When crossing the street becomes a leap of faith
I called my wife, Rebecca, on the phone early Friday afternoon, trying to stave off panic. “Just calling to check that you’re okay?” She was.
There had been a serious accident in the intersection where Keele St. turns into Weston Rd., at St. Clair Ave. in the Stockyards area at the north end of the Junction, just a few blocks from our house. Two cars had collided and police were reporting “multiple pedestrians struck,” one of them possibly without vital signs at the scene.
I am in that intersection every day, it’s just a few blocks from our house. My wife and children cross the street there regularly. It was too easy to imagine a summer trip to get burgers turning into a nightmare.
And it happens too often — this has become a bit of a ritual in the neighbourhood. My friend Sean Hertel, an urban planner who lives nearby, texted me that at the same time on Friday, his wife was worried about him — he usually goes out for a break for coffee at that time of day, crossing in that exact spot. “Pretty sad,” he writes, when his wife has to tell him “‘be safe’ every time I walk to the corner.” But he was safe, this time — a relief. In the three years he’s lived there, he tells me, he’s had a lot of near misses at that corner and another one nearby, both alone and walking with his son.
Too often, there is bad news on the street at the Stockyards: car collisions, streetcar collisions, cyclists hurt, pedestrians struck. It’s a busy, busy place, a meeting of wide roads with a lot going on: Keele St. and Weston Rd. are main routes to the Gardiner and the 401, and are the only north-south route that crosses the railroad tracks for about a kilometre in either direction. There are big-box mall complexes on two of the blocks. There’s a lot of truck traffic from nearby industrial sites. There is a streetcar right-of-way that makes the turning lanes a little less intuitive. A guardrail separating the road from the sidewalk near one of the corners demonstrates just how obvious and apparent the risk is.
The many adult cyclists and e-bike users in the area routinely ride on the sidewalk, and every time you are tempted to lecture them, you look out into the road and realize you’d be sentencing them to death if you sent them out there to drive among the car and truck traffic.
Hertel tells me he’s been trying to alert the city — traffic staff, police and local Councillor Frances Nunziata — to the obvious dangers of the intersection for a long time, to little effect. He’s not alone in recognizing the problems, an office worker who works at the intersection told a Star reporter on Friday: “This is such a terrible corner, we were waiting, just waiting for this to happen.”
We wait and check in with our loved ones whenever we hear bad news.
On Friday, as I was checking in with my wife and Sean Hertel’s wife was fretting about him, a note went out to parents in the neighbourhood: a popular local preschool program had been cancelled that afternoon, because one of the women who runs it was struck and hospitalized in the accident. A followup Monday said she was recovering and expected to be okay, but the shock for parents remained. It’s a relief that she’s going to recover okay, but it’s horrifying nonetheless. Every time there’s an accident, we frantically check around hoping it wasn’t one of our people. This time it was. Thank God she’s alive.
As Rebecca says, we’d all like to give our children a little independence, let them walk to school like we’re so often told they should, let them ride their bikes around the neighbourhood, run up to the frozen yogurt shop to get themselves a treat. But if the people who care for our children can’t even stay safe standing on the sidewalk at a major intersection, what chance do kids have out there?
As Hertel told me, “I’m a grown man, just trying to cross the street. I’m not taking some extravagant risk. I am just walking. Pedestrian safety shouldn’t be a luxury,” he says. “It’s a matter of life and death.”
There’s a metal plaque embedded in the sidewalk right in the place where the pedestrians were injured by a car Friday, bearing the words of A.F. Moritz: “A place belongs to the one who has most deeply loved it.” But a few feet away, the sidewalk there is marked with tire treads from the many cars who have cut the corner in exactly the place you’d stand if you were waiting to cross the road.
Many of the people who live here do love this place, deeply. But there is no doubt who, in practice, this place belongs to, and for whom it is designed. It is not the people who live nearby trying to walk around.
So “be safe,” we tell each other. It should be an expectation. But for now, it remains a fragile hope. Edward Keenan writes on city issues. ekeenan@thestar.ca.
Follow: @thekeenanwire