal time costs is easier to come by. In Montreal, for example, orange traffic cones have become a satirical civic emblem, given their role in exacerbating traffic congestion. A 2023 study discovered more than 500 of these cones in one small section of the city. All were originally installed to warn drivers of road work. Yet the study found nearly a quarter had simply been abandoned and were no longer serving any purpose except obstructing drivers. A local newspaper discovered one row of orange cones had been sitting beside a road tunnel for 16 years. According to the most recent traffic cone report, forgotten cones are now just five per cent of the total — which suggests city officials can actually be shamed into doing something about inadvertent congestion.
Deliberate Road Obstructions
What's far more insidious is when road congestion is deliberate government policy. In the name of Vision Zero and other efforts to make our streets 'safer,' many Canadian cities have adopted policies explicitly intended to make roads less efficient. Among the most common efforts at 'traffic calming' are speed bumps, road constrictions and in-road obstacles such as flexible bollards — bendy vertical hindrances placed in the roadway meant to make drivers uncomfortable by forcing them to slalom around them.
Once upon a time traffic engineers planned roads so as to get drivers to their destinations as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now they deliberately place obstacles the size and shape of small children in the middle of roads to do the opposite. Making driving more difficult and awkward has become a key policy goal. And this has real micro-productivity consequences for the vast majority of commuters who drive.
In 2024, for example, Toronto incorporated many traffic-calming and road-obstructing devices as part of a 'Complete Streets' renovation of a 4.7-km stretch of Bloor Street West, a main city artery. The changes included separated bike lanes, signal adjustments and the removal of two lanes of cars. The goal was to increase cycling and pedestrian traffic by making cars go slower.
What would you do with an extra day per year? Presumably something more productive than sitting in your car as you crawl by an empty bike lane. The micro-productivity crisis is real, and it's time we started paying attention to the small frustrations that add up to big losses.
