It’s time to take action on road safety
On Tuesday, according to the Twitter feed of the Toronto Police Operations Centre, at least seven cyclists and pedestrians were hit by cars. It seems like perhaps a traffic safety campaign of some kind might be overdue.
Not the kind where we remind pedestrians not to cross on a yellow light or demand that cyclists wear helmets and cease rolling through stop signs. As Toronto police, to their credit, seem to have noticed recently, based on their own safety information, that kind of safety warning doesn’t do much to keep anyone very safe as popular as it is with callers on talk radio.
It’s hard to know, for instance, what kind of “protect yourself” advice would have helped the woman who was unlocking her bike near a tree Tuesday in the cobblestone pedestrian zone of the Distillery district when a car jumped the curb, plowed her and the tree over, and came to a stop with her pinned beneath it. It seems pretty clear that no amount of reflective clothing would have saved the woman killed last week when an SUV crashed through the wall of a dance studio in the Beaches and mowed her down while she was taking a class. That was one of at least seven incidents — I stopped counting — in the past month where cars plowed into buildings.
If these people were dying by some other means, I expect we’d be looking pretty carefully at how to stop it from happening. This year, 18 people have been killed so far by gunshots, and some local journalists have been calling it another “summer of the gun” situation. But 30 people this year have been killed in motor vehicle collisions — 16 of them cyclists and pedestrians, according to the count of my colleague Luke Simcoe at Metro — and it’s ho-hum, just another day on the roads. If you think I’m cherry picking by citing only the gun numbers, there have been two fewer murders in total, by any means, than there have been fatal collisions. And that’s nothing new: last year there were 64 people killed by or in cars, compared to 56 homicides.
The number of deaths by car has risen fairly steadily since 2011 — possibly a result of the aging population who have trouble crossing the street quickly, an officer suggested to CBC late last year. Possibly. Whatever the reason, these deaths have something in common: they all involve motor vehicles and drivers using them. It follows that any approach to lowering the rate of death and injury ought to focus on cars and how they are driven. Some would argue we’re starting to do that: as I mentioned, Toronto police road safety announcements these days are far more likely to discuss how motorists should drive safely than how pedestrians or cyclists should be alert. (Mississauga police, meanwhile, were encouraging pedestrians to wear fluorescent armbands the same day a woman was run over in April.) Small progress.
Yet when we debated a bike lane on Bloor St. at city council this month, much more time was spent talking about the effect on commute times and the flow of cars than on safety. The experience of New York and other cities with aggressive cycling plans is that installing bike infrastructure makes all users of the road safer — including pedestrians and motorists. But how many lives might be saved was a minor factor in the Bloor debate. When it’s suggested photo radar might be used to patrol people running red lights or making illegal turns to make everyone safer, there’s a big debate about it as a cash grab. When residential speed limits were dropped to 30 kilometres an hour in the central city, I heard plenty about how absurdly low that was.
People need to move around the city, is what I hear all the time. And I understand that. My favourite way to move around the city, by far, is in a car. My rusting bike is testament to the years it’s been since I travelled on two wheels. But I also under- stand other things. Like that the sheer volume of people travelling in cars, clogging up the roads in traffic, is the biggest impediment to moving around the city right now, so providing safe, fast, reliable alternatives is the best solution. And that a few minutes’ time spent sitting in traffic or driving less quickly is a small price to pay for preserving people’s lives.
As impatient as I get as a driver, I am also a father. I am far more worried about my children being killed or maimed in a car accident than I am worried they’ll be shot. I know people who have been murdered — it is horrifying and scary and sad, and I am afraid of it. But I know far, far more people who have been seriously injured and killed in car collisions. I think most people do.
The carnage of the streets seems so common that it feels unavoidable; a freak force of nature, like the tides, immune to our manipulation or improvement. But it is not true. In Sweden, safety measures cut traffic fatalities by roughly half between the late 1990s and 2010. New York City’s approach to cyclist and pedestrian safety seems to have cut traffic deaths significantly, recording successive historic lows in the years since it unveiled its own Vision Zero approach and cutting average annual deaths by about a third in just over a decade. There are things that work, we just need to implement them. The question is if a death rate higher than that of any gang war in memory bothers us enough that we take action.
The city is working on its own new road safety plan which it says is modelled on Sweden and New York’s Vision Zero examples. That will give us a chance to see if the daily injury and death toll on the street is something we, as a city, really think is worth seriously addressing. Or whether we’re still in too much of a hurry to notice how big a menace our driving habits really are.