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Traffic has always been a hot topic for Toronto's chattering class, but these days it seems as though we're beset on all sides.

Thursday morning, Waterfront Toronto recommended going ahead with $300 million worth of traffic congestion in the tear-down of another chunk of Gardiner Expressway; in the next month or two, council will find out just what's involved in decongesting traffic on streetcar routes, and whether Torontonians' entitlement to left turns is to be a thing of the past; and of course the skyrocketing price of gas is making us all consider whether traffic - any of it - is really worth the trouble.

As things stand, with gas prices still under $1.40 a litre that is to say, it is. Those of us who don't live next to subway lines are pretty much doomed to queueing up on the road system at some point; and whether we're in a car, on a bus or in a taxi, the great mass of single-occupant vehicles is right there with us, slowing things down. Toronto and its surrounding regions are just too vast for anything but. At least for a while. It's not hard to imagine, however, a point in which talk about traffic turns into a talk about the lack of it.

We're already getting there. At a recent event launching the Toronto Cyclist's Union, Mayor David Miller articulated a hierarchy in the transportation world: Pedestrians before cyclists; cyclists before public transit; and public transit before the dinosaur-fuelled automobile.

Of course, dinosaurs took their time going away, and the vehicles they fuel won't be going too soon. Toronto's mid-range future looks like a continuing gridlock - of smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles to be sure, mitigated only somewhat by small tweaks and improvements to the way we move ourselves around.

The plan to prohibit left turns along streetcar lines is one such tweak, and it could come about sooner rather than later. It will be bad for motorists, although not as bad as it might sound: picture, rather, a future city where residential streets with streetcars nearby run more like the intestinal traffic mazes of the Annex: a simple left turn will turn into three right turns. Irritating, yes; but hardly the end of the world, particularly as those long, halting streetcar runs along Queen will become a bit more reliable.

Assuming prices at the pump don't start dropping, it will only be a matter of time before that streetcar gets a whole lot more reliable. That being the time that the high of fuel has genuinely priced most Torontonians out of their personal cars.

So ultimately - in the mid-to-long-term future, that is - Torontonians of modest means are going to have to reconcile themselves more and more to public transit, walking and cycling to get to and from work and to do the things that they need.

The tweaks needed to make that work will be big ones all around, although future residents of the 416 will have an easier time than others. The electric network of light rail lines that is Transit City will make impossibly long public transit commutes from the farther reaches of Scarborough and Etobicoke at least tolerable. And a great many communities in Toronto - particularly the older neighbourhoods in the former Toronto, and in places like Willowdale, the Lakeshore in Etobicoke, southwest Scarborough - are well-suited to pedestrian living, with shopping and amenities located near residential neighbourhoods and mass transit subway systems already in place.

For the rest - well, that's where larger tweaks come in. The public transit investments that we've seen so far will just be the beginning of what the city will have to do to keep its farther-reaching communities connected. Rail service into the 905 regions will have to be enhanced more dramatically still. And future developments will have to incorporate more self-sufficient urban design, turning themselves into smaller village-communities.

It will be an adjustment, and hard on many of us, but there's at least one bright side:

The takedown of the Gardiner Expressway can't add minutes to commutes if there aren't any.