Trash bin hides oncoming traffic at intersection
When you can’t see oncoming traffic, turning onto a busy street can be a death-defying manoeuvre.
The stuff the city calls street furniture — transit shelters, trash bins, paper boxes, notice boards — are the benefit to taxpayers for allowing advertising to be posted on them.
It’s a pretty good deal — ask anyone huddling in a transit shelter on a rainy day — but its positioning seems to have more to do with exposing ads to the maximum number of eyes than anything else.
Sometimes the ads aren’t the problem, but the location hasn’t been very well thought out, which seems to be the case at the intersection of Danforth Rd. and Wetherby Dr.
Doris Dignard emailed to say she can’t see oncoming traffic on Danforth when she approaches the intersection on Wetherby, due to a trash receptacle that’s in the way.
“Drivers can see oncoming traffic through the clear walls of the bus shelter but the garbage container blocks the view,” she said.
“There is plenty of room to move the grey garbage container back away from the road without it being on the sidewalk,” said Dignard, adding she worries about the potential for an accident.
“In a month or two, the snow will arrive and when the streets are (plowed) there is quite a pile of snow pushed into that small area. Snow space is limited due to the bus shelter.”
We went there and pulled up to the intersection in our car on eastbound Wetherby, to consider it from a driver’s perspective.
Fast-moving traffic on Danforth was obscured by the trash bin and hard to see until it was almost at the intersection.
It would be no big deal to move the bin about a metre or so closer to the sidewalk, where it would no longer be an obstacle to seeing the oncoming traffic. Status: Carly Hinks, who’s in charge of street furniture, emailed to say she’d have her staff look into it and see if there’s a better place for the bin, where drivers won’t need X-ray vision. What’s broken in your neighbourhood? Wherever you are in Greater Toronto, we want to know. To contact us, go to thestar.com/yourtoronto/the_fixer, call us at 416-869-4823 or email jlakey@thestar.ca. To read our blog, go to thestar.com/news/the_fixer. Report problems and follow us on Twitter @TOStarFixer.