CBC finds traffic lesson in tragedy

When disaster strikes, there’s always some social or political cause that comes along to capitalize on the event. Nothing like a good crisis to raise the profile of your world-changing mission. For a day or so, in the wake of Toronto’s Yonge Street pedestrian massacre, it looked like no such opportunity would present itself. As the grim story emerged of Alek Minassian’s multi-block drive down the sidewalk of the busy thoroughfare, killing 10 and injuring 14 more, the city of Toronto provided no opportunity for the usual post-mortem descent into ideology or social criticism and self-promotion.

The emergency response was letter-perfect, the medical system responded brilliantly, the officials who manage the city’s services — from the police chief, to the coroner, to the detective leading the investigation, to the squads who combed the street for evidence — exhibited nothing but high professionalism and competence.

Instead of the all-too-familiar suggestions of excess police violence or racial bias, the Toronto Police Service, thanks in part to Const. Kenny Lam, looked like a model of proper training and expertise.

There was no opportunity to foment or exploit cultural division. Instead, we saw what can only be described as the real Toronto, an amazingly unified multicultural and multi-racial metropolis. A parade of people from around the globe — Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe — were represented as the media interviewed the workers and residents of the highrise office and condo towers on the strip of Yonge that itself is a mosaic of international food and retail services. The alleged killer was arrested by a Chinese-Canadian cop in front of a storefront dominated by giant Arabic lettering.

There was nothing to exploit.

Or so it seemed until Wednesday morning when, less than 48 hours after the event, the CBC had managed to find a social and political cause to attach to the deaths and injuries: automobile traffic.

On CBC Radio’s The Current, host Anna Maria Tremonti introduced the idea that the deliberate murder of pedestrians by a lone and likely deranged driver could be used to promote the urban planning idea that Toronto is a city where pedestrians are vulnerable due to a dangerous mingling of speeding automobiles and vulnerable slow-moving bicycles and pedestrians.

As The Current played out, the Yonge Street tragedy became the foundation for the promotion of a radical urban-planning agenda known as Vision Zero, an international movement with the objective of reducing pedestrian deaths and serious injuries to literally zero.

Two of Tremonti’s guests were advocates of Vision Zero: former Toronto city planner Jennifer Keesmaat and New York consultant Claire Weisz, both of whom were all too willing — at Tremonti’s prodding — to use the Yonge Street event to support the alleged need to redesign the city around “pedestrian safety” and resolve “a crisis of cyclists and people on our sidewalks getting hit by cars.”

Keesmaat said we need to “redesign streets, with more separation of bikes and pedestrians.” From New York, Weisz added that “the gold standard is separating bicyclists from pedestrians, pedestrians from cars, cars and bicyclists. So separated bike lanes are kind of safe zones for people.”

The mowing down of people by one man in what appears to be a mass murder is “precisely what we’ve been seeking to mitigate against … the mixing up of traffic with vulnerable people, with vulnerable road users like pedestrians, like cyclists.”

Tremonti agreed. It may have been a deliberate act rather than an accident, but “pedestrians are vulnerable in a city like Toronto.”

Keesmaat acknowledged that Yonge Street was a “random criminal act” that does not represent “widespread risk” and therefore might not be all that relevant to Vision Zero, but she drove her ideological horse forward anyway. The “flip side” is that “we do need to focus on separating traffic from pedestrians and cyclists.”

Which is perfectly illogical, but what the hell. Vision Zero schemes include reducing traffic lanes, increasing onstreet parking that separates bike lanes with parked cars, which in turn serve as a barrier to protect bikers and pedestrians.

Whatever the debatable merits of these planning tools, it is obvious — or should be — that the Yonge Street van tragedy created fatalities that are totally incomparable to the routine pedestrian fatalities that take place in such cities as Toronto. Of 15 pedestrian fatalities in Toronto so far this year, 12 took place, not on the sidewalks of the city, but out on the street as pedestrians were crossing. Only one was killed on the sidewalk by a drunk driver who lost control.

The Vision Zero movement began in Sweden 20 years ago, although recent reports show Swedish fatalities and injuries related to traffic appear to be rising and the zero target seems out of reach by a wide margin. Nor is the city protected against sidewalk attacks: five people were killed last year when a terrorist drove down one of Stockholm’s main shopping streets.

Ironically, a major plan for a reconstruction of the Yonge/Finch strip following some of the Vision Zero theory would not have been effective in stopping Monday’s attack. The plan, which failed to pass city council, left bike lanes and sidewalks wide open.

At the end of the CBC Radio show, after Keesmaat and Weisz had flipped the Yonge Street tragedy in their favour, Toronto risk consultant Alan Bell had a chance to offer another view. “At the end of the day this was a oneoff event. And we shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction. In Canada, for some reason, we knee-jerk reaction every time something happens. They ruined 150 celebrations on the Hill in Ottawa, purely because they overreacted.”