By Gazette Staff
March 27th, 2026
BURLINGTON, ON
Residents are invited to attend Burlington’s first Community Traffic Forum, a collaborative event co-hosted by Councillor Lisa Kearns and Councillor Paul Sharman, focused on the future of local mobility and transportation safety in Burlington.
The Community Traffic Forum will bring together residents, City staff, regional partners, and transportation experts for meaningful discussion on traffic priorities, mobility challenges, and future‑focused solutions across the city. The forum is designed to encourage constructive dialogue and gather community input to help inform transportation planning and road safety efforts.
Traffic backed up on Lakeshore Road at Brant.
Event Details:
- Date: April 1, 2026
- Time: 6:30 p.m. (doors open at 6:15 p.m.)
- Location: Art Gallery of Burlington
- REGISTRATION IS A MUST. Click HERE to register
Councillor Kearns at one of her ward meetings.
“As Burlington continues to grow and develop, the pressures on our roads and transit systems continue to increase,” said Councillor Lisa Kearns. “Traffic congestion and mobility challenges cannot be addressed in silos. We need to work together, across City departments, regional partners, and with our community, to identify solutions now, rather than waiting until challenges become much harder and more costly to fix.”
Councillor Sharman: the reality is that growth can be managed more effectively with modern solutions- particularly on-demand and flexible transportation systems.
“Traffic and congestion in Burlington are shaped by our unique location at the end of Lake Ontario, where Highways converge around a natural bend in the corridor. This creates a bottleneck that regularly pushes highway traffic onto local roads as drivers try to get around delays. Further, while there’s a perception that more high-rise development will automatically increase congestion, the reality is that growth can be managed more effectively with modern solutions- particularly on-demand and flexible transportation systems that reduce reliance on single-occupancy vehicles and make better use of our existing road network.” ~ Councillor Paul Sharman
Participating organizations and partners include representatives from:
- Burlington Transit
- City of Burlington Transportation Services
- Burlington Integrated Mobility Transportation
- Halton Region Infrastructure & Environmental Services
- Halton Region Integrated Master Plan team
- Metrolinx
- Halton Regional Police Service
- Additional regional and community transportation partners
Event Details:
- Date: April 1, 2026
- Time: 6:30 p.m. (doors open at 6:15 p.m.)
- Location: Art Gallery of Burlington
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As Wayne says, the provincial Plan has not been working for most of two terms. The Gazette has been reporting this regularly.
It is just too many people, and costs too much. Now the latest scheme I saw right now on the 5 o’clock news is another developer bailout – get rid of development charges, and make, or coerce, the municipalities pay and our taxpayers pay, at all three levels.
Nobody in charge will admit, that the Plan itself is the problem. The industry is just not sustainable in the present built development form that the developers and City are wanting to plan, and 65,000 new people in the immediate planning period are not going to happen. This Plan is going to fail and everyone knows that, as it is quite apparent.
This is crazy planning, that just assumes, as a basic premise, that it is possible, when it is known that such a premise assumption guarantees that the Plan will fail.
What we are and now seeing is another proposed government spending spree. The announcement I saw at 5, put it on the municipality to agree to make taxpayers pay the developers investment cost of construction – the need for water, sewers, roads, police, and numerous public service needs.
Without these services installed up front, there are no houses build, and nothing to sell.
In any case, it seems to be in the news, that what developers have built, nobody seems to want, and what the 65,000 people Plan is trying to propose to build, does not seem to be wanted or saleable.
Whatever this meeting wants to discuss, it has to consider seriously, an entire reorganization of the structure of what can be feasibly built and work. Trying to force – build for 65,000 more people, and everything that is needed, with current thinking, funded by all levels, with a very large developer subsidy, is fiscal madness and a taxpayer rip-off.
Will the City meeting devolve into another leveraged attack on the City finances, by calling the DCs ‘Taxes”, which is a total lie? That is what the 5 o’ clock story actually presented.
1. growth vs. road capacity
Burlington plans ~65,000 more people but there’s no policy direction to adjust for the current volume of cars nor the growth.
2. it’s not just “volume” it’s also “system failure. Poor traffic light synchronization,
gridlock when QEW/403 backs up, cut-through traffic invading neighbourhoods and construction bottlenecks.
3. highways drive chaos so when the QEW/403 become congested that volume spills into city streets and local roads become escape routes. The problem there is Burlington traffic is regional, not just municipal.
4. safety is now tied directly to congestion. that means more aggressive driving, red-light running and risk-taking due to frustration.
5. there’s a credibility gap the forum needs to address. The current view at City Hall is there isn’t a serious ongoing congestion issue so the focus is on bikes/transit rather than real-world driving needs.
Simply, before the City wanders off into “never never land” again, what are the concrete, short-term actions the City will take to improve traffic flow and protect neighbourhoods before more density is added?
The situation that will get worse for Burlington streets is the congestion on the QEW.Burlington has no control over this and the province has no plans to ever ease that problem.The solution was put together by the Harris government was to relieve traffic by building the Mid-peninsula highway from
Fort Erie to link with the 401 near Milton thus going round Hamilton and Burlington.
The Burlington Council of the day along with Halton region convinced the Liberal government to kill the plan.
This has come back to bite us ….
I wonder when Paul Sharman will give up his car and ride the bus, what a dreamer !
Paul seems to be obsessed with building high risers , the taller the better.
The first thing Burlington should be doing is fixing the traffic lights so that they operate efficiently.