OPINION Enough talking, Mayor Tory. It’s time to take action to stop the carnage on Toronto’s streets
As the waterfront pedestrian and cycling trail passes by Royal Canadian Legion Branch 344, with its giant red poppy out front, other flowers are intermittently tied to a steel fence separating the trail from Lake Shore Blvd. W. By a child’s bicycle, painted white and chained to a pole, there’s an even larger cluster of flowers.
This “ghost bike” marks where 5-yearold Xavier Morgan was killed when he crashed going downhill on the trail and fell into Lake Shore traffic.
The flowers were placed there to mark the one-year anniversary of his tragic death on May 24. When the incident happened, Mayor John Tory demanded a review of the safety of Toronto’s bike trails and said, “It is past time for us to have a hard look at safety on these trails.”
One year later, the steel riot fence, a temporary barrier hastily erected, remains in place with nothing else done.
This past Tuesday, after a 58-year-old woman was hit by a truck and killed on her bike at Bloor and St. George Sts., the mayor said he was devastated by this and tweeted that his thoughts are with the family and that “the deaths of pedestrians and cyclists are deeply troubling to me.”
His tweet has been met with sustained anger from cyclists and others. People are tired of the mayor’s thoughts; they want action. Perhaps the mayor thinks he has the power of telekinesis, the ability to move objects with his mind, because after each spat of cycling and pedestrian deaths the mayor says more words like this, and offers more thoughts, but rarely any action.
On the same day as this latest death on our streets, Giorgio Mammoliti, one of the mayor’s hand-picked members of the powerful public works and infrastructure committee that determines where bike lanes and other needed cycling and pedestrian infrastructure goes or doesn’t go, said he thinks bikes don’t belong on city roads at all. This is a committee largely made up of councillors who are hostile to improving cycling and pedestrian conditions in Toronto. The mayor could change this if he wanted to, but chooses not to.
Indeed, Wednesday marked the two-year anniversary of the mayor announcing “Vision Zero,” an initiative to reduce traffic deaths to zero. Since then, 93 pedestrians or cyclists have died on Toronto streets. These are people just going about their day. Since then, the mayor has continued to offer his supportive thoughts, but then did not support a staff recommendation for bike lanes along Yonge St. in North York earlier this year.
In response to Tuesday’s crash, city scholar Richard Florida wrote an essay that mentioned Toronto’s rate of pedestrian deaths is 1.6 per 100,000, worse than Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., Portland, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo. Former chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat says it’s time to declare a state of emergency.
They, and everyone else, are frustrated because the solutions to lowering the death toll are known and exist in cities all over the world, but we play dumb, as if it’s an act of God that people are getting killed and maimed.
“Ah, but I see cyclists and pedestrians doing stupid things,” you might say, and you’d be right, there are some careless people out there. Welcome to humanity, but research also shows that driver error causes most collisions here.
Regardless, cyclists and pedestrians will not disappear from our streets, and will only increase in numbers as Toronto gets more crowded.
Don’t like the sight of cyclists on the streets? Are pedestrians annoying? What if one weekday everyone on bike or foot decided to drive? Would all those cyclists, taking up much less space than a car, be as annoying then? What if everyone who rides public transit also decided to drive that day? It would be a disaster. In a perverse way, the act of cycling, walking or taking transit makes it easier for those who do drive and easier for the mayor and councillors to ignore.
At some point it becomes mendacious to continually offer thoughts and concern then to not do what needs to be done. Since he was elected, Mayor Tory has governed with the spectre of another Doug Ford mayoral run this year. After last week’s provincial election, that’s not a concern and Tory will likely easily win this fall. There are few if any elected officials in Canada with as much political capital as he has right now. He is as powerful as any mayor could hope to be. He could make real change.
Mayor Tory, it’s time for action, not words. Spend some of your capital and save more lives. If you just keep talking, if the extent of your action is frowning and appearing concerned, more people are going to die on your streets.